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Title: American Bison: A Natural History by Dale F. Lott, Harry W. Greene ISBN: 0-520-23338-7 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 02 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: On being a Bison
Comment: This slim book provides a very thorough and scholarly, yet slyly humorous, and beautifully written summary of what modern biological and behavioral scientists have discovered about the American Bison and how they live their lives. The author has distilled decades of his own and others' research into a concise yet engaging account of what it's really like to be a bison. I found it a joy to read and suspect that it's one of, if not the, best book ever written about these fascinating and important animals. If you've always been attracted to bison, have wanted to read one book telling the most about them, and are not daunted by wading through a little science clearly presented, then this is probably the book for you.
Rating: 5
Summary: Bison Basics, Beautifully Told
Comment: Most of us grew up with cats or dogs as animal companions. Those who lived on farms had animals of wider acquaintance. Dale F. Lott was the grandson of the superintendent of the National Bison Range in Western Montana, and his father worked on the range as well. He writes, "I first encountered bison not as symbols of the West, the squandering of a natural resource, or a conservation triumph. They were simply the animals I had seen most often when I was a young child - enthralling in and of themselves." He went on to get his doctorate in biology, studying the huge animals he had grown up with. In _American Bison: A Natural History_ (University of California Press), he sums up the basics of bison. Thirty years of teaching seem to have given him an admirable power of storytelling, and his book is not only good for encompassing all the necessary natural history of the species, but also for his expression of personal encounters and feelings for the beasts.
In every chapter, Lott describes with no slight awe how well tuned evolution made these animals for their world, a world which is no longer. The peculiar bison profile, for instance, the huge mound above the forelegs, the hanging head, and the skinny rump, equips them for quick motion around the front feet "on which they pirouette on the sod like a hockey player on ice". A bull has to be able to pivot and twist to protect his own flanks and to dig a horn into the flank of an opponent. He says of the surprisingly complicated system of rumination, by which bison carry around bacteria to break down grass for their future digestion, "It's so sophisticated that neither bison nor biologists would be likely to think of it, yet it was achieved by the perfectly purposeless, aimless, and automatic process of natural selection." Lott has spent a good deal of time in what is left of the wild, watching these animals, and he reports on the complicated negotiations and social systems they have developed. He has written not just of bison, but of the prairie itself, how it came to be, and how the bison, rather than just being predators of grass, kept the grass vibrant through the centuries before they were ranged in. Part of the story has to be that the grasslands are no longer home to bison, and that the paying grasses we put on them are taking away the soil the bison helped build up. Bison are in small herds, with a risk of inbreeding, or being domesticated, with a risk of losing their complex wild behavior.
The worrisome future of bison is not the theme of this book, though. Throughout Lott shows an engaging eagerness to describe anything he has seen in his prairie fieldwork. Cowbirds, for instance, used to be buffalo birds, roaming the plains with the bison and thus unable to stick around long enough to raise a family. They can now stick around non-roaming cows, which do a sufficient job of stirring up insects for them to eat, but they still don't raise their own families; they still deposit their eggs in the nests of some other species which gets tricked to raising cowbirds instead of real progeny. Prairie dog towns are favored by bison, as both animals like closely cropped grass. The bison wallow around and damage the tunnels, but they also "bring something to the party... Of course, buffalo chips don't produce a fertilizer as quickly as, say Miracle-Gro, so the bison are a little like a dinner guest bringing a bottle of wine so new it must be aged a few years to be palatable." Ferrets, wolves, and grizzlies wander through these pages, too. It is an evocative book, beautifully written, by someone who loves these magnificent and forlorn beasts and is obviously eager for the reader to get to know them, too.
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Title: Field Guide to the North American Bison: A Natural History and Viewing Guide to the Great Plains Buffalo (Sasquatch Field Guides Series, No 10) by Robert Steelquist ISBN: 1570611343 Publisher: Sasquatch Books Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal by David A. Dary ISBN: 0804009317 Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: January, 1990 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie by Richard Manning ISBN: 0140233881 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: July, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Bison: Monarch of the Plains by David Fitzgerald, James Welch, Linda M. Hasselstrom ISBN: 1558684069 Publisher: Graphic Arts Center Publishing Co. Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Buffalo Nation: History and Legend of the North American Bison by Valerius Geist ISBN: 0896583902 Publisher: Voyageur Press Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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