14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bison Basics, Beautifully Told, October 6, 2002
This review is from: American Bison: A Natural History (Hardcover)
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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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On being a Bison, January 23, 2003
This review is from: American Bison: A Natural History (Hardcover)
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.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Anyone interested in the American Bison should own this book, April 7, 2005
This review is from: American Bison: A Natural History (Hardcover)
Not just a book about the American Bison (commonly called Buffalo)itself but also just about anything connected with them. You'll get information about herd ranges- past & present, current population estimates (and worries about the future of the herd, and scholars best guesses about what historical numbers might have been.
Dr. Lott writes extensively about behavior of the bison, some of this comes from 3 generations of personal family experience and includes items I hadn't read or heard of before. You'll even find extensive material about plant and other animal life that live with these animals and how many of them are interrelated.
He even covers the human/hunting aspects and their effects on what the bison was/is. Someone out to hunt buffalo might get some hints but the book isn't aimed at them.
If you've ever seen a buffalo you'll want this book, you really ought to consider it even if you don't ever plan on looking them up (That is the skimpiest part of the book, finding out just where the remaining bison herds are today).
I gave $40 for the hardcover, I think the paperback is $11.95, not cheap but a pretty good value for one of the best bison books I've got.
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