Bison are just built different.
In case you didn’t know, as bison head into the winter season, their coat thickens up to counter the frigid temperatures and blankets of snow that often fall in their North Americans habitats. Those wooly coats play an intricate role in keeping them warm through the winter, and allegedly create such a layer of insulation that snow that lands on their coat will not melt from the heat the bison’s skin gives off.
Bison pair their thickening coats (and skin) with their ability to derive sufficient nutrients from very small amounts of food, which is usually vegetation that peeks through the snow. All of these qualities allow for bison to survive the toughest of winter conditions, and those conditions were shown in the breathtaking footage below out of Yellowstone National Park.
An author and photographer by the name Michael Hodges captured this incredible video of a bison scavenging the small amounts of grass that were still sticking out through the blanketed snow. As you’ll see in the clip below, the conditions were abysmal, and snow was quite literally falling down sideways.
Hodges wanted to get out in the horrible weather to better understand what bison regularly go through when winter hits, as he explained in his post:
“Yellowstone. 5 degrees in a blizzard. 50 MPH winds. I wanted to feel what it was like to be with the bison in a blizzard. To be amongst the herd to see and feel what these great animals endure. Within minutes the front of my lens turned to ice and I had to retreat, my fingers and face numb. I didn’t last long.”
When I said “bison are just built different earlier,” I wasn’t kidding. A human being tried to spend a few minutes out in the brutal Yellowstone weather and was compromised within minutes. That made him appreciate the bison and what it was enduring all that much more.
And the man and the bison ending up sharing what he described as a moment of mutual respect:
“The mighty ice bison had no issues at all. He was made for this. Built for it. And in the blizzard, for a moment, just a moment, the great bison made eye contact with me. A moment of recognition. As if to say “we are still here. Once we roamed the plains in the millions. But you see, we are still here.”
Judging by what we’ve seen so far, I’d say Michael Hodges is a very poignant writer.
The photographer and author finished off his post with an ode of sorts to the American bison and all the other animals still out there thriving in the wild. It’s not often we humans get an inside look like this, and it’s cool to see that Hodges appreciates his experience coexisting with bison – even if it only lasted a matter of minutes:
“It’s true. They’re out there in Yellowstone. Like the grizzlies and wolverines and all the other animals that retreated to the last wilderness as we turned the country into parking lots. They are out there still. Hanging on. And sometimes, they’ll let you into their world, if only for a moment.”
