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A vast sea of grass once stretched across much of North America, but less than 5% of the original tall grass prairie remains lost to agriculture, urban sprawl, invasive species and climate change.
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American bison, also called Buffalo by some indigenous communities, are the quintessential species of the P=prairie.
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Only 200 years ago, as many as 60 million roamed the Great Plains.
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Not only has most of their habitat disappeared, they were driven to extinction by hunters in the late 1800s, with only about 300 individuals left by the late 19th century.
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But for decades, conservation efforts have slowly been underway to bring bison back to the prairies.
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Last precious fragments.
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The Wind River Indian Reservation, shared by the Eastern Shoshone in the Northern Arapaho, is home to one such project, an inspiring tribal Buffalo initiative.
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I traveled to central Wyoming, where Executive Director Jason Baldez introduced me to one of the newest members of the herd of 200 calf.
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Oh, look at that table calf.
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This is the cutest place that I have ever seen.
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There he is.
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It's unusual for a calf to be orphaned, but this one was recently spotted without a mother.
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So for just a little while, Jason has to be his surrogate mom.
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So does he know every day that you're here to see him?
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He's here every six to eight hours.
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He.
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He is ready for his meal.
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Hey, bud, I'm here.
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Bull calf.
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Bull calf.
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So he's under 30 days old.
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He's about 27 days.
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And look at the size of him already.
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Now, if he had been born out here and someone hadn't spotted him, you think he would have survived?
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No.
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So this is his best second chance at survival.
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When the herd comes by, he'll go hang out with him.
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And then when he's hungry, he comes back.
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So he's learning.
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As he gets older, he'll become less dependent on the bottle and he'll spend more time with a herd.
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The goal is to make sure he knows he's a Buffalo.
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And this guy, he'll never have a rope on his knee, never be in a rodeo or B Rd.
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From a tribal perspective, how meaningful is this?
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Well, it is.
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It is extremely meaningful because we've lived alongside this, this Buffalo, this species for thousands of years.
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American bison are the largest land mammals in North America.
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These herbivores are social animals living in herds that can number in the hundreds.
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Calves are called red dogs for the reddish orange coats.
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You often hear the question bison or Buffalo.
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Generally in English, Buffalo is the more correct term for for tribes.
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We now have over 200 Buffalo collectively between the two tribes.
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Most Buffalo and United States are under commercial meat production.
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They're ranched.
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So what we want to do and see here is grow a population that will become protected under tribal law as wildlife and ensuring that these Buffalo will have the habitat to be here in perpetuity and a place in the Prairie that used to have 59 million bison migrating through it.
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Millions of Buffalo were in this area.
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And can you tell me a little bit about all the good that this herd of Buffalo will do for the Prairie itself?
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Buffalo are ecosystem engineers.
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As a keystone species, they're very important in plant and animal biodiversity.
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They're wallowing behavior that creates micro depressions in the landscapes, very important for water accumulation and seed dispersal.
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Their hooves naturally aerate the soil when they walk.
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They're grazing behavior so allows plant biodiversity.
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They'll graze in patches and leave other areas alone.
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They heal the land and in turn they heal us as a Shoshone and around the whole people.
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A cornerstone of the initiative is to expand the protected habitat for the growing herd.
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So far, Wind River has pieced together about 200 acres.
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Removing fences is part of your master plan, right?
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That's true.
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In order to open up habitat for Buffalo, we've got to acquire land.
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And that means taking down fences so that the Buffalo have contiguous habitat to use.
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So this is a new property that we were able to acquire.
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And so this is some fence that is no longer needed.
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Nothing I'd rather do than take down a fence.
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That's correct.
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Take some fences down.
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So we're going to start with this one here.
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Jason and I began opening up a few more acres for this red dog to grow up on.
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There are now roughly 31,000 wild bison in North America, and this initiative is just one of hundreds of projects across the United States dedicated to rewilding the lost Prairie.
