Liam and Bison

 A Carolina wren pair raised a brood of babies in Liam's bison skull, which hangs on the side of our garage. He found it on a bison ranch in North Dakota years ago...maybe 2008, and he wanted it so badly, but we were flying and it wasn't exactly carryon size. Our friends the Ashers from Cincinnati volunteered to bring it back in their van for us. And darned if Jean didn't get it to us, and up it went on the garage under the eave, and there it has hung ever since.

Photo by Rondeau Ric

There is a classic post about how Liam found that skull and lost his stuffed monkey at the same time.
Read it here.


 Flashing forward six years...I kept seeing the wrens perched on the skull with food in their bills, and it took me a little while to realize that they had made a neat little nest down inside the brain case. Before long we could hear the baby wrens piping in there, and soon they were big enough that the adults would pop onto the skull, poke a spider or caterpiggle into the foramen magnum, and be gone. They were a very sneaky wren family, and I never saw them fledge. I think they did it during a thunderstorm when I was inside all day. When we took the skull down to look there was feather sheath dust in the nest, which generally means the babies made it to fledging. Being wrens, they kept their nest spic and span.

I got to thinking about Liam and bison. About all the times we've had with bison.

The bison is Liam's totem, and he was obsessed with them for a long time. It was a nice obsession, one we were happy to indulge. 

In 2009, when he was 10, we took him to Jamestown, North Dakota, which has two white bison--one the male calf of the first female they got. This is her.

And here's her boy calf, with the long thin horns.

OK, they don't look too great in June, because they're shedding old winter hair. Liam didn't mind. He was transfixed. He watched them through the spotting scope.

Then he called his friend Will back in Ohio to tell him all about it. 

In 2010, when Liam was 11, we had the most awesome family trip ever to western North Dakota, Montana and Yellowstone.

In Medina, ND, we tracked bison in the weird clay that makes up Teddy Roosevelt National Park.

And found this monstrous gentleman scratching himself on a guard rail.

Now that's a BISON.

We saw a candidate for some Darwinian selection.

Who was fortunately not selected out, at least while we were watching.

After both of them left, we went and looked at the shiny rail. Obviously he comes here often.

We spotted our first-ever elk.

and bought Liam a NDSU hat at Scheel's in Fargo.

I can't see to type.

 I'll be going out to North Dakota by myself this year, to work the 11th annual Potholes and Prairie festival. Bill's got other travel; Phoebe's got a job, and Liam wants to spend as much time as he can with his sister. They've been biking and swimming and reading together under the Japanese maple. I'll be doing my last packing as you read this.

I am thankful for all the times we've taken Phoebe and Liam along. I'll miss them terribly this year. 

Life changes on you, and before you know it the kids are elsewhere, no longer in the back seat wherever you go. That's when the memories kick in. 

These photos all raise such a lump in my throat I need to stop writing now. 

This grand and glorious bull said good-bye to us on our last day in Yellowstone in 2010.

It is something, to have an animal the size of a car, that could squash you in a New York minute, scratching itself on a lamppost right handy by.

There is nothing like showing an animal like that to your kids. I'm so glad we did, when we could, because animals like this one don't come along every day.

Neither do boys like Liam.

Veeries and Rhubarb

One of our new favorite destinations in North Dakota is the area up near Devil's Lake. Devil's Lake itself has a refuge where you can drive through and see bison lolling in the grass.

The babeh bison are a nice color of orange.

and very sweet.

We saw a light pole in someone's farmyard. They must do a bit of hunting...those are all whitetail antlers. Yow.

and we walked up our favorite road, which is our favorite because it is heavily wooded and you can see things like redstarts and vireos and thrushes and tanagers there. Those are hard birds to get on the prairie!

It was like walking out of North Dakota and into Pennsylvania. So we've learned over the past two years that if we want a nice fat Big Day list, we must hit this one magic road near Devil's Lake.

And on that road there is an abandoned farmstead

with a not-so-very-old house, which is unusual in itself

and just across the road from there is an overgrown place where once upon a time there might have been a garden

and growing in that garden was a beautiful plant in full bloom that looked to me to belong to the dock family (Polygonaceae) and it hit me that this must be rhubarb abloom.

And at the same time we heard a veery sing deep in the woods and Ann Hoffert had never seen a veery so Bill whipped out his iPhone and called that bird right in.

So not only did we have its breezy song sending shivers up our spines; we had the Real Bird Right There for Ann to See.

Which was wonderful. But the Horticulture Chimp was beginning to hyperventilate, because that blooming rhubarb had obviously done it before and dropped a few seeds. There were baby plants at its base. And though the stems were not yet red, there was something very familiar about their leaves. The Horticulture Chimp dropped to her knees. "Ann, is this rhubarb??" She bent over, looked. "Yes, I believe it is."

Well, it wasn't long before the Chimp had a pointed stick and had begun digging doggedly around the root of the giant rhubarb plant, and it became clear that the babies were actually root propagules, which made digging them out that much more interesting and effortful, a little dirtier.

But the HortChimp always gets her plant.

                                                                                        photo by Bill Thompson III

Two, in fact, which she dampened down with water from a bottle, wrapped in plastic bags, and stuffed in her boots for the long flight home to Ohio. Because she had always, always wanted rhubarb in the garden, and North Dakota rhubarb from right under a singing veery would be ever so much more special.

But it gets better...

Prairie Dogs and Mule Deer

One of our favorite spots at Theodore Roosevelt National Park: a place called Buck Hill. It's hard to beat the view from the top.
We feel compelled to photograph each other at the modest summit (There really aren't any mountains in North Dakota).

The kids love to shelter under a ledge and pretend they're hunter/gatherers, looking for dinner, building a fire, flensing skins, perhaps.

Dinner is everywhere--mule deer are plentiful.

It's a great place for wildlife photography. You're largely ignored, and the tableaux are stunning.


The biggest bull bison are often solitary, like this one. Imagine yourself on that winding road, passing from vision to vision. That's TRNP, at dusk in June.

A spotted towhee rasps out its song against the badland backdrop.

We round a corner to find a mother prairie dog and her three exclamation point babies!!!

They wondered why this woman was groaning...

never realizing that they and their tiny hands might be the cause

Three perfect little sod poodles in the slanting light of an endless June evening.

Bison Roadblock!

A long time ago, I told you about this summer's trip to North Dakota. Now I'm circling back, even though August is throwing every diamond she has at me and it's all I can do to keep up the ooh's and aaahs, much less blog about it. The bloggy backlog, she is tremendous. Hundreds of photos lie keening in their folders, waiting to be shared.

The last couple of years, we haven't stopped in North Dakota--we've pushed farther west into Montana. Medora, North Dakota, has an irresistible pull on us. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is an incredible place, a place of painted, sculptured bentonite clay--badlands, really--and abundant wildlife. It's one of the best places we know to surround yourself with bison.

Bison are big animals. Every once in awhile you stumble on a bull who is just...huge.

The really old boys have these huge Afros of black wool that flop out sideways, giving their heads a deltoid appearance, and massive pantaloons of wool that wobble as they walk.

Their horns hook back toward their skulls. It makes me wonder if they'd grow right into the skull if the bull lived long enough. He was a tank of an animal, clearly quite aged. And probably cranky enough to want to be alone most of the time.

A more modestly proportioned cow and her orange calf. The backdrop in this photo kills me.

In the days before a concerted government campaign to exterminate them, bison once covered the Great Plains, looking like a nubbly brown blanket when they were on the move. To break the resistance of Plains-dwelling Native Americans by pulling their food source out from under them, the U.S. Army and private contractors shot nearly all our bison in less than two decades. By 1890, they were all but gone. Before this summer, I’d seen bison only in small groups on private reserves. Our family trip changed all that.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park on the western border of North Dakota has a herd of around 300 bison, with a penchant for hanging out on the park’s only roadway.

Being brought to a halt by a shaggy, blackbrown wall of bovine flesh is a thrilling thing. The animals show no concern whatsoever for the cars that quickly stack up behind their roadblock.

They separate and flow around the vehicles, a grunting, breathing, massy river. Golf-ball sized eyes roll, meeting yours as the animals trudge slowly past, an arm’s length or closer away. Knowing that this is one of North America’s most dangerous and unpredictable animals adds to the allure of the experience, at least for me. I've been told that the experience is even more heart-pounding when viewed from the back of a motorcycle. I cannot imagine being on a motorcycle in a herd of bison. Well, to start with I can't imagine riding at high speeds with my limbs and head exposed to the pavement, but riding through a herd of bison? Noooo thanks. You'd think they'd warn you at the park entrance. "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here (on motorcycles)."

Ten-year-old Liam, who has been enthralled with bison since he was very young, was a quivering, pleading mess in our first bison roadblock. His apprehension only increased as time went on. “Please, Daddy. Just drive. Just go. Get away from them. Please. I beg you.” But the bison in Medora kept us stalled until well after dark, standing shoulder to shoulder, their backs turned to us, tufted tails switching insolently across their narrow haunches as we listened helplessly to our son’s pleas to get moving. The only thing to do was to relax into it, to inhale the rich, manurey smell of them, to listen to their sonorous grunts, to luxuriate in the texture of dark wool forequarters, shining black horn hooks, and smooth flanks.

I pee, unconcerned.

The bison issue only intensified when we drove on to Yellowstone National Park. Here, as many as 4,500 bison live, and bison roadblocks were apt to be correspondingly longer. Yellowstone is the only place in America where bison have lived continuously since prehistory. And these animals—the only genetically pure Plains bison left-- seem to know it. They're eerily skilled at moseying out into the road just as you think you're going to squeak by them.

In our week's stay among bison, a funny thing happened. I came to revel in the roadblocks, to look forward to them, and to crow with delight when we encountered them. To me, they were an invitation to join the herd, to watch the evening light drain out against the stark blueblack outlines of the hills and mountains, to slow it all down to bison time, even as our hearts raced at the proximity of these massive beasts. There are few places in the world where animals get to call all the shots. Those are the places I most want to be.

Still I pee. You are as nothing to me.