Big Bone Lick, Bouncing Baby Bison

Three weeks old and growing fast

Most motorists traveling south of Cincinnati have chuckled at the name. When it comes to paleontology, Big Bone Lick is no joke. Big Bone Lick is a former salt lick along Big Bone Creek. Its name came what Indians and settlers found when they visited much later. Early European visitors thought the lick hosted bones of human giants. To Native Americans, they were the bones of gods, so the tribes left them alone.

Kentucky protects the site inside a state park now, even though the bones are long gone. Lewis and Clark took bones from here, as have many others. The museum’s centerpiece is a well-preserved mastodon skull. However, many of the bones were shipped to museums here and in Europe.

The replicas

In their place stand replicas of the Ice Age creatures that visited this salt lick --- giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, bison and others. Animals migrated to the salt lick because herbivores could only obtain their salt in that manner (carnivores get it from the animals they eat).

Of course the history interested me. I tore through Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which included a Big Bone Lick stop.

The park’s bison herd interested me just as much. It had been too long since I had seen them in the fur. Most animals that visited the lick are long extinct or have been extirpated from these northern Kentucky hills. The bison herd provides a small connection to the migrant mammals that visited the lick before the 19th century.

The real deal

I came to the rolling field where the bison roamed to find it lacking bison. Despite all the warning signs, the fields and the paddock were empty. Walking down a service road I wasn’t supposed to use, I stumbled upon their grazing spot.

At this early morning hour, they were quite active. I counted 10, mostly bulls grazing at a deceptively slow rate. At this point in spring, the Little Red Dogs begin to appear among the bison herds. Little Red Dog is an affectionate term for the young bison, who are born with rust-colored and boast a springy gait. A female bison and her young one stood closest to the fence. The female eyed me warily.

Best observed at a distance

As I stood and watched silently, she lost interest in me and moved off the graze. I guessed the bison to be a few months old. At the visitor center, staff corrected me – the male bison had been born just three weeks earlier. He was walking the day he was born. The calf expressed no fear, alternating between sitting with his spindly legs folded beneath and standing to rub his head against the trunk of a broken tree. The fur was still downy and soft. His horns and signature bison bump would not form for months.

With their 2,000-pound frames, 25 mph running speed and skulls as dense as iron, I make a point to respect the bison. Even behind a fence, a bull bison could make trouble for anyone who wandered too close. As when I hit the high point of a hike, I tried the soak in the moment with the grazing bison. We only get moments of peace in this life. Watching them graze and knowing they were indifferent to me gave me a sense of calm.

Soon I heard rustling behind me and , “I’m gonna see the f---in buffalo first." Three late-high school/early college kids traipsed through the bushes, leading the baby bison to spring backward in fear. Rather than stomach how these kids were going to act around this magnificent creatures that if prompted could easily trample the life out of them, I walked on.

School children swarming on the park road led me to take a paved path quickly in case they came closer. They didn’t and I had the marshy grounds of the old salt lick to myself. When their roar subsided, I closed my eyes and let the music of the creek and its marshy surroundings take over. Minus the calls of megafauna, it couldn’t have been that different from distant millennia.

Next time he won't be this small.