Buffalo Dan's Bison

On a cool morning after a night of particularly heavy dew, you can easily see the moisture steaming.  I've seen this before in cattle, but never this much.   

One of the bison (closest to the photographer) in the process of molting her winter hair. With the spring weather getting increasingly warm the even more rapidly growing bison have begun molting their winter coat of dense hair.  Now they aren't just leaving a few hairs on everything they touch.  They are actually leaving larger objects, such as tree trunks, wrapped in a layer of hair.  One of the "rubbing posts" I had installed in the pasture.  A closeup on the post, which is covered in a layer of bison hair.

About a month ago, after spending a ridiculous amount of time augering only a few post holes, I made the realization that I physically couldn't keep installing fence posts the way I had been with my modified hand-held gas-powered earth auger.  Although the Stihl BT 130 Earth Auger I had purchased in May of the previous year had worked well and enabled me to erect enough fencing to start raising bison, I could no longer take the physical punishment of both bracing the motorized auger against my body as it drilled an eight-inch diameter hole four feet into the ground (with lots of clay, rocks, and tree roots) and then repeatedly lifting the entire apparatus out of the hole to remove the soil. With the summer rapidly approaching and a clear need to get the fencing and many other hard jobs completed, Jess and I decided it would be best for us to buy our own small tractor.  After consulting with friends and conducting a lot of online research, we decided to purchase the J

Bison are incredibly hairy and are constantly shedding.  Wherever they've been you'll always find two things: heavy bison foot prints and a fuzz of hair stuck to anything they've touched.  

Recently, I attempted to measure the sheer volume of poop my bison produce in a day.  Using a shovel I picked up all of the mostly fresh bison poop I could find in an area they had been occupying over the past 24 hours.  Surprisingly, I was able to fill two 5 gallon buckets to the brim with poop.  That's a lot of poop.  One last thing I'll have to comment on is the manure's unique lack of odor.  If you've been around farms with cattle, you'll be very aware of the distinct and powerful odor associated with cow manure.  With that in mind I had expected the two buckets of fresh poop to reek, but, two my surprise, they didn't.  In fact the buckets of poop smelled so little that I was able to transport them in the back of a hatchback vehicle (with a lid on each bucket) for several hours to my garden in northern Virginia without the slightest bit of unpleasantness.  I don't know if this is something unique to my bison or related to diet (they eat only gr