Buffalo Dan's Bison

No. 8 made quite a scene the other day as she strolled about the pasture with an entire brier vine tangled in her horns.  This is by no means an uncommon sight among the bison, but it is probably one of the largest brier vines I've seen on a bison. Our normally majestic looking bull (left) wearing a sort of hay wig (right). Other items I've seen worn by bison include bushes, soil, and, more recently, hay.  Because bison are very large and wooly animals I can understand the tendency for things in their environment to cling to them.  However, what often puzzles me is their indifference to said things.  In the above photograph (right), for instance, the large mat of hay covering our bull's head didn't seem to bother him at all.  Though the hay obscured a large portion of his field of view and could have easily been shaken off, the bull continued about his business as if everything was normal.  The hay did eventually fall off.

The shipping container with a completed lock box.   Shipping containers can be both helpful and harmful when it comes to the storage of tools on a remote location.  On the one hand, a container provides a relatively low-cost, sturdy, lockable, portable, and weather-proof place to store tools and equipment.  However, because they are known for their use as tool storage units, shipping containers can also be an irresistible draw to thieves.  The default locking mechanisms on these containers are no match against a pry bar or a portable grinder.  For this reason, my first improvement to a shipping container I recently purchased has been to fabricate a lock box for it. The lock box system, which is basically a shrouded hasp, is welded directly to the container doors.  Attached to one door is a steel box with an open bottom and on the other door is a steel shroud designed to protect the box from prying.  The back side of the steel box has a narrow slit through which a piece

No. 10 with a heavy bulge and her tail raised.  These are all signs of impending labor.  I recently realized I haven't posted any bison photographs or updates in a long while.  Well they are still here and both Jess and I strongly suspect some of the females to be close to having their first calves.  Bison don't always show the most obvious outward signs of pregnancy, but many of the females have been "springing" lately and are walking around with their tails elevated.

Continued efforts at pasture expansion have led me to invest in a tractor mounted seed broadcaster for planting grass seed.  Initially, I had started out broadcasting seeds by hand, but this gets old very fast and trying to cover any ground area larger than a quarter acre isn't practical. To remove the burden of hand broadcasting grass seed I first purchased a push broadcaster.   This kind of broadcaster can work very well, but only on smooth level ground.  Any rocks, tree roots, tree branches, or uneven ground will either stop the forward motion of the wheels or tip the entire broadcaster over.   A search for a rugged yet affordable tractor mounted seed broadcaster eventually led me to the Herd model M-12 pto-powered broadcaster.  I'm very pleased with the fact that all of the parts for the gearbox, frame, and hopper are metal and everything appears to be bolted together rather than just stamped.  After an initial test I added an extension to the handle that opens a

  When we bought our first 10 bison in December 2014, our plan was to allow them to graze on 22 acres of pasture we had fenced off and, when necessary, start buying them hay.  Having grown up in Wisconsin, which is frozen for a large part of the year, I figured we would likely have to start buying hay by the spring of 2015.  However, as spring rolled by and there was still plenty of grass (I even felt comfortable enough to burn half of the pasture) I began to realized that the grass in southern Virginia grows a heck of a lot more than it does in the northern US.  Over the following summer and fall the grass remained strong and fed the herd through the winter of 2015-16.  It was during that winter that we added a three year old bull and two bull calves to the herd.  Since then the grass on this 22 acre area has managed to continue feeding the herd until recently in early 2017 when the need for hay has become apparent. In my opinion there are two causes for the recent shortage in g

Today I drove two and a half hours (five hours round trip) to the Norfolk, Virginia area to pick up a 20 foot shipping container I purchased earlier this week.  This shipping container, which is weather sealed and can be securely padlocked, will be used to store many of the smaller tools and equipment I use on the ranch. Until I was able to test the tractor front-end loader's ability to lift the container, I wasn't exactly sure how I would unload the container from the trailer.  I had found a variety possible methods for doing this on YouTube (including the below video), which I reserved in my mind as possible solutions, but, because the tractor was able to partially lift the container, I instead came up with my own dangerous method of unloading the container. On a trip like this one in which a somewhat costly and larger-than-normal cargo is picked up from an unfamiliar depot and hauled home on unfamiliar roads, there is always a higher-than-normal stress level.