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MillimeterBuffalo Soldiers
Aug 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding
Buffalo Field Campaign fights for Yellowstone National Park's wild bison.
Mike Mease knew the power of video. As a veteran videographer and the founder of Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers, a nonprofit that produces alternative media and documentaries about human rights and environmental issues, he had used video to bring attention to many causes. When Mease witnessed the slaughter of more than a thousand of Yellowstone National Park's bison — almost one-third of what he says is the last undomesticated, free-ranging bison herd in the United States — he realized what he had to do.
 During the winter, Buffalo Field Campaign volunteers brave the extreme cold in Montana while keeping watch over Yellowstone's bison. Photo courtesy: Matt McGovern Rowen. |
Mease co-founded the Buffalo Field Campaign with Lakota elder Rosalie Little Thunder in April 1997, the spring after the mass killings, to fight against what the organization sees as an unjust management plan governed by the Montana Department of Livestock. Under the plan, the DOL and several other agencies herd or slaughter Yellowstone buffalo that wander out of the park boundaries, according to Mease. The primary reason is a fear of the bison transmitting brucellosis, a bacterial disease that causes animals to abort fetuses, to the surrounding cattle herds. Mease, however, says that there have been no known cases of bison-cattle transmission in the wild.
“I realized that [the DOL] was ashamed of what they were doing,” he recalls. “I realized that if I went out with my camera and sat with the herd, they'd kill the stragglers and I'd get it on video, but they'd leave the big herd alone. That rung a bell in my head. I thought if we just had enough people to be with the buffalo who are out of the park … then we could make a difference.”
Now BFC welcomes thousands of volunteers whom Mease trains in basic video skills and wilderness survival. After orientation, patrols of five to seven people armed with Sony and Canon DV cameras trek out to the park borders. During the Montana winter — when temperatures of 20 to 40 degrees below zero are common — the patrols stand ready to shoot footage should the DOL start capturing or killing the bison. The crews are in the field from October to May, every day from sunrise to sunset.
“We've learned a lot of neat tricks about how to shoot in the frigid cold,” Mease says. “On some of our jackets, we'll hook a little pocket that goes under your armpit that provides heat to help keep the batteries warm. We also build these gadgets, so you can climb up a tree and hook this thing on. It has a fluid-head tripod that you can attach the camera to, so you don't have to use your hands as much.”
The extreme efforts are worth it to Mease and the BFC volunteers. After a day of action, crews bring video evidence back to the BFC's headquarters near West Yellowstone, Mont., where Mease edits a 5- to 10-minute highlight tape for media release using Apple's iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Numerous regional and national media outlets, including CNN and NBC, have produced segments based on the footage. And with increased media attention, the number of buffalo slaughtered every year has decreased significantly since the winter of 1997.
But as long as any are killed, the BFC will keep watch over the bison. “Everyone is under that assumption that we created Yellowstone to save these buffalo, and here we are years later still doing the same things for the same interests: the cattle industry,” Mease says. “Our state should have pride — we're one of three states that still have any free-ranging buffalo, and the Yellowstone herd is the only one that has never been through any form of domestication and has always roamed free on the land that was native to them. There is so much that is significant about them.”
For more information on BFC, visit www.wildrockies.org/buffalo.
Kristinha M. Anding is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. E-mail her at k_mccort@hotmail.com.
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