Beyond the Long Winter 1

Two white bison stand in falling snow among the greens and blacks of old-growth forest, cordoned off by brass stanchions and red velvet rope. This is an animal so nearly lost that it is now handled like a museum object: precious, protected, roped, viewed. The staging is closer to the truth than it first appears, because the bison survives today largely because a zoo took it in.

North American bison fell from tens of millions to a few hundred animals by the early 1900s, and now number in the hundreds of thousands. In August 2026 the Paleogenomics Lab at UC Santa Cruz, published a study on the cover of Science sequencing 160 new bison genomes across more than 20,000 years. It found that the twentieth-century collapse fragmented the species’ genetic diversity rather than erasing it, and it sets out a roadmap for reconnecting isolated herds into a functioning whole.

North American bison fell from tens of millions to a few hundred animals by the early 1900s. The rescue began in New York in 1905 when William Hornaday, first director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and President Theodore Roosevelt founded the American Bison Society at the Bronx Zoo. Two years later fifteen Bronx-bred bison were shipped west to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma, the first reintroduction of a wild animal ever attempted in North America. The zoo has kept at it since: the first genetically pure bison bred by embryo transfer in 2012, and in 2022 six New York-born animals returned to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma to help restore native grassland.

The species now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, and its future increasingly sits in Indigenous hands. Native nations manage some 20,000 buffalo across more than a million acres, coordinated through the InterTribal Buffalo Council and its more than eighty member Tribal Nations. In August 2026 the Paleogenomics Lab at UC Santa Cruz published a study on the cover of Science sequencing 160 new bison genomes across more than 20,000 years. It found that the twentieth-century collapse fragmented the species’ genetic diversity rather than erasing it, and it sets out a roadmap for reconnecting isolated herds into a functioning whole.

McLachlan and Cardwell’s work honours this rejuvenation, and turns artifice into attention and understanding, which the artists hope becomes further action.