Oklahoma’s 1,327 bison records resolve into two strongholds: Comanche County, home of the Wichita Mountains, holds 1,030, and Osage County, home of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, holds 250. Everything else in the state is a thin scatter.
Two herds with deep roots
The Wichita Mountains herd is one of the oldest conservation herds in the country, founded in 1907 with fifteen bison shipped west from the New York Zoological Park at a moment when the species had nearly been extinguished. The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve herd, reintroduced in the 1990s, grazes the largest protected remnant of tallgrass prairie left anywhere, playing the ecological role the species once played across the plains. Records also reach the refuge’s wilder corners, including the Wichita Mountains Wilderness North Mountain Unit.
Grass, wallows, and the rut
Reports crest in April and May, when green grass and spring calving keep herds in the open, and climb again in November. Through late summer the rut dominates: bulls bellow, wallow, and spar, and the herd’s normal wariness drops away. That is when a bison is most dangerous, though a deceptively fast animal of up to a ton deserves distance in every season. Both herds are managed conservation animals on protected grassland, not a free-roaming statewide population.
Status in Oklahoma
The overlay treats the bison as native to its mapped Oklahoma range, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state. The IUCN lists the species globally as Near Threatened.
