Outdoors: American bison making a comeback

Often (and incorrectly) referred to as the buffalo, our national mammal, the American bison (Bison bison) roamed a great expanse of land following the retreat of the glaciers that covered the American continent during the Ice Age. This area was called the Great Bison Belt, and it extended from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, from California to just shy of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a wide-open grassland where as many as 60 million bison roamed in massive herds, their only real threat coming from pack-hunting wolves and native Americans, who did little to threaten their numbers.