The choice when a buffalo calf’s mother died: the bottle or the bullet?

Baby Buffalo

The buffalo cow was an older animal, but healthy as far as Dick Wildes knew. She’d given birth July 1 at Summerseat, the St. Mary’s County, Md., farm on which Dick keeps about a dozen bison. She nursed her male calf for three days and then, on the Fourth of July, she lay down and didn’t get up.

“Something just took her away in a hurry,” Dick says. A heart attack maybe, or a stroke.

The odd thing was, the other buffaloes came up to her one by one, as if paying their last respects. “I’d never seen that before,” Dick says. When he dragged her into the woods to bury her, the other bison followed in a single-file line, like a funeral procession.

Now there was the calf to deal with. Dick had a decision to make: the bottle or the bullet.

“I always said I’d never bottle-feed a buffalo,” he says as we stand beside a weathered barn.

Dick Wildes used to run a commercial printing business in Southern Maryland and raised cattle on the side. On a trip to Colorado 35 years ago, he encountered bison and was smitten. He’s been raising them ever since. (John Kelly/The Washington Post)

But here is Dick two months later, a 200-pound buffalo calf rubbing its incipient horn nubs against his thigh and licking his hand and elbow with a black, sandpapery tongue. Here isIndy, the orphaned buffalo of Summerseat Farm.

Dick is 73, with strawberry hair going to gray and a close-cropped beard. He used to run a commercial printing business in Southern Maryland and raised cattle on the side. On a trip to Colorado 35 years ago, he encountered bison — or buffaloes, as most people call them — and was smitten. He’s been raising them ever since, at Summerseat and his own farm in nearby Hollywood, Md., where he keeps an additional 15.

“They’re just majestic animals,” he says. With their broad, shaggy shoulders, narrow hips and shiny horns, they are American icons.

And, to be honest, Dick says, bison are easier to raise than cattle. They don’t need a barn, preferring to be outside. They don’t need grain, though Dick gives them a bit. They graze on pasture, foraging for all sorts of plants. They’re resistant to disease. And they produce a tasty meat that’s high in protein and low in fat.

Until Indy — his full name is “Independence,” for the day his mother died — Dick had never hand-raised a calf. Too hard, requiring six feedings a day at first, from morning till night. And too dangerous.

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The buffalo cow was an older animal, but healthy as far as Dick Wildes knew. She’d given birth July 1 at Summerseat, the St. Mary’s County, Md., farm on which Dick keeps about a dozen bison. She nursed her male calf for three days and then, on the Fourth of July, she lay down and didn’t get up.