Bison statues visit Lincoln on the way to the national mall

You might have seen a few bison wandering Nebraska’s roads last weekend. A group of bronze bison statues were on their journey east to Washington D.C.

Their pilgrimage is a part of the 250th celebration this year of the U.S. becoming a country. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History commissioned a Nebraska sculptor to make statues of the national mammal.

Saturday morning, bronze bison glowed in the sunlight outside of Morrill Hall on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. Crowds of parents, kids and the bison-curious gathered to see 9-foot tall likenesses of the great beasts, perched on a flatbed truck for their long journey back east. Jim Wood, their driver, said the bison have drawn plenty of attention.

“It was really fun to watch people’s mouths drop open and their eyes go wide and shake their heads as to ‘what the heck is going on here,’” Wood said, laughing.

The sculptures depict a bull and a cow with her calf. The statues were built in Colorado, and Lincoln was the second stop on their trip. By day’s end Saturday, they rolled to reach their scheduled stops in Iowa City and Chicago before arriving in D.C.

Chloe Scheele came from Waco to see them with her mom.

“One of them is kind of on their own and one of them has a baby?” Sheele described the scene. “It looks really cool. I’ve seen drawings of them in like textbooks for school.”

Standing by the bison was their maker, Gary Staab, originally of Grand Island. He has sculpted everything from dinosaurs to snails.

“The process all starts exactly the same way, whether you’re building a dinosaur or a big buffalo,” Staab said. “It starts with the skeleton.”

Staab’s works can be seen in museums around the world. But both the bison sculptures, and Staab himself, got their start in the American West. He grew up in Kearney, where his love of animals was inspired.

“I was a feral child out there,” Staab said. “I got to catch snakes and box turtles and fish and do all that good stuff.”

Staab was so inspired that by age 11, he was doing taxidermy. After studying art and biology in college, Staab interned at museums from the Smithsonian to the British Museum of Natural History. Today, he freelances, which is how he got commissioned by the Smithsonian.

“The process starts with just trying to gather as much information as you can about your subject,” Staab said. “And for me, that was actually spending time with live bison.”

Staab’s studies for this sculpture were done on a conservation site near his home in Missouri, where five bison live. He fed the bison hay and apples alongside their caregivers.

“Like with any of these subjects, you want to breathe the same air as that animal,” Staab said. “You want to understand them the best way that you can. And then through that familiarity, you can start to play with poses and gestures.”

Over the course of six months, Staab created miniatures of bison through which he designed the pose and gesture of the sculptures and fine-tuned the anatomy and expressions of the creatures. After enlarging the designs and molding them with clay, he made a bronze cast of the bison. The statues are larger than life, standing three feet higher than the average living bison, and held together on the inside with stainless steel. After arriving in D.C., they will flank the entrance to the National History Museum.

“As an artist, you want to design for that space,” Staab said. “And so these, our national mammal, are going to this place at a time when I think we really could use a good story.”

While creating the sculpture, Staab learned plenty about the ancient mammals. Part of bison history is shown in the details at the sculpture’s feet. Staab left replicas of empty rifle cartridges, commemorating the years that bison were hunted for sport, their corpses left on the Plains to rot.

“It’s such a deep story,” Staab said. “We go from at their height about 45 million animals. And we get down to a point where there’s probably less than 500 animals.”

That was when bison faced extinction. Today, there are almost half a million bison, the majority of which are in commercial herds with a small amount in conservation herds. Kirk Johnson, director of the National Museum of Natural History, said the bison sculptures are to honor the history of the creatures and the nation’s anniversary.

“There really remains a really strong, enduring bind to all Americans to this animal that nearly went extinct and was saved from extinction,” Johnson said. “Now, there’s even some in Hawaii.”

In the late 1800s, when bison were on the verge of extinction, a herd was brought to live behind the Smithsonian. This, like the journey the sculptures are taking to D.C., was to raise awareness about bison and help support conservation.

“(The museum) exists to help people be aware of and be inspired by the natural world and to understand the scientific importance of the natural world,” Johnson said. “And bison are great ambassadors for us.”

The bison will greet visitors to the national museum and help open a new exhibit called ‘Bison: Standing Strong’ which opens this May.