Our son, Otto, calls early summer The Shaggy Season, as the bison are shedding their winter coats, and there is shed bison hair all over the place.

I love stumbling across a big clump of it dangling from the sagebrush.

And I love knowing that all sorts of birds and small mammals are using the shed bison hair in their nests.

The science is clear that where there are bison on the landscape birds have a higher nesting success rate.

It’s just another example of bison as a keystone species — and how bison lead to increased biodiversity.

And I think back to hundreds of years ago when there were tens of millions of bison shedding their coats all over the Great Plains and the American West.

How many critters evolved using that shed bison hair over thousands of years?

And then in a blink of an eye — that shed bison hair disappeared from the landscape — and it’s still essentially gone, as bison remain largely ecologically extinct in North America.

But here on our ranch the bison shed their winter coats at the beginning of the summer, and birds and small mammals pick it up and use it like they always have.

That feels good — and it makes me happier than it probably should — but I just think it’s so cool.

When I field-harvest in the summer I pull out huge clumps of the hair that’s shedding, and I just let it go into the wind.

I love it.

Happy Shaggy Season.

— Matt