Better than bottled: How a Dutch company uses bison to maintain pure drinking water

A photographer and I have been walking for an hour through Zuid-Kennemerland National Park, which is sandwiched between the North Sea and the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. You’re either crazy or a cyclist to be out in the windswept coastal dunelands during the winter months. But we’re here for a different activity in the most densely populated country in the European Union: bison watching. Most of the Bison Trail is spent sloshing through sand that lies just below the surface all along the heavily developed western part of the Netherlands, also known as the Randstad megalopolis. Yellow-painted poles demarcate this sanctioned trail, which travels up and over the shoulders of shifting dunes as they struggle to hang on to their toupees of marram grass in the frigid wind. Panting, bent double, I spot two official-looking chaps kitted out with waterproofs and binoculars the size of elephant tusks. “Have you seen the bison?” I venture. “They’re sheltering in the woods over there,” one of them replies through thick gray stubble, pointing over undulating dunes to the far side of the 330-hectare (740-acre) bison enclosure called the Kraansvlak. “But you’re missing out — look,” he continues, gesturing with his tusks toward a nearby stag that lifts up its trophy of antlers. It was lazily grazing just across the dune slack from us, almost annoyed we hadn’t noticed it. The thing that intrigues me, though, is not that my narrow-minded focus has blotted out a resplendent stag. No, it is that…

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