The Catalina Herd

Santa Catalina Island · August 2026

Fourteen bison were brought to Santa Catalina Island in 1924 for a film shoot, and never taken off.

The story that gets told is that they were left behind after filming The Vanishing American — that the crew wrapped, sailed home, and simply forgot fourteen bison on an island twenty-two miles off the coast of California. Whether the herd ever actually appeared on screen is disputed. What is not disputed is that they stayed.

A century later their descendants graze the prickly pear on the ridges above the Pacific. The herd is managed now — contraception rather than culling, a population held at a few hundred — but nothing about them is tame. On a morning in August I sat on a slope above the interior road with a long lens and waited. Two bulls closed on each other, stood still for a long moment, and then did not fight.

The boat was anchored in a cove on the windward side the evening before, and the walk out started early. But the hour on that slope is the part I keep: no architecture, no one else in the frame, nothing to compose. Only something to wait for.