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loyiid At Last - The “last Bison'*The wod bison, granddaddy of j the familiar plains buffalo, big- j |©r (6 feet high,' 12 feet long, j 1,300 pounds), blacker, and wool- j Her, once ranged in millions J from the Horn- Mountains in Canada’s subarctic to' the Colorado plateaus. But such was the slaughter as civilization moved j westward that in the U.S. the A wood bison did not live out the j nineteenth century; only in Ca- j mada did a few hundred, protect- j ®d by law, struggle into the j twentieth century. jThe decline of the survivors j began in 1906s when Canada, outsmarting a reluctant U.S. Congress, bought the last surviving herd of plains buffalo in the U.S., loaded them into cattle ears, and shipped them 1,200 miles to Wainwright, Alta.Some years later a genetically Ignorant Ottawa bureaucrat added the plains bison to, the herd of wood bison. The newcomers swamped the wood bison. By 1949, inbreeding had left no known pure-blooded, bison atlia-vascae rhoads — the zoological j name of the woodland species. |For years, hope lingered that j maybe in a remote valley some j of the wood bison had escaped hybridization, but . • none was ever found.Then in 1957 wildlife officers,taking an aerial census of fouf- j falo, spotted some animals in j the northwestern corner of the j Wood Buffalo National Park in j northern Alberta. They were 75 j miles from the nearest hybrid herd, separated from it by nr.is- j keg swamps and lakes that are impassable except in winter, jThey .were big and black; could jthey be unhybridized wood buf- jfalo?iLast year a ground expedition jcrossed the muskeg to find out.Five bison . were shot andbrought back to Ottawa for stu- jdy. Finally, last month, a zoo- jlegists’ report confirmed the jhome: These were pure-blooded jwood buffalo, indeed. 5. |Now, Canadian conservation- IMs have launched a- crash pro- j gram to find the animals a new j md isolated range where they j should survive and even rebuild j their ranks. Once the site has' i been selected, a wintertime trac- j tor-train expedition will cross j the frozen muskeg barrier to bring out young cows and bulls ! to start new herds. The old herd | will be left t© continue its fight j for racial survival. Not far from I the wood buffalo’s present range, f the whooping crane (world po» I pulation: 40) nests and battles j for its right to a place on the f planet. j
Newspaper Details
Orono Weekly Times
Orono, Ontario, CA
Thu, Oct 20, 1960
Page 7
Full Page
Clipped by
Kevin S.
CA 26 Jul 2021
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