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enaflt;ct Wlt;%n CityREPORTINGOttawa Correspondent torBrandon SunOTTAWA—The wood buffalo, discovered alive after 20 years in which scientists mourned it as* extinct, will be set up in business again on land its ancestorsroamed.Government wildlife officials like Dr. W, E. Stevens are excitedl.v scouting the northwest tor new buffalo range, determined not to muff a second chance to save the wood bison.The range must be large enough to support a good sized herd; must be wild, unsettled country with no farms to complicate matters, and must be far enough from the herds of plains buffalo that there will be no interbreeding.One possibility is the aspen parkland of northern Saskatchewan. where no buffalo have lived for 75 years. Another area Stevens has in mind is in the Northwest Territories, west of Great Slaye Lake.When the sites have been selected, the Wildlife Service intends to send a winter tractor-train expedition to the remote northwestern corner of Wood Buffalo National Park, where aherd of pure-bred wood bison has been found, and bring out enough young bulls and cows to start the new herds.'Cr lt;*'?**The wood buffalo, for size and weight the king of his species, would not have faced extinction if, 35 years ago, some Ottawa bureaucrat had remembered about the bees and the flowers.The story starts in 1906, when Interior Minister Frank Oliver persuaded the Laurier cabinet to let him buy 250 head of plains buffalo for $200,000 from the Walking Coyote herd on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Many Americans were furious when the deal went through for this herd was the largest in the States. At the shipping point this resentment ail but erupted into violence when the buffalo were loaded into cattle cars for the 1,200 mile railway trip to Wainwright, Alta.TheB 1925 the herd at W ight had so increased that the rang® there could not support it But in northern Alberta the 17.300 square miles ot Wood Buffalo National Park supported only a couple of thousand wood bison— the descendants of some 300 that were the last survivors of the subspecies when the government banned hunting them in 1891.With ill considered conservationist zeal, the government moved 6.673 plains buffalo into the park The native wood buffalo were swamped by the influx. It is estimated that by 1940 there were no pure-blooded wood buffalo left—only plains bison and hybrids that today total about 16,000.☆ Hr HrFor years government zoologists hoped that maybe in some remote valley some of the wood bison had escaped the intermingling of genes—but none wasever found.Then, in 1957, wildlife officers taking an aerial census of the park buffalo spotted some bison in a remote area where none had been reported before. Moreover, they were 75 miles from the nearest hybrid herd—and the terrain between was muskeg, a natural barrier that buffalo could cross only in winter, when the animals travel least.With hope renewed. Wildlife Officer N. S. Novakowski of Fort Smith led a party across the frozen muskeg early last year. They found a herd of 200 animals, shot five for study, and from the size and coloring of the beasts—20 per cent larger and much darker than the plains bison—Novakowski was almost certain he was witnessing a miracle. Back in Ottawa, calipermeasurements of the skulls ofthe five specimens shot confirmed the miracle—the wood buffalo. Bison bison Athabascae Rhoads, still lives.But only marginally. This is his last stand. The only retreat is into oblivion.
Newspaper Details
Brandon Sun
Brandon, Manitoba, CA
Fri, Sep 23, 1960
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Kevin S.
CA 28 Jul 2021
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