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Grrald Waring ”Reports from Ottawa ITHE wood buffalo, discovered alive after 20 years in which scientists mourned it as extinct, will be set up in business again on land its ancestors roamed.Government wildlife officials like Dr. W. E. Stevens are excitedly scouting the northwest for 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 cfltintry 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 75years. Another area Steven* has inmind is in the Northwest Territories, west of Great Slave Lake.When the sites have been selected, the Wildlife Service intends to send a winter trmctor-train expedition to the northwestern comer of Wood Buffalo National Park, where a herd of pure-bred wood bison has been found, and bring out enough young bulls and COws to start the new herds.* * *The wood buffalo, for size and weight the king of his species, would not have faced extinction if, 35 years sgo, some Ottawa bureaucrat had remembered about the beet and the flower*. '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 all but erupted into violence when the buffalo wer? loaded into cattle cars for the 1,200-mile railway trip to Wainwright, *1Alta. - uBy 1925 the herd at Wainwright Phad so increased that the range ftier* could not support it But In northern PAlberta the 17,300 square miles of Wood Buffalo National Park supported only a couple of thousand wood bison—the descendants of some 300 nthat were the last survivors of the ilsubspecies when the government Ibanned hunting them In 189L IWith ill-considered conservationist rzeal, the government moved 6,673 cplains buffalo into the park. The *native wood buffalo were swamped by the influx. It is estimated that by 1910 there were no pure-blooded wood buffalo left — only plains bison and hybrids that today total about 16,000.-jjjfiffi' * * 4 dfcr * *v*Fw years government zoologists hoped that maybe in some remote valley some of the wood bison had escaped the intermingling of genes— but none was ever 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 offi- ' cer N. S. Novakowski of Port Smith ' led a parfy 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, cailper measurements of the skulls of the f|v# 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
Victoria Daily Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia, CA
Sat, Sep 24, 1960
Page 27
Full Page
Clipped by
Kevin S.
CA 28 Jul 2021
Other Publications Near Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria Daily Colonist
Victoria Daily British Colonist
Victoria Vancouver Daily Standard
Victoria Vancouver Daily Evening Post
Victoria Evening Telegraph
