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American Bison (Bison bison)
American Bison (Bison bison)
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American Bison (Bison bison)
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Credits to Cory W Berish.
I just loved the bison on my winter trip to Yellowstone a week or so ago - although everywhere, they are so part of the Yellowstone Ecosystem.  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Rob Daugherty.
Fighting Bison in the Snow, Yellowstone National Park. Click on it to play.
Credits to Shari Sommerfeld.
Listen to the wind. it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to your heart, it knows. American bison, Yellowstone NP.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Connie Troutman.
Saw this handsome guy on my recent trip to the mountains. Soon, a few of the bison that call the North Fork home during the winter, will make the long trip back to Yellowstone.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Callie Runyon.
I just returned from my vacation to parkadise and it was so hard to come back to hot, humid, and rainy Florida. YNP will forever have a piece of my heart. This trip was extra special because my brother brought his girlfriend along and I brought my hubby. It was their first time in the park and needless to say, they loved it. I took nearly 2000 pictures and although bison can be a little boring to take pictures of, this guy really stood out to me. It turned out a lot better than I was expecting.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credist so Sandy Sisti - Wild at Heart.
Contact...... During August, the deep, rumbling sounds of the bison rut can be heard throughout Hayden Valley as these one-ton giants gather for this annual ritual. Dominant bulls warn off challengers by swinging their horns, bellowing and pawing the earth. If the challenger remains undaunted, the two bulls clash in a head on battle for supremacy within the herd. Once these two evenly matched bulls began swinging their heads, I sensed a battle was imminent. They spent the next three minutes with horns locked, using all their strength to shove the other down a grassy hillside. The bulls began to tire, but neither wanted to admit defeat. Finally, the bull at left turned and ran. The victorious bull gave chase for a few moments, then returned to the hillside with tail raised, looking for another fight. Finding no-one willing to take him on, the frustrated bull ran up and down the hill a few times until he finally disappeared into Hayden Valley, bellowing all the way. What an amazing sight!  *This image is copyright of its original author
Plains bison roaming free in Banff National Park for first time in decades
Published Thursday, August 2, 2018 3:48PM EDT https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/plains-b...-1.4038444 BANFF, Alta. -- Parks Canada says wild plains bison that were reintroduced to Banff National Park are now free-roaming animals. Officials say 31 bison were released Sunday into a 1,200 square-kilometre zone that features meadows and grassy valleys for grazing along the park's eastern slopes. "Now, they are free-roaming wild bison and their path forward may not be easy," said Bill Hunt, manager of resource conservation with Banff National Park. "They will experience harsh winters, they will travel through difficult terrain and they will eventually be hunted by wolves and other predators." He said they will also play an important role in keeping the ecosystem healthy in the national park. "Bison are what we call a keystone species -- that means bison alter the food web and the landscapes." As examples, he said they improve grazing for animals such as elk because they fertilize the grasses, open forests for meadow-loving birds and small mammals, create amphibian habitat by wallowing in the lowlands and their heavy winter coats shed each spring to provide nesting material for alpine birds. Hunt said they are also an important food source for scavengers and predators such as wolverines and grizzly bears. "Bison will make Banff a wilder place," he said. They disappeared from the area due to overhunting before the national park was created in 1885. Sixteen plains bison from Elk Island National Park were reintroduced as part of a $6.4-million plan in February 2017 into the remote Panther River Valley, about 40 kilometres north of Banff. Plains bison are an iconic part of Canada's history, having freely roamed in the Rockies, filling an important need for the livelihoods of First Nations people and early settlers. Ten of the females had calves last year and five of those animals gave birth again this year. The reintroduction is supported by First Nations and conservationists, but concerns have been raised by some nearby landowners about the animals wandering out of the park. Parks Canada said it will keep a close eye on the herd through electronic monitoring and wildlife staff on the ground will try to keep them in the area. "We have this gift of natural containment -- rock ridges and cliffs that typify the mountain environment," said Karsten Heuer, project manager for the bison reintroduction. "But there were these key pinch points on the periphery of the 1,200 square-kilometre reintroduction zone, in which the bison are now free roaming, that we wanted to potentially be able to deflect the bison if they came to those areas." They've also installed fencing at some of those pinch points to keep the bison from wandering out of the park. If they do get on to provincial land, Alberta Environment and Parks said the herd will soon be protected under a special ministerial order. "People are concerned about if they do get out of the park," said Minister Shannon Phillips. "Of course, there is monitoring and response in place if that happens. "If it does, we have taken steps in the past ... to protect the Ronald Lake bison herd and I will do that again with this particular herd." The order would give the bison the same protections as animals such as grizzly bears. "You can't just shoot 'em if you want to," said Phillips. The province said the order will be in place next week.
In other words a new Yellowstone is emerging in Western Canada, where wild bison will face again grew wolves, cougars and grizzly bears. Same actors as in United States. Banff national park is localized in Canadian Rockies and its territory is only a bit less than the territory of Yellowstone.
Credits to George Dian Balan - Miracle of Wildlife.
LEGEND OF AMERICA Some legend says that the genes of the big humped prehistoric bison are still alive in a few bison of today. If that is true, then this is one of the last. Tatanka himself, the spirit of his ancestors. This must be the kind of bison that inspired native American folklore, being usually associated with strength, endurance and protection. At the time humans settled in North America there must have been many more impressive bulls like this one. The legend(s) go(es) on, deep into the snowy winter...  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Renee Lund.
I wanted to test out my new 150-600mm lens on clarity for distance. Yesterday in Yellowstone on an overcast day the mosquitoes were in such huge swarms that I shot from my car. I rolled the window down long enough to take a quick snap at Mr. Bison which was quite a long ways off the road and the only one of 2 that were tough enough to with stand the swarms. I'm rather pleased with these lens being hand held in my car at quite a long distance and it still picked up the tiny mosquitoes!  *This image is copyright of its original author
External measurements of Bisons in Wichita Mts. Wildlife Refuge, Comanche County, Oklahoma
Picture credit to @bison.ins_gram  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
Protect your own at all costs
Credit to @snagsafari  *This image is copyright of its original author
What America Lost When It Lost the Bison
By migrating in huge herds, bison behave like a force of nature, engineering and intensifying waves of spring greenery that other grazers rely on. ED YONG NOVEMBER 18, 2019 Chris Geremia was surprised. After considerable effort, and substantial risk to life and limb, he and his colleagues finally had the results from their decade-long experiment, and those results were both clear and unexpected: Bison do not surf. Specifically, bison (or buffalo) don’t follow the waves of new shoots that burst from the ground every spring. This phenomenon, known as surfing the green wave, allows animals to eat plants at their most nutritious, when they’re full of nitrogen and proteins and low in indigestible matter. Such freshness is fleeting, and so grazers undertake large migrations to track the new greenery as it crests across the landscape. Over the past decade, scientists have shown that mule deer, barnacle geese, elk, elephants, Mongolian gazelles, and a dozen other species all do this. Geremia wanted to see whether bison, which once formed the largest grazing herds in North America, follow the same pattern. Beginning in 2005, he and his colleagues started putting GPS collars on bison in Yellowstone National Park, home to the largest remaining herd in North America, and the only one that truly migrates. Their sociable nature makes for an impressive spectacle, but also creates a problem: When you tranquilize one of them, the others tend to surround their fallen herd-mate. “It took a few years to learn the confidence to walk into this group of a hundred animals, each weighing between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds, and put a collar on the one that’s sleeping,” says Geremia, who works at the National Park Service. “Most of the time, the others just move away.” Once it had collared enough bison, the team used satellite images to see whether the animals’ movements matched the appearance of new greenery. “They really didn’t,” Geremia says. “They start to surf, but then they stop,” allowing several weeks’ worth of fresh vegetation to pass them by. Confused, the team followed the bison in person, and collected dung samples to see whether the animals were suffering from a nutritional deficit because of their lax migrations. The poop, however, revealed that the bison were still consuming as much protein as if they had continued to surf the wave. “It threw us for a complete loop,” Geremia says. “How can they fall behind but still have an incredibly high-quality diet?” He found out by fencing off small patches of land along the bison migration route. By comparing the plants within and beyond the fences, the team learned that bison graze so intensely that they freeze plants in early spring for weeks at a time, preventing them from maturing and forcing them to continuously produce young shoots. Other North American mammals like mule deer can’t do this, because they travel in small-enough groups that plants can still outgrow the effects of their grazing. Bison, however, gather in the thousands. By moving in synchrony, they don’t have to surf the green wave. Uniquely, they can also create it. Their actions change the landscape. In areas where bison graze, plants contain 50 to 90 percent more nutrients by the end of the summer. This not only provides extra nourishment for other grazers, but prolongs the growing season of the plants themselves. And by trimming back the plant cover in one year, bison allow more sunlight to fall on the next year’s greenery, accelerating its growth. When Geremia’s team looked at parts of Yellowstone where bison numbers have fluctuated, it found that the green wave grew in intensity and crested over a longer period as the herds grew larger. The bison engineer and intensify the spring. And astonishingly, they had a stronger influence on the timing of plant growth than weather and other environmental variables. They’re equivalent to a force of nature. That force would have been even more powerful in centuries past, when 30 to 60 million bison roamed North America. “They would have been everywhere,” says Matthew Kauffman of the University of Wyoming, who led the new study. “The productivity of those grasslands would have been radically different because there are that many bison, trampling, eating, defecating, and urinating.” These herds must have changed the path of the green wave, and inadvertently governed the fates of other animals that surf it, from deer to elk to bighorn sheep. What happened, then, when European colonizers virtually eliminated the bison? By 1900, fewer than 600 remained. When we lose animals, we also lose everything those animals do. When insects decline, plants go unpollinated and predators go unfed. When birds disappear, pests go uncontrolled and seeds stay put. When herds of bighorn sheep and moose are shot, their generational knowledge disappears and migration routes go extinct, as Kauffman showed last year. And when bison are exterminated, springtime changes in ways that we still don’t fully understand. They’ve rebounded somewhat, but still occupy less than 1 percent of their former range. There are probably about 500,000 bison around today, but the majority are part of privately owned herds. Only 20,000 or so live on public lands, and only 8,000 of those can move freely. And of those unfenced bison, about 5,500 live in Yellowstone. “This large population can change how spring happens,” Geremia says, “but there aren’t a lot of other places today where bison have the landscape that they do here.” It’s not enough to preserve bison numbers without also conserving bison behavior. If the animals exist, but aren’t allowed to migrate, there will still be a bison-shaped hole in the world. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/11/how-bison-create-spring/602176/ |
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