Bison Herding and Other Wonders

I was much struck by a BBC film report of the annual Bison round up in the Black Hills of South Dakota .... this entails cowboys moving the 1,000 animals to a winter pasture .....


Bison Stands Off Wolves 

 

I looked it up, and there are approximately 500,000 bison in captive commercial populations (mostly plains bison), on about 4,000 privately owned ranches ..... 

 

True wild bison on the range number only 15,000 individuals in total, these are North American wild bison i.e. still on the natural range, free-ranging, not confined primarily by fencing.


A Running Bison

 

Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century, and were reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1880s ....

15,000 Bison Skulls From One Hunt!

 

..... this from a peak of  several millions with hunters such as Buffalo Bill Cody .....

 

Buffalo Bill Cody

 

..... who was contracted to supply Kansas Pacific Railroad workers with buffalo (American bison) meat, after the American Civil War. Cody claimed to have killed 4,282 buffalo in eighteen months between 1867 and 1868. He got the nickname 'Buffalo Bill' for this, and a claim he made to having an an eight-hour buffalo-shooting competition with another hunter, Bill Comstock, over the exclusive right to use that nick name, which Cody claimed he won by killing 68 animals to Comstock's 48, despite using a slower rifle.

 

I guess with the human encroachment of the planet, this (and maybe the whales to some degree) may be the last major recovery of a species we will manage. I can't see any other currently endangered animals being allowed to recover to even this degree in the future.

The US Passenger Pigeon, which went from three to five billion in the United States when Europeans arrived in North America, to extinction in the early in the 20th century, is the more likely pointer for the fate facing much of the animal world.  

US Passenger Pigeon - Extinct

 

Imagine enormous migratory flocks – sometimes containing more than two billion birds – that could stretch one mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long, crossing the sky, sometimes taking several hours to pass ..... wow, what a wonder that would have been to see!