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Dennis Lingohr / American Prairie Reserve
Some of the 71 bison calves trucked from Canada are released onto grassland in Montana.
Dozens of bison calves trucked in from Canada are now roaming a stretch of Montana countryside that conservationists hope to restore to its original shape.
The bison, even though they were born across the border, are from the genetic stock of herd that used to roam what's known as the American Prairie Reserve. Hundreds of their ancestors were from that same area when they were sold to Canada in 1906 for its Elk Island National Park.
"We knew from the beginning that returning bison to the land would be an important step in restoring the reserve’s full biodiversity," Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve, said in a statement. "When the Canadian government purchased the herd, it helped the species survive near extinction. Now we are bringing them back to help restore a complete grassland ecosystem."
The 71 calves released Thursday join 140 bison already on the 123,000-acre reserve.
The nonprofit says it aims to "create the largest wildlife reserve in the continental U.S., culminating in three million acres of private and public land and connecting one of the last large sections of untilled temperate grasslands on the continent."
Some 500,000 bison roam rural U.S. lands today, a fraction of the tens of millions that once populated the Great Plains.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News
Leave a Comment:
Thank you, American Prairie Reserve, for the good work you are doing to preserve the bison and our nation's prairies.
ok whop-te-do here comes the return of buffalo so now bring back the american origanal land owners the american indans
Hey Dork.. all men migrated from Africa.......North and South America were populated from many destinations. DNA shows American Indians DNA from a little valley in Siberia......
It is wonderful that now the Bison are home. In our area there is a big push to return to native grasses. There are already some areas that have been successful. Hopefully, the Bison will aid Montana in doing the same.
yea now grow some hemp !
Bison are awesome animals.
Yes they are AWESOME. I am eating a bison burger as I type this.......
da doc...and no doubt if any wolves inhabit this area they will soon be enjoying the bison as well.
hs: Aint nature wonderful? culling the weak
You are probably enjoying a beefalo burger - of the 500,000 bison in the US now, most have been genetically mixed with various breeds of cattle. The experts estimate a total pure-bison population of about 6,000. Luckily, we now have genetic screening methods available, so dedicated conservation groups can cull out the mixed breeds and encourage survival and reproduction of the pure bison.
Cliff? Is that you?
thanks cheetah i needed a good belly laugh.
A strand in the web of all life going home with the promise of a grassland ecosystem. So American; So America the beautiful. "God shed His Grace on Thee."
I was afforded the opportunity to spend time in a bison herd. A very special, almost religious experience.
I see skor154's life ending very similar to that guy who spent time with grizzly bears.
With all the bad news you hear from up here in Alberta about "dirty oilsands", what isn't mentioned is that the mined out land is being restored to a better condition than it was before the oil was removed from the sand. The land already reclaimed has been restored with native grasses etc and there are herds of bison grazing there. I'll bet many people are unaware of this. "Good news" doesn't seem to travel as well as bad....sadly. Google Oilsands reclaimed land.
Blackbird,
Looks good if you only reads the claims of the oil industry. Why not try a scientific description instead?
Well yes; because we know Man always improves upon Nature. As if that was even possible.
I googled, and found Alberta's description of reclamation. Then I looked at the chart. The bulk of the land is cleared, or disturbed. The land ready for reclamation, being reclaimed and reclaimed is minimal. I'd say about 5% of the land impacted by mining is being worked while 95% is not.
Bottom line, the jury is still out on reclamation.
I live in northern alberta and dont agree with all the oil activity but have suggested many times that 10 dollars a barrel be added as a surcharge for all alberta oil going south of the border and that this money be used to reclaim lands tore up by activity to get this into a monster pipeline
this would give the government of alberts some needed cash to work with
millions of barrels a day equals a lot of grass
Well said Blackbird. It is good news. As you well know, all the people against the Keystone Pipeline being built are hypocrites. They all drive cars, travel by air and purchase products with some form of petroleum or oil derivative. I love their not in my back yard mentality but reap the benefits from the oil being transported through these pipelines. I love to see the Bison roaming freely where a pipeline has been laid. Its more proof that pipeline is not detrimental to our environment.
While having 'local' oil is nice, one of the main reasons Keystone XL is being promoted is so the company that owns it can get the oil to the international markets via the Gulf states. Most of the jobs it creates (5,000 to 6,000 in a given year) are temporary jobs, along with the spinoff support jobs. Once the pipeline is in place, the number of employees needed to maintain it will drop to hundreds as opposed to thousands.
(State Department report.)
Generalist you got it right on the money. Money is the key word here. The speculators and International market will raise the price to make the big oil companies that get billions in subsidies even more richer. Republicans just voted against removing big oil subsidies a few months ago. Back to the story, ..nothing better than Bison meat!
They probably would have made just as much money by just culling the original Pre Columbus herds for absolutely free instead of switching to cattle that they had to buy and feed
Wouldn't have gotten rid of the America Aborigines now, would they?
No...they wouldn't have saved a lot of money. Bison are bigger, meaner and a hell of a lot more dangerous than cattle. Bison ranches tend to have 12+ ft tall electric fences around their entire fence line with additional large wooden barriers to prevent them from going right through it during an outage. They WILL try to kill you...and are NOT easy to work with. Our country was built by small family farms and ranches....kids can help with cattle...not with bison. It's the difference between your dog and a wolf.
The American Prairie Reserve is similar to the efforts being made in Canada in southern Saskatchewan. We imported herds from the Elk Island group as well. Small herds have been established in "Old Man-on-his-back" ranch and the Grasslands National Park. Eventually the two efforts will enlarge and perhaps there might even be a cross border herd developed. That's a far out dream of mine but give it 20 years or so. Park managers however only set a goal of having a few hundred bison in the park which I think is short sighted.
Bison ranches DO NOT have 12' high electric fences (perhaps small enclosed pens but not ranches). Grasslands for example has similar height but stoughter fence poles than ranchers are using with cattle. People who have handled both often say that bison are easier to handle and more intelligent. They are meant to graze on the prairies and their restoration also helps to heal the land abused by cattle.
Bison first, then prairie dogs, ferrets and burrowing owls next are coming back and perhaps even predators like cougar and wolves may eventually thrive in this area.
"a stretch of Montana countryside that conservationists hope to restore to its original shape." That of course would be with wooly mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, camels, and other fauna which are now extinct. I love animals and support any effort to maintain their environment, but the notion of restoring the "good old days" of the dodo and other ex-inhabitants is folly. When mankind's time comes, we'll disappear like the dinosaurs.
Homo Sapiens cannot control the cycles of life. He can be a steward of the land, sea, and sky. That's about it.
kountrking,
They are not trying to bring back mammoths or saber-tooths. Only trying to restore a small part of the ecosystem that existed before the white invaders came and destroyed it all.
SingBiker...racist much? "white invaders"? Seriously?
So-called Native Americans drove numerous species to extinction when they arrived in the Americas. (http://www.lauralee.com/news/humanimalextinct.htm)
HS321, it wasn't a racist comment but a factual statement as it was white people from Europe who were responsible for the destruction of those herds in an effort to drive the native peoples from the land that the white people wanted.
A racist statement would've been something like soul-less white devils.
Why not restore the land? Teddy Roosevelt has a great quote.
"The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others."
Address to the Deep Waterway Convention, Memphis, TN, October 4, 1907
You got it right Countryking.
Uummm, Tatanka.
In Montana if the ". . . outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man," just imagine what the outside
of a bison will mean to the Native-Americans. Especially Whitebuffalocalfwoman. Hope springs eternal.
The Natives killed what they needed to maintain their Livelihoods. They used most; if not all of the Bison for food, clothing, shelter and tools. The Manifest Destiny crowd killed for Hides, and because they just enjoyed killing.
The US government also killed bison to starve Native Americans.
Sorry, not much for hope.
Torbot........... Before we all get misty-eyed for the aboriginal there is a history to remember there as well. When they arrived on the continent there was a massive extinction that followed them as well: Mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses and a stately deer called the stag-moose coexisted with giant ground sloths and beavers the size of today's black bears. You could also add the very first group of humans the Clovis people which research traces to Europe origins to the list. The image of the native aboriginal on horse hunting only had a brief 50 year span, prior to re-introducing the horse by Europeans a common method of hunting herds was setting praire firse to drive entire herds over cliffs and only using as much of the meat etc. as the tribe could handle at the moment. Fire was a common (and only practicle) method of land clearing and hunting large game. People of every group on every continent used the most efficient means available to them to provide for the tribe, Australia before the arrival of humans is another example of the effect on extinction rates and change of the native animal mix.
Lived in Edmonton for a few years, near Elk Island National Park, where the bison went and their from where these bison have come. Great place, always fun to go see the bison there.
Brucellosis free? How is it that the State of Montana is silent on a project like this and then slaughter thousands of bison from Yellowstone National Park?
I cannot wait until I get to hunt the rare, sacred great white bison. It is my understanding that the American Indians worship this beast, so my hunt should all the more spectacular.
White bison is superb fodder for the white man.
Wow.
I wonder how many people realize that the Southeast corner of Montana is where the "Battle of the Little Big Horn" occurred. A bumper sticker from the late 60s and 70s stated that: "Custer had it coming".
Is that what the self-hating crowd put on their cars in the 60's and 70's?
Just more expensive wolf chow
John Wayne, the Duke herded them through the Ponderosa & Little Joe helped. Walter Brennan did the cooking riding the chuck wagon & using Bison chips for fire. Glen Cambell sang for the cowpokes at night keeping the herd calmed down. Jack Elam got into a fight with Montgomery Cliff, but the Duke broke it up. The Commencheros tried stealing some of the herd off to Mexico, but again the Duke stopped them after an Apache attack with 3 arrows in the Duke. Ward Bond pulled out the arrows & the Duke healed up in just one day. The cowpokes got tired of hearing Glen Cambell singing all the time so Ricky Nelson joined the Bison drive. Dean Martin couldn't make it, he was drunk in Las Vegas. Thanks to the Duke, Montana now has 1 million Bison in open range & Kevin Costner is watching over them with his Indian wife Dances with Feet. Take the Wagon Train west on Route 66 & you will see them all, you can't miss 1 million Bison. Don't mess with the Comanches, they still take Scalps. Protect your women folk & children. Bring plenty of drinking water.
A little to much time in front of the televison maybe ...,albeit somewhat humorous.
GOOD EATS
American Bison
Dennis. Your story has never been proven and is pure conjecture. That somehow people with throwing sticks killed off all the animals is silly. The Native Americans with much more efficient bows and arrows lived with 10 of millions of bison and did not exterminate them as well as moose, deer, elk, pronghorn, bighorns, muskoxen, caribou, grizzlies and wolves. It took the Europeans only a couple of centuries to exterminate the Eastern bison, elk and then turn on the western bison and almost exterminate 10s of millions of them in a few years. The elk was also almost exterminated by the Europeans as well as the grizzly. Wolves were exterminated in almost the complete 48 states. Let's hope this experiment works. Our grandchildren will appreciate what we left for them.
Songwriters: Roger Miller, "You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skFWsc_-i14
You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
...
All you gotta do is put your mind to it
Knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it
....
To completely restore the natural biodiversity, once the buffalo herd is re-established maybe we can then then restock the prairie with a few breeding families of Sioux Injuns.
Just outside the East entrance of Zion National park, there is a restaurant where you can get bison burgers. MMMmmmmm.
Wow, you take a simple good story to good oil bad oil to racism to spiritual. For one thing this is 2012 and not 1850 so get over what the white man did to the Indian that was done by our ancestors and we were not any part of it. Each person has the way to do something good for themselves it is their choice and their determination . And buffalo are important to our grass lands but they are not spiritual ,when was the last time you saw one in church. They were put on this planet to feed people and be used as clothing,tools, and shelter. And not much left in buffalo or elk in Yellowstone Park as the wolves have killed most of them. But if you want to see beaver according to the wolf people they are there awaiting you tourist.