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travel / great places / explorer / so06
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Elk Island National Park
Buffalo trade
It had been thousands of years since bison last set hoof
in Siberia. But all that changed last April when 30 wood bison
from Elk Island National Park arrived in Russia's north
to begin anew as part of an effort by conservationists to
re-establish the animal in its traditional territories.
Elk Island National Park has been sharing its bison to repopulate
other areas for some 40 years now in large part because its
plains and wood bison populations are amongst the purest in
the world.
The Siberia project is the furthest the bison have ever been
sent from Elk Island. Past projects have focused on sending
the animals throughout Canada in an effort to establish four
free-ranging herds of 400 bison in Canada.
"It's been very successful so far," says
Norm Cool, a wildlife biologist at the park. "But the
limiting issue is the disease to the herds in Northern Canada."
The park has nearly reached its goal, having established
three herds of at least 400 bison in Canada. The disease he
refers to afflicts one of those herds, in Wood Buffalo National
Park along the Northwest Territories-Alberta border, where
tuberculosis and brucellosis has caused a debate over whether
to depopulate and re-establish the herd, which is the world's
largest free-roaming buffalo herd.
In the meantime, Cool and his colleagues are looking to Fort
Yukon in Alaska as a potential site for the next herd of bison
to leave Elk Island.
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