Alaska closer to reintroducing once-extinct wood bison to Interior
Published Friday, June 27, 2008
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FAIRBANKS — The state Department of Fish and Game cleared a major hurdle in its 15-year-old effort to restore wood bison in the state when it trucked 53 of the beasts into Alaska from a national park in Canada last week.
The bison, which arrived June 19, are being held in pens at the Alaska Conservation Wildlife Center, a big game farm south of Anchorage, where they will remain under quarantine for at least two years to ensure they are disease free before being released into the wild.
“We got them into the state, which is a huge step,” said Cathie Harms with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks.
The first group of wood bison will be released in the Minto Flats northwest of Fairbanks in 2010, if all goes according to plan, said state wildlife biologist Bob Stephenson in Fairbanks, the man who has been ramrodding the bison restoration plan since the early 1990s. The 53 bison hauled in from Canada — 27 females and 26 males — join a herd of 33 wood bison that belong to AWCC owner Mike Miller and will be purchased by the state, giving the department 86 wood bison with which to work.
“That will be the feeding stock for whatever we do,” Harms said.
The state acquired the bison, which range in age from 1 to almost 3 years old, from Elk Island National Park in Alberta, Canada, and used a $100,000 grant from the Turner Foundation to transport them to Alaska. The bison were hauled to Alaska in two special cattle trucks. The 2,000-mile trip took about 48 hours, said wildlife planner Randy Rogers, who along with Stephenson and regional fish and game director David James, met the bison convoy at the Alaska border.
“This is a major milestone in the project,” Rogers said.
But until there are wood bison running wild in Alaska, the department won’t consider the project a success.
“We’re not in this for having bison in captivity,” Rogers said.
Permits, paperwork
Wood bison are the largest land mammals in North America, bigger than their Plains bison cousins that were introduced in Alaska in the 1920s and have established themselves in herds in three parts of the state. Bull wood bison can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds.
Based on interviews with Native elders on the Yukon Flats and radio carbon-dated specimens found around Alaska, wood bison roamed Alaska in large numbers as few as 200 years ago before becoming extinct about 100 years ago. The state has been working on a wood bison restoration plan since 1991, back when it was “just a notion,” Stephenson said.
State wildlife biologists have identified three potential release sites for wood bison — Minto Flats just northwest of Fairbanks; the Yukon Flats 150 miles north of Fairbanks; and the Innoko Flats in western Interior.
The animals will almost surely be listed as an endangered species in Alaska — they are listed as threatened in Canada — when they are released, and it will take years for the herd to grow where it is big enough to be hunted, which is the ultimate goal, Rogers said.
The state conducted an environmental review to address potential impacts as a result of reintroducing wood bison to Alaska and began applying for permits to import wood bison from Canada more than a year ago. The state had to get a litany of permits from Canadian and U.S. agencies to bring the animals into Alaska, several of which pertained to the Endangered Species Act, Rogers said. The state plans to work with federal officials to get Alaska’s wood bison population designated as “a non-essential, experimental population,” according to Rogers. Doing so eliminates a requirement for designating critical habitat for a species, which is a major concern for industries interested in oil and gas development in both the Minto Flats and Yukon Flats, he said. The same regulation was used when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and Preserve in the 1990s, Rogers said.
A veterinarian from the U.S. Department of Agriculture was on hand to break special seals on the two trailers and certify each animal when the convoy arrived at the AWCC, Rogers said.
The bison were treated for parasites and inspected by a tick expert from the University of Calgary to ensure they were carrying no winter ticks. The animals were fed weed seed-free hay for several days before to make sure they were not carrying weed seeds in their digestive tracts, Rogers said.
The trucks the bison were hauled in were sterilized and steam cleaned before the bison were loaded, he said.
Even though the animals have been tested twice for tuberculosis and brucellosis and there has not been a case of tuberculosis or brucellosis in the Elk Island wood bison herd in 40 years, the animals will be held in captivity for at least two years, during which time they will be tested several more times before their release.
“If for some reason we get a positive test down the line and something major happens, we could potentially de-populate the entire herd,” Rogers said.
The state could have attempted a reintroduction effort with the 33 wood bison that were already at the AWCC but they wanted a larger number of animals for “genetic diversity.” The minimum number the state will release is 40, Stephenson said.
“More is better,” he said.
New home
The bison are being held in an approximately 50-acre area that is double fenced with an 8-foot-high game fence. The state veterinarian required two fences “so wild moose won’t come up and kiss one of the bison,” Miller said.
The new bison are being held separate from the herd that was already there, which came from a herd in Whitehorse, Yukon, that also was started with animals from Elk Island. There is no way the two herds can interact with each other or other animals.
The AWCC also is home to a herd of about 100 Plains bison, 25 elk and a handful of bears, moose, caribou and musk ox. Miller said the new batch of bison is being held separate from the ones that have been at the center since 2004, and were “still settling in” to their new home. The trip to Alaska took about 48 hours of almost continuous driving. Other than stops for fuel and meals, the only time the convoy stopped was to water the bison, which they did once in Canada and once in Tok, where they solicited help from the local volunteer fire department.
“We used a fire truck with a 2-inch capacity hose to fill water troughs inside the trailers,” Rogers said. “They didn’t drink much in Canada, but they were thirsty in Tok. We went around the trucks three or four times refilling those (troughs). Bison can drink a lot of water.”
The trailers were equipped with mist sprayers to keep the bison cool, and each trailer had temperature and humidity sensors that could be monitored by computer by someone in a support vehicle following the convoy.
Only one bison was injured during the trip — a bull that suffered a bruised shoulder was limping when it got off the truck, Rogers said, but appears to be doing fine now.
“There was concern about shipping animals 2,000 miles,” he said. “There’s definitely a chance for mortalities and having only one with a slight limp we’re considering to be a major victory. They did amazingly well.”
Most of the bison bolted off the trucks when they were opened, though a few had to be coaxed off the trucks, Rogers said.
“They went thundering off into the brush,” he said. “The pen they’re in has some pretty thick alders; they disappeared pretty quickly.”
Community Discussion
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"The trailers were equipped with mist sprayers to keep the bison cool, and each trailer had temperature and humidity censors that could be monitored by computer by someone in a support vehicle following the convoy."
Really? And what did these "censors" keep the bison from saying or doing? *Grin* Makes you wonder if they might not have been more efficient had they instead installed "sensors".
That said, it will be nice to see bison in the Interior in large numbers once again. Having collected many Late Pleistocene fossils of their ancestors over my years up here I often wondered what it would be like to see those huge herds covering the steppes. Granted, we don't have the environment to reproduce that scenario anymore (nor the bison) but an approximation would be a nice vista.
The article mentions the bison went extinct within possibly the past 100 years in the Interior. Any reason known for that loss?
Wow great bring endangered species back again so humans can be blamed for anything that goes wrong. That's why I might as well give up gaming and now just try to win money.
here's a like if you want to try spam,phis,scum free. And by our good neighbors I guess. Canada. Haven't gotten to far yet. gl.
http://www.moola.com/moopubs/b2b/exc/joi...
If the wood bison became extinct then where did these come from? Somebody start using the proper terms or I will be expecting extinct dinasours(sp) to be heading to Fairbanks soon.
And does this mean we will have to shoot more cow moose to keep the numbers lower so the buffalo can have a bite to eat once they get unextincted in our wilderness? Suppose we won't be able to build a pipeline anywhere near these unextinct buffalo cause it could change their lifestyle so much they may become extinct again. Wonder how they will get along with woodland caribou? Ah, so perplexing...
Expensive wolf chow.
I have no problem with re-introducing the wood bison. And I applaud the effort to prevent bringing in non-native plant seeds by washing down the trailers and such. But was the effort worth it given that all of the other traffic crossing the border is not sprayed down? It was, however, a good idea to clean the digestive tracks of the bison of potentially invasive plant seeds so they don't get established in the Yukon Flats.
By the way, biologists use the word, extirpate, to describe species that were once endemic but are now locally extinct. And until the bison are re-introduced, they are still extirpated (not extinct) from the interior.
Hmmm... Am I going to have to change my handle to VeryBigOldBisonHunter?
By the way, dobieman, that was a very incensitive dig at the article's author....or proofreader....
and AKHusky, take a look at our Delta bison herd - diminutive critters compared to the wood bison - if you think wolves have anything like an easy time of it when thinking about buffychops
BOMH,
I said nothing about wolves. I don't get your point.
Functionally extinct would also work.
So this is how they spent all the money they claimed they didn't have to do proper wildlife surveys. Glad our licence fees are being used for something we will never be able to hunt.
The article states that the goal of the project is to have a huntable bison herd.
I'm not a bison expert, but I'd be willing to bet that these guys are going to be good for moose. They cause a disturbance regime that favours the growth of moose friendly plants. Oh, and to thewayiseeit, Bison are grazers, not browsers. Not much competition between moose and bison to be had.
But let's not let facts get in the way.
Once again we're getting Buffaloed!
Tim Burton, owner of the Kodiak Cattle Company, switched from raising cattle to buffalo in the last 1980's because bears did not bother the buffalo. At the time I was working at an remote electronics facility that was in the middle of the area Tim leased, and got a chance to see these buffalos daily. I expect these larger ones will do quite well in the interior.
I hope they follow up on the one with the injured shoulder.
Good stuff.
Mike Miller does good work, I'm glad to see he is working with Stephenson on this. It'll be neat to have some wild bison about.
Bob Stephenson and Randy Rodgers have been working real hard on this for a long while now. They gave a great presentation on all this at the last Board of Game meeting in Fbks. The org I co-chair has also strongly supported this. The biggest hurdle is going to come with the ESA rules and getting the feds to list the bison under the 10(j) clause as "experimental/non-essential." Mowry hit on that in the article but didn't say that the other big part of that listing is you can't hunt the bison unless they are listed that way. One of the neat things to come out of all this is that we got broad support from a variety of orgs and groups that aren't typically prone to support what hunters do, and vice-versa. You can read more about where this project is going in terms of future hunting opportunities and possible allocation scenarios in the comments we sent in:
http://alaskabackcountryhunters.org/ABHA...
Very sorry, AkHusky!!!! That was anent the prior post - Reader1's. My apologies.
Great. Let's bring in these creatures so humans can kill them. Good thinking.
BOMH, That's okay. Now I see the point you are making. Thanks.
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