Ecology: Where the Bison Roamed
Originally Published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.
Photography by Chloë Ellingson
'Good morning, ladies," says Karsten Heuer, brightly. The ladies – 10 bison heifers, each weighing as much as 1,000 pounds – don't look up, but you can be sure they notice the fit, stubble-faced human in their midst. These are prey animals: hyper-alert and wary of outsiders. Mr. Heuer's job title is "bison reintroduction project manager." He's overseeing an initiative to bring back the continent's largest land mammal to Banff, Alta., Canada's oldest national park.
On this crisp January day, Mr. Heuer is at Elk Island, also a national park, located 35 kilometres east of Edmonton. If you've ever seen a bison in Canada, it probably had Elk Island lineage. For the past century, the park – a grassy, 194-square-kilometreenclosure – has been a cradle of life for the species. Its personnel study bison, monitor their health and occasionally transfer them to other parts of the continent.
Mr. Heuer, a Parks Canada employee, is a conservationist in the deepest sense of the word. To preserve wildlife, he argues, we must keep it wild, although such an approach is difficult. You can find bison "display herds" – sad, penned-in clusters of animals – at parks and ranches across the country, but wild herds are comparatively rare. (There are three unfenced herds in North America. The Banff herd will be the fourth.)
Ironically, restoring a species to something similar to its wild state requires intensive human intervention. Handlers must manage the bison – enticing them into enclosures, then corralling them into chutes or shipping crates – without destroying their self-reliance. It's delicate work, all to revive an animal with Ice Age ancestry that was once abundant.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.