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I
was always fascinated by Bisons. Now I have met them in reality. They
have been 3 feet beside our car in the Yellowstone National Park. That
was a great adventure. But they are very dangerous and you should keep
your distance and not annoy them. Very dangerous are female bisons with
baby bisons. In our case we have been in the car and the bisons have
accepted the cars and the traffic. When we left the car we had a larger
distance. They can run with 30 km/h speed.
We visited Yellowstone in August 07 as a part of our large trip in the
USA. We visisted many National Parks, but Yellowstone and Badland
National Park are the only one with bisons. In the Wet Mountains in
Colorado I saw hundreds of bisons behind fences on huge farms.
The farmers raise them for meat. In Keystone we had for dinner
buffet and I could eat a bison steak, stew and burgers. Delicious!
I
am very happy that the bison is back, because a century ago there have
not been many of them anymore. The Indians have only killed them to
survive in the wilderness. The white man has killed almost all of
them. Only a few could survive. Today they are back and in the US and
Canada are a few herds.
For me this animal is a symbol of power and strength. In many old
stories about Indians we find descriptions and in Kevin Costners movie
"Dancing with the Wolfes" the main actors are bisons.
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Bison (sometimes
referred to as the Prairie Cow) is a taxonomic group containing six
species of large even-toed ungulates within the subfamily Bovinae.
Only two of these species still exist: the American Bison (B. bison)
and the European Bison, or wisent (B. bonasus).
In American Western culture, the bison is commonly referred to as
"buffalo"; however, this is a misnomer. Though both bison and buffalo
belong to the same family, Bovidae, the term 'buffalo' properly
applies only to the Asian Water Buffalo and African Buffalo. The gaur,
a large, thick-coated ox found in Asia, is also known as the Indian
Bison, although it is in the genus Bos and thus not a true bison.
The American and European bison are the largest terrestrial mammals in
North America and Europe. Like their cattle relatives, bison are
nomadic grazers and travel in herds, except for the non-dominant
bulls, which travel alone or in small groups during most of the year.
American bison are known for living in the Great Plains. Both species
were hunted close to extinction during the 19th and 20th centuries but
have since rebounded, although the European bison is still endangered.
Unlike the Asian Water Buffalo, the bison has never really been
domesticated, although it does appear on farms occasionally. It is
raised now mostly on large ranches in the United States and Canada for
meat. Wild herds are found in Yellowstone, Utah's Antelope Island,
South Dakota's Custer State Park, Alaska, and northern central Canada
(see Wood Bison).
Bison live to be about 20 years old and are born without their
trademark "hump" or horns. With the development of their horns, they
become mature at two to three years of age, although the males
continue to grow slowly to about age seven. Adult bulls express a high
degree of dominance during mating season.
On March 16, 2007, 15 American bison were re-introduced to Colorado to
roam where they did over a century ago. A herd of 15 bison has been
established in the 17,000-acre (69 km²) Rocky Mountain Arsenal
National Wildlife Refuge, a former chemical weapons manufacturing
site. (Source:
WIKIPEDIA)
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