Posted on 04/29/2021 5:48:20 PM PDT by mac_truck
The National Park Service is calling on hunters to volunteer in order to reduce the number of bison living on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.
The herd of bison has been living on the North Rim since the 1990s and has long been a source of frustration for park managers, scientists and conservationists.
Descendants of bison that were brought to northern Arizona in 1906, park officials estimate the herd could be as large as 800 animals. And park officials worry about the herd’s growing impact on water, vegetation, soils and archaeological sites.
Reducing the number of bison, which are considered non-native to the area, will protect the park’s ecosystem, resources and values, according to the national park.
Still, local environmental and conservation groups have long called for nonlethal methods of removing the bison.
The park captured and relocated 57 bison to Native American tribal nations in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota just last year. At that time, 11 bison were also equipped with tracking collars. Since the park began managing the herd in 2019, a total of 88 animals have been relocated.
But now, in a media release, park officials said they are looking for skilled volunteers to assist with lethal removal of some of the bison.
(Excerpt) Read more at azdailysun.com ...
Hunting bison is like hunting cows in a farmer’s field. The rest will only run a little ways when you shoot one.
Do they know the bison ae causing problems? Or are they just assuming, like they did with cattle in certain locations?
Bison territory in the United States when we got here was not limited to the plains, in fact they still are in Northern Mexico which is but a small part of the real story.
In the La Brea Tarpits in Southern California of all the animals they have recovered bones for Amrican Bison is number one and orders of magnitude more than any other animals they have discovered.
Now i know there will be snarky remarks about Bisons mental capacity but they are ill formed. They have never been domesticated as Cows and other animals have and they are fearless. They calve in snow and if a predator is dumb enough to tray and take down say a calf they form a circle around it and then the action starts.
You may have heard of Buffalo grass that grew whereever they roamed, sometimes high enough that a man on horseback could not be seen. Buffalos provide an invaluable service as they eat, pee, poop and make baby buffalos. Their hooves are not like cattle and they till the soil as the run rather than flatten it out as other animals like horses and Cattle do
They regenerate the land and eat invasive plant species
You’re thinking of prairie chickens. You shoot one of them and the rest come running to see why it is flopping around. If you put the dead ones in your truck it’ll smell like farts all the way home so put them in the bed.
That is why they imported pheasant because they’re more of a challenge.
I have a place on the south rim directly across the canyon from this and I can tell you for a fact that there is not enough grazing feed land to support Bison. There is very little that will grow under all the Juniper and Pinyon Pines. Sparse Manzanita, Sage, and some Cacti. Let alone that most of the terrain is fit for only Deer and Dall sheep. Even the Elk and Pronghorn Antelope there prefer not to navigate most of it, too steep.
About 100 years ago the Park Managers of the North Rim made deer hunting illegal. The deer multiplied so rapidly they destroyed the land and then had a massive die off due to starvation.
Hope the modern managers are doing a better job than the early ones did.
What is the Methane output of one Bison?
Doesn’t Ted Turner have a lot of them?
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