Posted on 04/29/2021 5:48:20 PM PDT by mac_truck
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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