It’s the best time of year! The first baby bison of spring was recently spotted at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Calves are orange-red in color, earning them the nickname “red dogs.” They can walk within 3 hours of birth, and before long, nursery groups of calves will romp around together, never far from their mothers’ watchful eyes. Check out more bison facts: http://on.doi.gov/1Oc7VXg Photo by National Park Service.
Bison expert Rafal Kowalczyk spotted the cow this week on the outskirts of Poland’s Bialowieza Forest. Rafal Kowalczyk/AP
Excerpt:
The Bialowieza Forest, which spans 350,000 acres between Poland and Belarus, is home to a vulnerable population of about 600 bison. But this winter, the forest also became home to a reddish brown cow who decided to escape domestic life for some time in the wild. Poland’s TVN24 news portal reports an ornithologist first spotted her in November, wandering the outskirts of the forest with a herd of about 50 bison.
This week, Rafal Kowalczyk, a bison expert and director of the Mammal Research Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, spotted the cow again. He told TVN24 that she appears healthy. She is a Limousin cow, which means she has thick fur, and eastern Poland has had a relatively mild winter. He also says the bison herd she is traveling with appears to be doing a good job of finding nutrient-rich food like corn.
“This isn’t the first time in this region that a cow has escaped, but it’s the first time that a cow has joined a herd of bison,” Kowalczyk told TVN24. “With the bison, it’s safe from wolves. If it was on its own, it would likely fall victim to wolves.”
For your viewing pleasure: Some v C O L D B O I s I took pictures of last year. Please do not delete my caption, this is my work that took me hours to edit and I would appreciate my work not getting stolen.
A lot of people forget about the Eastern subspecies, but they were very important too.
Often associated only with the Great Plains of the American West, bison were once numerous east of the Mississippi, and were once common in West Virginia. The town of Buffalo, WV, was named after Buffalo Creek, so named because bison were commonly seen along it. Dr. Thomas Walker recorded that 13 buffaloes were killed during the his 1743 expledition of the trans-Allegheny region.
The Native Americans of West Virginia made use of the bison for food, clothing, bedding, war paraphernalia (shields made from hides), utensils, and musical instruments (trumpets made from horns, drum skins from hide.)
Although valued as a source of food by white settlers, many engaged in the wanton killing of bison as as a “sport.” Dr. Walker noted in 1743 that, “game in these parts and would have been of much greater advantage to the inhabitants than it has been if the hunters had not killed the Buffaloes for diversion.”
The bison once roamed in large herds over the entire state, the greatest number of them being found along the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. By 1730, all the wild bison were gone from Virginia and by 1760 they had were no longer found in the Carolinas or eastern Georgia. Daniel Boone wrote in his diary that he hunted buffalo in North Carolina until they “became scarce” in the late 1760’s.
The last buffalo seen in West Virginia were a cow and calf in Webster County in the year 1825. The last wild bison living east of the Mississippi River was shot in 1832.
Bison: Builder of Roads
White hunters and early settlers in the trans-Allegheny region reported sizable populations of bison, that had beaten down traces or paths between salt licks. Many of these paths served as roads that used by Indians, and later by the white settlers. Many decades later, the paths of the bison became the route followed by many of the early turnpikes and road systems.
What’s referenced as Virginia there AFAICT was the limits of the colony at that time, which had not yet expanded west of the Blue Ridge. I am from the New/Kanawha/Ohio drainage, just over the current WV state line, and close to places named after that Dr. Walker (and buffalo place names)–where they held on for almost a century longer as mentioned above. Until after there were larger numbers of settlers and just groups of destructive roving assholes killing them off.
My folks also used to make boats covered with the large, tough hides, which would hold up better to rapids better than wood. Deer skins don’t work for that. Neither would elk probably, but they also got totally wiped out at about the same time anyway.
Did run across this one, though, so bringing it back.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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