Bison in winter

Yesterday, 14 November 2014, my daughter and I went to the Spruce Meadows Christmas Market. Afterwards, on a short drive SW of the city, we passed a few of the free-range Bison/Buffalo that belong to the Canadian Rocky Mountain Ranch. These animals, along with Elk, are raised for meat. Of course, I much prefer photographing wild Buffalo, in a place like Waterton National Park. However, we couldn't resist this chance to photograph one of these huge animals grazing in our recently fallen snow. It snowed yet again last night, but the sun is shining today. I have been ridiculously short of sleep the past couple of weeks, but I got a full night's sleep last night, resulting in posting today's photos so late (after 12:30 pm) and my plans for today went out the window. Yesterday was so cold - almost too cold to take photos.

There are two living subspecies of WILD bison in North America: the plains bison (Bison bison bison) and the wood bison (Bison bison athabascae).

"Two hundred years ago, the plains bison was by far the more common of the two subspecies. It was the dominant grazing animal of the interior plains of the continent, and it often occurred in large herds. A smaller population occurred east of the Mississippi.

Today, there are comparatively few plains bison. A herd of about 600 is fenced in at Elk Island National Park, 64 km east of Edmonton. There are small numbers at Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba, and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. There are at least 25 herds of plains bison in national and state parks and wildlife refuges in the United States, numbering more than 10,000 animals. There are more than 140,000 in private collections and on a large number of commercial ranches in both Canada and the United States.

The wood bison has always lived to the north of its prairie cousin. In historic times its range was centred in northern Alberta and the adjacent parts of British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and Saskatchewan. Herds made use of aspen parkland, the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the lowlands of the Peace and Slave rivers, and the coniferous forests and wetland meadows of the upper Mackenzie Valley. The wood bison was never as abundant as the plains bison, probably numbering no more than 170,000 at its peak.

In April 1994, there were approximately 3,000 wood bison in Canada, most in five "free-roaming" herds, the largest of which consists of more than 2,000 animals in the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary near Fort Providence, Northwest Territories. The source herd of 350 animals for the recovery program is at Elk Island National Park. The total population is small enough that the wood bison is considered threatened by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC).

The other large free-roaming herd of bison is in Wood Buffalo National Park, on the Northwest Territories–Alberta border, where there are about 2,000 animals, descendants of mixed plains and wood bison stock."

www.hww.ca/en/species/mammals/north-american-bison.html

www.crmr.com/ranch/media/