While 26 plains bison have been living in the backcountry of Banff National Park for the past year, there are still plenty of unknown factors concerning what exactly is going to happen when they are released into the wild this summer.
Those unknown possibilities range from how they will interact with predators like wolves and grizzly bears, to where they will range on the landscape and what would happen if they range too far and step outside the national park onto provincial lands where their status is still in question.
The variables are enough to keep bison reintroduction manager for Parks Canada Karsten Heuer busy this winter working on a plan for how the agency will manage the animals on the landscape when they are released this year as part of a five-year reintroduction pilot project.
Right now, the herd is inside an enclosed area of the Panther Valley where they are supported through food and water by Parks staff, having spent the last year within a slightly larger enclosure area that included a river and steep landscape features.
But this year the plan is to open the gates and release them into a larger 1,200 square kilometre reintroduction zone, at which point they would be roaming wild on the landscape. Strategically placed fencing and geographical features are the only obstacles the large mammals would have to prevent them from leaving the national park.
“We don’t know how much affinity bison would have for this area when we release them and there is a lot of uncertainty,” Heuer said. “We are on track to release them this summer, then we will be in a big monitoring phase … we are really taking this as a phased approach to pause, take a look and adapt.”
Keys to success are for the herd to accept the landscape inside Banff National Park as its permanent home. That process has included keeping them in the enclosed area for a year as a soft release, the natural bonding process that occurs for bison when they have calves each spring, and actually shepherding them when they are set free.
But while they will be wild on the landscape, if they step outside the national park and into the province of Alberta, their status is still up for debate depending on who you talk to.
“Right now, bison are not recognized as wildlife outside the national park,” Heuer said at an October Bow Valley Naturalists talk. “There is recognition inside the Alberta government (that needs to be addressed) and added pressure would be helpful to see wild plains bison actually recognized as a wildlife species outside the national park.”
Plains bison were hunted almost into extinction toward the end of the 19th century in North America, and very few wild herds exist within traditional ranges.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the species status as near threatened as of 2008, while the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) listed it as threatened as of 2004. It is not listed in the federal Species at Risk Act. The committee is expected to update that status in 2018.
In Alberta, the specific species (bison bison bison) is considered extirpated and under the Alberta Wildlife Act it would be considered livestock, according to the Alberta Wilderness Association’s interpretation, as well as Heuer’s. Extirpated is defined as a species that no longer exists in the wild within a jurisdiction, however does exist in the wild elsewhere.
The list of endangered and threatened species currently listed in the Alberta Wildlife Act does not go so far as to distinguish between the two sub-species of bison – wood and plains. Specific herds, like the Hay-zama and Ronald Lake, are protected through regulations.
“Those two populations of bison are recognized under the Wildlife Act and regulations, and until more recently, we have not really had any discussions about plains bison because they have not been wild by nature in the province and not subject to natural process that might affect wildlife populations like predation and weather,” said director of the Fish and Wildlife policy branch for Environment and Parks Sue Cotterill. “Part of the process is to try and rectify that, but we are only part-way through the process.
She said it is important to note that bison are included in the act, but it does not distinguish between plains or wood bison at the species level. If a wild plains bison leaves Banff National Park, Cotterill said it would have no consideration under the legislation, as it is not recognized as wildlife yet.
In order to change that wildlife act, a status report on plains bison is needed and was conducted by the Alberta Conservation Association in 2016-17. The ACA has published 86 status reports and 16 updates on species in Alberta since 1997, all of which are forwarded to the Endangered Species Conservation Committee (ESCC), which reports to the province’s minister of environment and parks.
Status updates provide a ranking for each species and involve consultation with biologists and population data. The objective is to identify species that may be considered for a more detailed status assessment.
When it comes to plains bison, Cotterill said the province is in the process of redoing the status assessment for bison at the species level (both plains and wood), which requires that status report and review by the ESCC.
“The one piece of the puzzle that influences all of this is that the Endangered Species Conservation Committee is advisory to the minister and established under the Wildlife Act, which is part of a government-wide review of agencies, boards and commissions,” she said. “We are waiting for a decision on that and if the committee is re-established, and I feel fairly confident that will happen, it is the way we would move significant species at risk business forward to the minister.”
Cotterill said the process to consider changes related to the status of plains bison in Alberta has definitely started through the status report and the assessment process by a scientific subcommittee of the ESCC. But until the provincial government reaches the conclusion of its review for all agencies, boards and commissions, that process is “in a holding pattern,” she said.
Furthermore, any change to the status of bison would then require the provincial government to undertake a management plan and perhaps even a recovery plan, as well as consultations with First Nations, for whom bison have important cultural significance.
“We have had a lot of discussions with Parks over the past four to five years and they have done a substantial amount of work relative to some of the concerns Albertans have raised early on about the potential impacts of the reintroduction of bison,” Cotterill said. “One of the other key questions for us, and a concern, was what are they going to do when bison leave the park?”
Retired Parks Canada biologist Cliff White has conducted extensive research on the historical ecology of plains bison in North America and looked at its “heartbeat,” the annual migration of the species across large landscapes.
Questions White is trying to get at through historical research, and computer modelling of bison movement, include how did plains bison end up in the mountains, how many of them were there and what did they do while they were there?
One hypothesis is that bison moved into the mountains yearly from the plains where they were abundant. The other is that plains bison lived in the mountains as smaller herds, on a landscape significantly different than it is today due to natural processes like wildfire, as well as pressures from being hunted by First Nations people.
“It is not like people haven’t thought about this for a long, long time, but to get at it you have to look at a whole bunch of sources of information,” White said. “This is a really good opportunity to use multi-disciplinary sciences to try and get at that.
“The bison heartbeat was an irregular thing, because you had all these things driving it. The general pattern was they remained in summer in large numbers on the plains and near the edge of the plains in winter. What would get them to go into the mountains and how do we look at that? That is where it gets confusing and hard to figure out.”
Another avenue of exploration to answer that question for Parks Canada this year was to conduct isotope analysis of bison bones found in the Rocky Mountains.
“The question, I guess, is the bison were here … but were those bison here for their whole lives, or just when they died?” Heuer said. “You can actually get at that question through isotope analysis.”
The bones of six bison found in the Panther Valley area of Banff National Park were tested last summer. Heuer said bison that lived their entire lives eating vegetation on the plains versus vegetation in a mountain landscape show different isotope results.
The results of the tests were confirmation of the hypothesis that some bison lived their entire lives in the Rocky Mountains, and didn’t just migrate in and out of the area from the plains.
“The results lead us to believe they were spending most of the time in the mountains,” Heuer said. “That was a nice piece of information for us to get recently that suggests what we are trying to recreate, or restore, is a dynamic that isn’t that too far from history.”
He said the work by White also helps with an understanding of how many bison is a good number for the Panther Valley, given that it is a natural range for the species. In 2022, the pilot project would assess what has been learned so far about how the herd moves, lives and reproduces on the landscape, how they affect vegetation and other species and what should be population targets in the long term.
“I imagine if this pilot goes well, we will be asking that question and creating a management plan for bison over the long term,” Heuer said. “That is part of the excitement of working on this project, there are unanswered questions that only the animals will answer and they are wild animals. Once we release them, it will be up to them.”
“We are pretty sure we will have done everything possible to anchor them to this landscape.”
This summer, in addition to having collars on the bison to track their movements, Parks staff are going to act as shepherds for the herd, to encourage them to move in certain places, and not in others, he said. There are also plans for prescribed burning in spring to create attractive vegetation for bison in areas where wildlife managers want them to stay.
“We will be doing some herding of the animals this summer, but our plans for the release have not been completely hammered out yet,” Heuer said. “It is going to be a strategic, well thought out method by which they first get introduced to their new home range and somewhat assisted by us.
“At least that is our intent, but we know we are dealing with wild animals.”
When they are ready to put collars on the bison this spring, Heuer said they would also assess herd females for signs of new additions. While all 10 females gave birth last spring, there was breeding behaviour this fall, he said, and the expectation is some calves would arrive this spring.
PLAINS BISON TIMELINE
Mid-1800s
Wild plains bison are all but eliminated from the landscape across North America. By the 1850s, no wild bison remained in the Rocky Mountains.
1885
Rocky Mountain National Park is established after railway workers stumble upon a hot springs, which is now the Cave & Basin. It would later be renamed Banff National Park.
1897
A ‘buffalo park’ is established near the Banff townsite by Rocky Mountain National Park superintendent Howard Douglas. Three formerly wild bison from Texas are relocated there, followed by 13 more bison later that year, including the legendary Sir Donald, a large bull considered to be the last of the wild plains bison.
1907
The last remaining genetically pure plains bison from Montana are secured for purchase by the Canadian government. It took six years to round up the bison of the Pablo herd and ultimately they were brought back to Canada by Banff’s Norman Luxton and superintendent Douglas, including 77 that came to Banff.
All plains bison in North America currently alive descended from this herd.
1909
Sir Donald dies.
1997
As a result of the 1996 Bow Valley Study, the display herd of wood bison in Banff National Park that lived inside a fenced paddock are removed to facilitate wildlife movement around the townsite.
2004
Breaking ground on Bear Street for a new development, Banff businessman Peter Poole discovered two 6,000-year-old bison skulls. The archaeological find reaffirmed long held local knowledge that bison lived in the Bow Valley for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. The Bison Courtyard opened in 2005.
2009
The draft Banff Park Management Plan contemplates restoring a wild bison herd in the national park.
2010 – September
As part of the 125th anniversary of the establishment of Banff National Park, the Eleanor Luxton Foundation launches the Bison Belong campaign to see plains bison restored to the Bow Valley and eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies.
2012 – January
Minister of the Environment Peter Kent announces the beginning of a public consultation campaign on reintroduction of plains bison to Banff National Park.
2014
The historic Buffalo Treaty is officially created and signed by eight First Nations in Montana.
2015 – March
The federal government announces $6.4 million toward a five-year plan to reintroduce plains bison into Banff National Park
Stoney Nakoda Wesley Band Chief Ernest Wesley, Chief Kurt Buffalo of the Samson Cree and Chief Aaron Young of the Stoney Nakoda Chiniki Band sign the Buffalo Treaty.
2016 – September
The Buffalo Treaty is brought to Banff on the anniversary of its signing and Bison Belong calls on the Province of Alberta to recognize plains bison as wildlife in its legislation. Stoney Nakoda First Nations apply to the Geographical Naming Program of Alberta and the federal government to rename Tunnel Mountain to Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain.
2017 – February
Sixteen plains bison are translocated from Elk Island National Park to an 18-hectare fenced enclosure in the Panther Valley of Banff National Park. The new herd is comprised of 12 pregnant females and four two-year-old bulls. All calves survived the relocation and were born in the spring.
2018 – spring
The bison herd is expected to be released from its enclosure and able to roam a 1,200 square kilometre reintroduction area. The area has some fencing in strategic geographic locations to keep the herd in the valley and from roaming outside the park.
