Imagine traveling across the grasslands of North America and needing to take a three-day rest stop between destinations because there is a heard of 100,000 Bison slowly grazing their way across the landscape. That would have been the norm less than 200 years ago. Before the commercial hunt of the late 1800s, tens of millions of these bovine behemoths covered the land. They were the most prominent large mammal on the continent for thousands of years, shaping landscapes, creating habitat and defining the wild. From a low of roughly 1000 individual Bison in the 1880s, today we have managed to bring back this species from the brink of extinction through 100 years of hard-fought conservation efforts. Bison were crucial to the original inhabitants of Canada roughly 13,000 years ago and they are responsible for building the thriving economy we enjoy today in North America. We owe Bison a great deal.
#83-Forgotten Icons With Greg Wilson