American Bison Society

The American Bison Society (ABS) was founded in 1905 by pioneering conservationists and sportsmen including William T. Hornaday and Theodore Roosevelt to help save the bison from extinction and raise public awareness about the species.

Over 40 million American bison ("Bison bison") once roamed the plains and grasslands from Mexico to central Canada, shaping the landscape with their migrations, grazing patterns, and behavior. By the 1870s, their populations had been decimated by westward expansion and over-hunting. An 1889 survey conducted by Hornaday, the first director of the Wildlife Conservation Society (known then as the New York Zoological Society), showed that approximately 1,000 bison remained in North America.

History

The early American Bison Society launched a campaign to raise funds to create wild bison reserves and stock them with bison from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. In 1907 the ABS shipped 15 bison to the Ouachita National Forest and Game Preserve in Oklahoma by cart and rail. This was the first animal reintroduction in North America. In 1910, the ABS helped buy the nucleus herd for the National Bison Range in Montana, and in 1913, ABS donated 14 bison to Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Counting on the successful reproduction of the species, the ABS considered their work done, and the organization was disbanded in 1935.

In 2005, the American Bison Society was re-launched by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to secure the ecological future of bison in North America. About 450,000 bison remain in Mexico, the United States, and Canada in various management settings. They are absent from most of their former range and do not influence grassland ecosystems as in the past. Over 90% of these bison are being raised for meat in managed circumstances. The complex modern identity of the bison – as cultural icon, wildlife, and livestock – poses several challenges to its ecological future. The revitalized American Bison Society has undertaken a long-term, transboundary, multi-disciplinary initiative to live up to the promise of its original founders “to protect and increase the American bison” by building a network of bison experts and managers, including public and private herd managers, conservationists, Native American managers, federal and state agencies, and scientists, and fostering opportunities for collaboration on important issues facing the species, including genetic status, health and disease, and ecological interactions with other species, such as grassland birds.

The group's mission is to "work with a broad range of partners to build the scientific and social bases to achieve ecological restoration of North American bison."

External links

* [http://www.americanbisonsocietyonline.org American Bison Society official site]
* [http://www.wcs.org/institute/ABS WCS Institute’s ABS Web pages]
* [http://www.wcs.org Wildlife Conservation Society website]