ALDER FLATS, Alta. – Bison producers got a chance to bid on history recently.
Just less than 200 bison from Canada’s oldest Plains bison herd were sold in Elk Island National Park’s annual dispersal sale.
“We’re 100 percent certain there has never been any cross breeding,” said Wes Olson, senior park warden at Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton. The bison were brought from the United States in 1907.
The park maintains two bison herds in its 130 sq. kilometres. Before the sale, it had 760 Plains bison on the north side of Highway 16.
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Wood bison from the north
On the south side of the highway, in a separate pasture, are 360 Wood bison which are transplanted to the wild in northern Alberta, northern British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. The park is also home to 1,800 elk, 400 moose and about 250 deer.
Unlike farmed bison, the bison from Elk Island are not selected or rejected for size or disposition.
“We try to duplicate what happens in nature,” said Olson.
Because of dry conditions that caused a feed shortage this year, many animals weighed less than previous years. The animals aren’t given supplementary hay or grain to increase their weight. Olson said they decided not to ship bison calves that weighed less than 300 pounds.
But once those animals are gathered in sorted corrals, the first 50 percent that walk into the chute are shipped. There is no attempt to keep the largest animals. The herd is half male and half female.
“The goal of the park is to maintain a healthy representative herd,” said Olson.
Every year the surplus is removed. This year the park sold 177 animals at the sale, including mature cows, heifers and calves.
Olson said each fall during roundup park workers slowly entice the park’s animals into sorting corrals with feed to reduce stress. Until a few years ago they used quads and horses to move the animals. “It was a real rodeo.”
