Taken today a couple of miles from town. I stayed on my side of the fence.
40 Replies to “Bison”
Farmer: “Son do you think you can make it across the meadow under 2 minutes?”
Son: “Yes, why?”
Farmer: “…Cuz the Buffalo does it in 2 minutes.”
What kind of fence Kate?
Computer graphics are cool.
6 foot wire. I didn’t hang around when he started shaking his head and pawing dirt in the air. We both knew it wasn’t going to slow him down too much.
The blur is the essence.
Remarkable image…
Kate
I once worked on a service rig operating near Kindersly/Coleville.
One location we were working on required us to pass through a pasture populated by the big fellas.
The roughnecks literally fought each other to see who had to open and close the gate. Being the driller at the time I thanked my lucky stars that I’d worked my way up the ladder to the point that it wasn’t an issue for me.
Scary animals to be sure.
Syncro
p.s. Page wire fence I assume.
Kate’s new aboriginal appellation:
“Dances with Bison”
Cheers
I’ve had the lucky opportunity to see buffalo up close three times.
About 10 years ago I was camping at Yellowstone Park. It was September (and because of the high altitude – very cold at night). We pulled back our tent opening early in the morning and low and behold a herd of Buffalo was in the campground walking around and grazing amounst the tents. (We had heard sounds at night but we were not expecting something like this.) The closest Buffalo was about 10 feet away. There were danger signs all over Yellowstone concerning Buffalo and so we waited until he had moved another 20 feet before we felt safe enough to venture out to the washrooms.
This year I managed to see some Buffalo on Antelope Island (in the Great Salt Lake in Utah) – which were part of a managed herd although free roaming – and I had the cool experience of seeing a herd of Buffalo cross a highway – and stop traffic – on the great scenic drive through the Back Hills of South Dakota heading north towards Mt. Rushmore.
It’s great to see these noble and native North American animals thriving when not too long ago they were almost hunted to extinction.
They’re delicious as burgers or steaks, too. 😉
I can see the attraction they had for the Metis and market hunters….they sure look “tastey”.
And each and every one of those bison is threatened by global warming and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT.
Wait a minute.
It’s the bison’s fault.
carry on.
Two years ago my wife and I took a vacation to Wyoming. We’ve got pictures of the bison herd we saw at Evanston, but the day we went to Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis we didn’t take pictures. Pity too, because in the park’s drive-through buffalo pasture we encountered a bull that had stepped over the wood-rail fence and was grazing right next to the very narrow one-way lane we had turned down.
If he hadn’t been on the left as we passed, the driver-who-shall-remain-nameless on that occasion might have stopped with that ton of potentially angry critter almost within arm’s reach so the wildlife-happy passenger could have leaned across me to get a picture.
But the driver-who-shall-remain-nameless was too cowardly to take that chance.
“Oh give me a home,
where the buffalo roam,
where the deer and the antelope play,
where seldom is heard , a discouraging word,
and the skies are not cloudy all day,
home, home on the range . . .” . . .
Great country Kate , now get rid Calvert and the socialist hordes that govern out there.
I once saw a small number of buffalo up close in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, of all places. My most distinct memory is that a. they’re smaller than I’d expected and b. my God, do they ever stink! They must wallow in their own …, I guess. Phew!
It wasn’t ‘hunters’ in the modern sense of the word who eliminated bison. It was people on trains who were handed rifles as they drove through herds, and were told to shoot as many as possible. It was gov’t policy to get rid of them so that farmers could use the land and raise cattle & grain. You can believe if you want that the gov’t wanted bison gone so that the natives would HAVE to rely on the gov’t for sustenance.
‘Hunters’ in the traditional and modern sense never want to see their game disappear; they want to hunt for the rest of their lives, and they want their grandchildren to hunt also. Exterminating a species is not associated with sport hunting, but with market hunting.
If any of you pass by Edmonton on occasion next time take a detour through Elk Island Park, lots of times you have to slow right down or stop completely because the big critters are lounging right on the road. I get nervous because it’s not unheard of for them to take a run at your vehicle. Mean and nasty mothers, they are..
Great picture! I got one of me somewhere doing the ‘Lindy” in a herd in Manitoba. WL – the meat is better then beef.
You must have read to much US leftard revisionist crap Grock…in Canada it was HBC/NWC trade tribes and Metis market hunters who decimated the herds…buffalo was the prime ingredient in “pemmican” which was traded like money in western Canada for decades.
The hunts were in the late spring and they lasted a few weeks then processing the animals took a couple of months…cleaning and curing hides to sell to HBC…drying/smoking the stripped meat and pulverizing it with berries and bison suet (fat) to fill cart loads of Pemmican to trade for HBC goods….taken to market (Ft Garry pr St. Paul Minn.) in red river carts and back east by stern wheelers and packet ships on the great lakes….no train west of lake Nipissing was available in Canada during the era of big Bison hunts.
Some Metis traded Bison hides to HBC in Ft. Benton Montana which had a narrow gage railway spur and paid top price… but American buyers only wanted the hides (to make drive belts for steam era industrial machines) or fresh tongue or hump for rich patrons of the Waldorf and Algonquin hotels in NYC.
By the time the CPR came through western Canada there was nothing of the herds left to shoot at…but bone collectors in Sask and Alta made a profit picking up the millions of sun-bleached bones that littered the prairies and sold them to be ground into fertilizer by firms back east where they were taken by the newly arrived CPR.
Any bison in Canada today came from the Allard herd from Montana which were transplanted to southern Alberta in the 20s and then up to Wood Buffalo park in the 50s…some pure prairie bison remain in Banff and Waterton parks but there has been so much domestic breeding with cattle that it is hard to find a pure bred bison today…I know one thing…they hate fences and treat them like they don’t exist 😉
I got chased by a big bull once in ND. Driving my VW, he was bigger than the car. A lot bigger.
Damn good thing the car was faster.
I saw them once waaaay far off the highway in New Mexico once. Little dinky wire fence didn’t look like it was going to do much, the bulls were as big as a Volkswagen.
Happily, my truck MUCH bigger than that. ~:)
I got chased by a big bull once in ND. Driving my VW, he was bigger than the car. A lot bigger.
Damn good thing the car was faster.
…Deja vu mojo.
The Matrix must be shifting…
Spent the summer driving the prairies and saw a number of domesticated herds of the big guys also saw forty to fifty pronghorn. Picked up some steaks in Hanley and have to agree with GW above, the steaks were very nice, milder than I thought they would be.
Darcy said: “WL – the meat is better then beef.”
Sure is…lean and meaty and has a slight nuttiness to it when you BBQ it. I had steaks and roasts from the animals culled from WB herd curtesy of a friend in the ministry…we also get hybrid buffalo from my buddy’s neighbor who keeps about 20..I like it as much as Elk…maybe someday I’ll try my hand at making some pemmican…what did Uncle Ted Nugent say?….if ya can’t track it and whack it you don’t deserve to eat it.
Wild game is the cleanest fat free meat you can get…and Buffalo has to be top of the heap.
Having been a few feet from them I stand in wonderment how the Metis put these animals down with the muzzle-loading trade rifles and old snider enfield carbines they had access to…this animal has a thick skull, tough thick hide and bigger bones than a moose to deflect a low speed large caliber lead ball.
I once saw a small number of buffalo up close in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, of all places. My most distinct memory is that a. they’re smaller than I’d expected and b. my God, do they ever stink!
Those weren’t buffalo; those were the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Jim, I thought the SF Supervisors were a herd of dinosaurs, not bison. Didn’t they star in Jurassic Park?
The Phantom –
You’re probably right. It was likely just a herd of hippies or druggies, assuming that there’s any difference between the two.
Anyone know why people switched from bison to beef (and don’t say because they ran out of buffalo – if we can raise beef we can raise bison).
It appears that cattle have a far better disposition than bison and make them a more sensible choice to produce. It’s just business some say.
“…more sensible choice to produce. It’s just business some say”
How true. A close farmer/livestock grower friend of mine said when he was a kid, he’d walk up to their bull and bonk it on the nose – the bull never challenged him any more after that and would come when he called.
Try that with a buffalo.
(Yes of course don’t try this at home kids on any bull, depends on how they are brought up, and knowing animals.)
2 decades ago, a pleasant drive through Teddy Roosevelt Nat. Park – and a smallish herd looking confused at the sudden lack of grass beneath their feet.
Reverse is a wonderful gear. I’ll have to hunt for the pic my lady managed to take.
That picture looks seriously photoshopped.
It seriously ain’t, Jeff. I lifted the tones a touch, as I was forced to shoot into the sun, but other than that, no changes whatsoever outside of normal cropping.
The bull was shaking his head violently at the time – and pawing the ground with is front feet.
True story.
Some years ago a visitor from a province down east, saw his first bison in Elk Island Park.
Parked his car and jumped the fence to ‘pet’ it.
Wound up in hospital.
Lucky it was a hospital and not a morgue.
Great pic.
Large Dead Animals, anyone?
CRB
All bison should be slaughtered and made into burgers because they pass an exorbitant amount of CO2…..and The Real Canadian Superstore should put them all on sale…burgers buns too.
…ah yes, but will the buns be big enough for the burgers, or will you have to buy a dozen buns for 10 burgers, or is that a dozen patties for 10 buns.
Ah skip it.
this was one of my bulls,and no he was not mad the tail is not up, he was probably shaking himself off from a dirt bath.the bison do not want anything to do with people eventhough we have one that is a pet,she is only about 1300 lbs last time we had her on a scale.we have a relatively calm herd and drive in them every day even with my husbands little car.its better for buisness both for meat sales and live animal sales.
co-owner of LAKOTA BISON
…how much is a bison getting these days?
Dirt bath? The grass and ground around doesn’t look flattened, but hey I won’t argue with semantics if it is mad or not…
😉
No, Linda is right – he was kicking up the dirt, and he’d rolled in it. But he was looking right at me when he was shaking and pawing the ground, so I took that as bisonspeak for “stay on your side of the fence”…
Farmer: “Son do you think you can make it across the meadow under 2 minutes?”
Son: “Yes, why?”
Farmer: “…Cuz the Buffalo does it in 2 minutes.”
What kind of fence Kate?
Computer graphics are cool.
6 foot wire. I didn’t hang around when he started shaking his head and pawing dirt in the air. We both knew it wasn’t going to slow him down too much.
The blur is the essence.
Remarkable image…
Kate
I once worked on a service rig operating near Kindersly/Coleville.
One location we were working on required us to pass through a pasture populated by the big fellas.
The roughnecks literally fought each other to see who had to open and close the gate. Being the driller at the time I thanked my lucky stars that I’d worked my way up the ladder to the point that it wasn’t an issue for me.
Scary animals to be sure.
Syncro
p.s. Page wire fence I assume.
Kate’s new aboriginal appellation:
“Dances with Bison”
Cheers
I’ve had the lucky opportunity to see buffalo up close three times.
About 10 years ago I was camping at Yellowstone Park. It was September (and because of the high altitude – very cold at night). We pulled back our tent opening early in the morning and low and behold a herd of Buffalo was in the campground walking around and grazing amounst the tents. (We had heard sounds at night but we were not expecting something like this.) The closest Buffalo was about 10 feet away. There were danger signs all over Yellowstone concerning Buffalo and so we waited until he had moved another 20 feet before we felt safe enough to venture out to the washrooms.
This year I managed to see some Buffalo on Antelope Island (in the Great Salt Lake in Utah) – which were part of a managed herd although free roaming – and I had the cool experience of seeing a herd of Buffalo cross a highway – and stop traffic – on the great scenic drive through the Back Hills of South Dakota heading north towards Mt. Rushmore.
It’s great to see these noble and native North American animals thriving when not too long ago they were almost hunted to extinction.
They’re delicious as burgers or steaks, too. 😉
I can see the attraction they had for the Metis and market hunters….they sure look “tastey”.
And each and every one of those bison is threatened by global warming and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT.
Wait a minute.
It’s the bison’s fault.
carry on.
Two years ago my wife and I took a vacation to Wyoming. We’ve got pictures of the bison herd we saw at Evanston, but the day we went to Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis we didn’t take pictures. Pity too, because in the park’s drive-through buffalo pasture we encountered a bull that had stepped over the wood-rail fence and was grazing right next to the very narrow one-way lane we had turned down.
If he hadn’t been on the left as we passed, the driver-who-shall-remain-nameless on that occasion might have stopped with that ton of potentially angry critter almost within arm’s reach so the wildlife-happy passenger could have leaned across me to get a picture.
But the driver-who-shall-remain-nameless was too cowardly to take that chance.
“Oh give me a home,
where the buffalo roam,
where the deer and the antelope play,
where seldom is heard , a discouraging word,
and the skies are not cloudy all day,
home, home on the range . . .” . . .
Great country Kate , now get rid Calvert and the socialist hordes that govern out there.
I once saw a small number of buffalo up close in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, of all places. My most distinct memory is that a. they’re smaller than I’d expected and b. my God, do they ever stink! They must wallow in their own …, I guess. Phew!
It wasn’t ‘hunters’ in the modern sense of the word who eliminated bison. It was people on trains who were handed rifles as they drove through herds, and were told to shoot as many as possible. It was gov’t policy to get rid of them so that farmers could use the land and raise cattle & grain. You can believe if you want that the gov’t wanted bison gone so that the natives would HAVE to rely on the gov’t for sustenance.
‘Hunters’ in the traditional and modern sense never want to see their game disappear; they want to hunt for the rest of their lives, and they want their grandchildren to hunt also. Exterminating a species is not associated with sport hunting, but with market hunting.
If any of you pass by Edmonton on occasion next time take a detour through Elk Island Park, lots of times you have to slow right down or stop completely because the big critters are lounging right on the road. I get nervous because it’s not unheard of for them to take a run at your vehicle. Mean and nasty mothers, they are..
Great picture! I got one of me somewhere doing the ‘Lindy” in a herd in Manitoba. WL – the meat is better then beef.
You must have read to much US leftard revisionist crap Grock…in Canada it was HBC/NWC trade tribes and Metis market hunters who decimated the herds…buffalo was the prime ingredient in “pemmican” which was traded like money in western Canada for decades.
The hunts were in the late spring and they lasted a few weeks then processing the animals took a couple of months…cleaning and curing hides to sell to HBC…drying/smoking the stripped meat and pulverizing it with berries and bison suet (fat) to fill cart loads of Pemmican to trade for HBC goods….taken to market (Ft Garry pr St. Paul Minn.) in red river carts and back east by stern wheelers and packet ships on the great lakes….no train west of lake Nipissing was available in Canada during the era of big Bison hunts.
Some Metis traded Bison hides to HBC in Ft. Benton Montana which had a narrow gage railway spur and paid top price… but American buyers only wanted the hides (to make drive belts for steam era industrial machines) or fresh tongue or hump for rich patrons of the Waldorf and Algonquin hotels in NYC.
By the time the CPR came through western Canada there was nothing of the herds left to shoot at…but bone collectors in Sask and Alta made a profit picking up the millions of sun-bleached bones that littered the prairies and sold them to be ground into fertilizer by firms back east where they were taken by the newly arrived CPR.
Any bison in Canada today came from the Allard herd from Montana which were transplanted to southern Alberta in the 20s and then up to Wood Buffalo park in the 50s…some pure prairie bison remain in Banff and Waterton parks but there has been so much domestic breeding with cattle that it is hard to find a pure bred bison today…I know one thing…they hate fences and treat them like they don’t exist 😉
I got chased by a big bull once in ND. Driving my VW, he was bigger than the car. A lot bigger.
Damn good thing the car was faster.
I saw them once waaaay far off the highway in New Mexico once. Little dinky wire fence didn’t look like it was going to do much, the bulls were as big as a Volkswagen.
Happily, my truck MUCH bigger than that. ~:)
I got chased by a big bull once in ND. Driving my VW, he was bigger than the car. A lot bigger.
Damn good thing the car was faster.
…Deja vu mojo.
The Matrix must be shifting…
Spent the summer driving the prairies and saw a number of domesticated herds of the big guys also saw forty to fifty pronghorn. Picked up some steaks in Hanley and have to agree with GW above, the steaks were very nice, milder than I thought they would be.
Darcy said: “WL – the meat is better then beef.”
Sure is…lean and meaty and has a slight nuttiness to it when you BBQ it. I had steaks and roasts from the animals culled from WB herd curtesy of a friend in the ministry…we also get hybrid buffalo from my buddy’s neighbor who keeps about 20..I like it as much as Elk…maybe someday I’ll try my hand at making some pemmican…what did Uncle Ted Nugent say?….if ya can’t track it and whack it you don’t deserve to eat it.
Wild game is the cleanest fat free meat you can get…and Buffalo has to be top of the heap.
Having been a few feet from them I stand in wonderment how the Metis put these animals down with the muzzle-loading trade rifles and old snider enfield carbines they had access to…this animal has a thick skull, tough thick hide and bigger bones than a moose to deflect a low speed large caliber lead ball.
I once saw a small number of buffalo up close in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, of all places. My most distinct memory is that a. they’re smaller than I’d expected and b. my God, do they ever stink!
Those weren’t buffalo; those were the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Jim, I thought the SF Supervisors were a herd of dinosaurs, not bison. Didn’t they star in Jurassic Park?
The Phantom –
You’re probably right. It was likely just a herd of hippies or druggies, assuming that there’s any difference between the two.
Anyone know why people switched from bison to beef (and don’t say because they ran out of buffalo – if we can raise beef we can raise bison).
It appears that cattle have a far better disposition than bison and make them a more sensible choice to produce. It’s just business some say.
“…more sensible choice to produce. It’s just business some say”
How true. A close farmer/livestock grower friend of mine said when he was a kid, he’d walk up to their bull and bonk it on the nose – the bull never challenged him any more after that and would come when he called.
Try that with a buffalo.
(Yes of course don’t try this at home kids on any bull, depends on how they are brought up, and knowing animals.)
2 decades ago, a pleasant drive through Teddy Roosevelt Nat. Park – and a smallish herd looking confused at the sudden lack of grass beneath their feet.
Reverse is a wonderful gear. I’ll have to hunt for the pic my lady managed to take.
That picture looks seriously photoshopped.
It seriously ain’t, Jeff. I lifted the tones a touch, as I was forced to shoot into the sun, but other than that, no changes whatsoever outside of normal cropping.
The bull was shaking his head violently at the time – and pawing the ground with is front feet.
True story.
Some years ago a visitor from a province down east, saw his first bison in Elk Island Park.
Parked his car and jumped the fence to ‘pet’ it.
Wound up in hospital.
Lucky it was a hospital and not a morgue.
Great pic.
Large Dead Animals, anyone?
CRB
All bison should be slaughtered and made into burgers because they pass an exorbitant amount of CO2…..and The Real Canadian Superstore should put them all on sale…burgers buns too.
…ah yes, but will the buns be big enough for the burgers, or will you have to buy a dozen buns for 10 burgers, or is that a dozen patties for 10 buns.
Ah skip it.
this was one of my bulls,and no he was not mad the tail is not up, he was probably shaking himself off from a dirt bath.the bison do not want anything to do with people eventhough we have one that is a pet,she is only about 1300 lbs last time we had her on a scale.we have a relatively calm herd and drive in them every day even with my husbands little car.its better for buisness both for meat sales and live animal sales.
co-owner of LAKOTA BISON
…how much is a bison getting these days?
Dirt bath? The grass and ground around doesn’t look flattened, but hey I won’t argue with semantics if it is mad or not…
😉
No, Linda is right – he was kicking up the dirt, and he’d rolled in it. But he was looking right at me when he was shaking and pawing the ground, so I took that as bisonspeak for “stay on your side of the fence”…
…i hope you had a zoom lens Kate
😉