I noticed that a user is going through flagging a ton of American Bison observations as captive, including some I took in Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. I messaged to ask why and he said that there are only a few truly wild bison herds on earth and the rest are fenced or managed. I am curi…

[image] susanhewitt: Therefore our own ideas on what should be considered wild or not are pretty much irrelevant here. I wouldn’t say irrelevant. There are gray areas – as iNat staff have admitted – where the opinion of the observer or reviewer can come into play.

I think the bison in Wind Cave would qualify as “wild” for iNaturalist purposes. Yes, this is a population established from introduced bison, but those we see now were born there. The population is managed, but not more so than the Yellowstone bison that are descendants of a population that never…

“Managed” is another concept that is a bit nebulous. Deer and elk are managed as game species in my state, but that management is at the population level (not individual level). California Condors, which are all individually tagged and radiotelemetered, are managed at the individual level. Black-f…

I am the one who has been marking the bison captive. Not only are they managed, but they are also fenced in, which is what made me mark them as captive. I do not think management has anything to do with a population being wild or not, but I always say that’s the reason I’m marking things captive bec…

The unfenced herds in Canada are the Primrose Lake herd, the Caribou Mountains herd, the Hay-Zama herd, the Wood Buffalo NP herd, the Pink Mountain herd, the Nordquist Flats herd, the Chitek Lake herd, the Mackansie Sanctuary herd, the Nahanni herd, the Slave River herd, the Prince Albert NP herd, A…

Yeah, I’ve been slowly going at this for over a year now. The problem is that SO MANY of these observations have been voted “wild”, even on small ranches where the bison have less than an acre to roam.

What do you mean by Russia? There’s no wild American bison in Europe, just European bison helped with hybridisation, there’re both captive herds and wild ones, managed, but still pretty wild, e.g. in Belarus.

There is a large American Bison herd in Yakutia, Siberia. All of the sources on it suggest that they are wild bison but that doesn’t mean much, given how many placed claim to have wild bison that are actually fenced. I’ve yet to confirm what their status is.

Oh, found it, there’s a 80-head herd that were set free, but they come back for winter food, all others are fenced.

Wild American Bison are captive?

General

upupa-epops June 22, 2021, 8:57pm 19

Man that sounds like a big project… I considered doing this for honey bees in Canada but figured it wasn’t worth the time and effort.

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Wild American Bison are captive?

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