The Return of the American Buffalo, Beaver and Moose | Our World

The buffalo is one of the classic mammals of North America. Once upon a time, a hundred million buffalo roamed the prairies. That was before the pioneers and cowboys like Buffalo Bill conquered the American wilderness and decimated the herds. Another of the animals which one associates with North America is the beaver. Like the buffalo, the beaver has had more than its fair share of persecution, mainly from fur trappers, but it does have protection now. The moose is a third classic American species. Moose is North American Indian for wood eater. However, it may surprise you to know that neither the moose, nor the beaver, nor the buffalo was originally an American animal. They came from another continent, thousands of miles away. The history of the buffalo, the beaver and the moose began in Europe and Asia. They first evolved here. One of the reasons that this isn't widely known is that there is only one place today in Europe or Asia where all three exist together. It's a place where a buffalo is not a buffalo, but a bison. The European animals in question aren't at all numerous and they exist together in just one small region, behind the Iron Curtain. The bison, the beaver and the moose live in a primeval forest in Poland called Białowieża. Biał means white and wieża means tower. In medieval times there was said to be a white tower in this ancient forest which straddles the Polish-Russian border. Most of Europe was once densely forested. Then man moved in and he quickly discovered that growing crops and husbanding domestic animals was a more certain and profitable existence than hunter-gathering. The forest was cleared to make way for a great monotony of fields. In some cases man's influence has been beneficial to wildlife species. White storks nest on towers and chimneys. They forage in ditches and fields. Animals that favour open spaces haven't done too badly. But for the wildlife that depends on the deciduous woodland things have gone from bad to worse. More than 95% of the old forest have disappeared and fragments of it are few and far between. Białowieża in Poland is one such stand of trees and amongst the trees some of the last free-living bison in the whole of Europe and Asia. They're beasts that seem to belong to some prehistoric era and so they do. The bison family has lived in Europe for several million years. The European bison is majestic and powerful and, weighing up to a ton, is the largest land animal in Europe today. The bull bison is larger than the cow with thicker horns and a thicker mane of hair on its head and hump. They're animals of thick forest but do venture out into the forest clearings. In this ancient Polish forest there are many flowers that are uncommon in other younger European and Asian woodlands like Siberian iris, wood cow wheat, marsh geranium and dyer's greenweed. But equally remarkable about the forest is the way that the trees seemingly go up forever. The trees are never cut down and they can grow up to 160 feet high. There's a great range of species, oak, ash, birch, hornbeam, lime, scots pine, spruce and rowan. The birdlife tends to be up in the crowns of the trees. A golden aureole, lower down a thrush nightingale and below a statuesque bison. Bison are members of the cattle family but they are not the ancestors of domestic cattle. It was the wild ox or aurochs which was tamed and domesticated. This species became extinct in 1627 in the wild. Though its domestic descendants lived on of course. The large size and strength of the adults protected the bison groups very successfully against predators until the arrival of man. Then they were hounded out of Europe's forests by the tree fellers and hunters. It was only in North East Poland that one or two groups survived into the 20th century. In 1914 there were just 400 European bison left in the wild. Then in the violence of the First World War soldiers and poachers shot everyone. But fortunately some bison had been sent to zoos elsewhere and in the 1930s several individuals were reintroduced. If the bison families long and checkered history began in Europe and Asia then there is still the question of how the bison's close relative the American buffalo got to America. The answer lies in the frozen north. Over the last 10 million years there have been numerous ice ages. During ice ages large quantities of water that might otherwise be in the sea are locked up as ice in glaciers. Today America and Russia are separated by the waters of the Bering Straits. But during the ice ages with so much water locked up as ice the level of the sea fell exposing the ocean floor across the Bering Straits between Asia and America. This process happened several times. Across the great land bridge of Beringia as it was called walked a host of Asian and European animals including at different times the bison, the beaver and the moose. And this was how they colonized America. The Bering land bridge emerged and submerged on a number of occasions. But it last submerged 10,000 years ago when temperatures increased and much of the glacier ice melted. The sea level rose and the Bering Straits were filled with water. The bison cut off in North America are still very similar to the European variety. The term buffalo should never really have been used. The word buffalo actually describes the African and Indian buffalos which look much more like cattle and lack the characteristic massive head, neck and shoulders of the bison. While the European bison is primarily a forest dweller and browses on trees and shrubs the American buffalo is a grazing animal of the plains. When the buffalo reached the great American prairies there was no stopping them. A few became millions. Then man arrived and began to hunt this sea of meat. The American Indians who had acquired horses from the Spanish conquistadors developed a whole way of life which depended on buffalo meat and skins. They used to drive the buffalo over cliff edges to kill them in large numbers. But it was the European cowboys who really destroyed the American buffalo. Armed with rifles they killed 30 million animals. By 1903 there were just 21 wild buffalo left. Like the European bison the American buffalo had to be rescued from the brink of extinction. It was President Roosevelt himself who created their first refuge in 1905. Today in several national parks the buffalo are beginning to be as thick on the ground as they once were of old on the prairies. In Custer State Park the herds are now so large they're beginning to overgraze the area. In some years the buffaloes have to be rounded up and animals translocated elsewhere. Stampeding buffalo are almost impossible to control. In the old days while the West was being won big herds of buffalo knocked whole railway trains off their tracks. When the buffalo are rounded up they're given a health check and inoculated against disease. Some of the calves will be shipped out to help establish new herds. But the great majority of buffalo are released back to roam the prairie land. Like the cowboys they've come a long way from their European origins. The rivers run slowly through the ancient forest of Białowieża in Poland. That's partly due to the flatness of the central European landscape but there's another factor involved. The beaver family first evolved in the old world of Europe and Asia. Today's descendants are the largest rodents in the continent and they're some of the most skilful engineers of the natural world. They build dams across rivers to make a protective moat around their island castles or lodges which they also construct. Once the beaver lived in almost every European country including Britain. Over the centuries the fur trappers and foresters dismayed at the tree damage have destroyed the beaver in all but seven European countries. Like the bison the beaver family crossed the land bridge from Asia to America and this tells us that the land bridge of Beringia was not just a featureless raised seabed but that it was at one time covered with trees for no beaver ever survived without a diet of wood. To be precise the beaver does not eat wood it eats bark for it is in the bark layer that the protein and nourishment lies but the wood is useful for building and to transport it to the lodge the beaver often excavates a system of canals. Inside the lodge the female suckles her young. The combination of skilful workmanlike hands and chisel sharp teeth enables the beaver to build almost anything with wood. The lodge is ingeniously constructed with impenetrable walls of logs. The exits are underwater and this stops predators coming in to take the young. Scientists have been looking to see exactly what it is that makes beavers build dams and they have discovered that a beaver will generally build a dam where it hears the sound of running water. They found this out by playing tape recordings of a trickling stream by a beaver dam. The result was that the beavers built their dams higher and higher with mud and logs and stones and seemed set to go on forever until one beaver had the bright idea of covering the scientists loudspeaker with mud. Beaver dams have a considerable effect by creating large areas of marshy swamp and in the thickets close by you can find the largest species of deer in Europe. An animal second only in size to the bison. The elk is almost the same size as a horse. It may have originally evolved in Central Asia and then spread westwards to Europe including Britain and north to Scandinavia. The elk then moved east to America where it is known by its American Indian name of moose. The elk is highly mobile and can run at up to 50 kilometres an hour but at this precise moment the bull elk are in the process of the rut. Walking slowly and stiffly indicates aggression to a rival. Elk also thrash bushes and trees during the rut. When night falls on the forest the smaller mammals emerge. A hedgehog searches for insects on the forest floor. A polecat looks for prey. Many of the mammals of the deciduous forests of Europe never made it to America. The climate along the way was just too extreme and the forests of the Bering land bridge were largely evergreen pines and spruce and unsuitable. The polecat and the hedgehog didn't make it and neither did the wild boar. Wild boars depend on deciduous woodland too though they're very adaptable within it. Eating anything from truffles to dead rats. They're looking for acorns and tubers here and plough up the forest floor in the process. When snow covers the ground in this part of Poland the bison often move out of the forest onto the surrounding farms in search of hay and beets. Hunger drives the bison unusually close to the farm buildings. They're often joined by families of wild boar. The bison are totally protected animals but there's a limit to the amount the farmers can be expected to tolerate. So the Polish bison guards put out hay to keep the animals in the forest. More importantly, providing hay stops the bison eating bark and saplings and so prevents the destruction of trees. For the forest is really too small to sustain several hundred bison through the winter. Gone are the days when the great herds could roam throughout the forests of Europe. Large mammals have to be managed if they are to survive. It is during the winter when the bison get used to the forest guards comings and goings that the Polish scientists carry out part of their field work. This involves darting the bison with a tranquilizing drug. It takes a minute or two for the tranquilizer to take effect on such a large animal. The idea is to make this bull identifiable as an individual to the scientists later on. He's marked in three different ways. First of all, an ear tag is attached. Then the number is branded on, using a harmless freezing technique. The branding iron is dipped into liquid nitrogen. Finally, the bison is put on the air. A battery-powered radio transmitter and collar are fitted. The scientists check that the collar is secure, but not too tight. It will transmit for the life of the battery, which is about a year before replacement is necessary. The point of the operation is to follow individual bison throughout the seasons and to answer questions like, how large is a bison's range? Do bison move at night? Is a bull bison solitary or sociable? Once the antidote has been given, the bison will begin to reveal the details of its private life to the Polish scientists. It seems none the worse for the experience. Now the bison is on the air, it'll be possible to track it through the forests of Poland. Bison have even been known to push their way through the border fences into Russia. For us, the answer to the question, when is a buffalo a bison, is when it's in Poland. For the Poles who preserve this ancient forest, the answer is that a buffalo can never be a bison. For them, the Polish bison is unique, an important link with the prehistoric past.