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Bison bison
This is a very large bovid with dark brown hair and heavier wooly fur on the front quarters, neck and head. Have short hooking horns. Bulls may weigh as much as 3000 pounds, cows considerably less. Calves are reddish brown.
Bison once ranged across what would become the United States and Canada. They lived in varied habitat from open plains (from which they are best known), to savanna and heavier forest in the eastern United States. This particular animal is a plains bison, which is slightly smaller than its more northerly cousin, the woods bison. They may have been, at one time, the most common grasslands ungulate in the world. Estimates range from 20 to 60 million of these animals once roamed the western prairies of the US and Canada.
We ran across this big bull along with several others at the edge of Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park in South Dakota, USA.
Spotted on Sep 16, 2006
Submitted on Apr 28, 2011
4 Comments
It's great country, isn't it? I've always been a fan of prairies, especially in late afternoon or evening when shadows start to spread across the rolling hills and temperatures start to get more comfortable. Plus the wildlife can be plentiful and varied, skies dramatic, and storms simply awesome.
I haven't been to South Dakota and Wyoming since age 18; makes me miss it a lot!
I've not. White bison calves are sometimes born, but most of them turn dark as they go through annual shedding processes. There have been a few white bison that remained that way into adulthood, but those are extremely rare.
i love 'em...did you ever take a shot of a great white buffalo? ;)