Bison reintroduction (a small victory for zoologists)
Imagine an abandoned village, in which only one grandmother remained to live. And she complains to the postman:
- My God, a nightmare, it is necessary to leave from here!
- Why, Grandma?
- Devils come in the evenings! Look in the window! I'm afraid!
The postman did not really understand the devils, so the grandmother was almost hospitalized because of the cuckoo that had gone. But the rumor went wild. Unlike many similar stories, the grandmother of the devils described very accurately, not quite according to the canon, and she could give an orientation according to all the rules of the detective case. She saw them to the slightest hairs on the rotten faces. So they found bison, who decided to walk a little bit out of the aviary. These features gave rise to one of the reintroduced herds.
Just imagine what this window looked out to you at night:
')
In general, when everything around it dies out and ends, one of the coolest modern successes in the animal world is the reintroduction of a bison. Because they were nearly nailed to zero. By 1926, all available bison were successfully shot in the wild, and only 48 animals remained in the zoos on the entire planet, moreover they were Bison bonasus bonasus (lowland). Only one Bison bonasus caucasicus lived to 1925. He was predictably extinct, but came to Valhalla with shaggy Valkyries before that. Because I managed to spawn the calves and pass the genes on.
Today, there are about 7.2 thousand bison on the planet, of which 5 thousand are free-loving. 20% of them are in Russia. On February 21, a new bison accounting started.
UPD: About a share of 20% grinCo believes that this is because we have counted hybrids on purebreds, in fact the proportion is smaller.
The initial reintroduction plan was this: take bison into an open-air cage, then gradually expand it, and then release them after a few years. But the first three, which were brought to the Russian North National Park, did not wait and immediately ran away.
And in the forest, although about them they thought that they were flat. And lost. These were the same devils from grandmother. Here's another hellish face:
They brought two more to them, but these also ran away.
In general, feeding in the region was somehow not puzzled, so the bison calmly ate what they found. And the vegetation there is nutritious. In 2007, there were already 30 goals; 15 more were brought to accelerate from other places. Now there are about 80 of them, but have not done the exact re-counting yet.
But let's start from the very beginning.
This is the "European bison", more precisely, the bull, a relative of the bison. Fluffy and pretty kudlatovy pretty creature, weighing a ton (cows can be about 800 kg). If you scratch him behind the ear, he can quite lead his head and accidentally break your arm. Little bison is very playful and fearful. In adults, the character becomes more serious and cynical, because they understand that with their mass in the forest there is only one problem - the trees. All the rest and all the rest can be passed through.
Since they are not domestic, but very wild, you cannot come close to them. Especially in the open area, because something sudden might come into their head, and they decide to suddenly run off somewhere to the side. If you are not lucky - through you. They are very strong, capable of unexpectedly jumping up to 3 meters in length and taking obstacles up to 2 meters. In herds of matriarchy, and the female may decide that it is necessary to protect the herd. And attack. Enough is not enough, because they run faster than a man and immediately a crowd. But you can hide from a bison grumbling at you behind a tree. They are not very persistent.
They live 23 years, the first calving in 4 years. Cows are reproductive from 3 to 18 years old, bulls c 5 to 15 years old. A bison cow bears a cub of 9 months, the bison is born weighing 24 kilograms. That is, the rate of reproduction is not the highest, but with a good life, the conveyor itself is quite good. Plus, take good care of the cubs.
At the time of the first appearance of bison in the "Kaluga abatis", there were 9 of them (they came from the Orlovskoye Polesye park under their own power and settled down - this is a sore subject for some). Now, after 18 years, there are already about 200 heads, and this year there are 30 calves. Therefore, they are taken to other national parks for a long time.
More precisely, how many of them exactly - it will be clear after accounting. At the preliminary they counted 24 calves and 111 heads in total in broodstock. At the same time, “small mother groups that are very shy at the beginning of winter, as well as adult males, who prefer not to be caught at all by the accountant’s eyes, have not yet arrived at the wintering sites . ”
This is when we soaked someone, then repented and delivered anew either from zoos or from another place where there is a lot of such animals.
For example, they somehow drove musk oxen to Taimyr from Greenland. True, in Taimyr, it was not we who ate the oxen, but they themselves had already smoked something long before the beginning of the industrial era.
The term is applicable to plants too.
One of the problems of reintroduction is that animals lose the necessary adaptive properties, for example, the skills of searching for food collection in the wild, defensive and attacking properties. Therefore, they are often released gradually. With bison, too, so it was planned, but they are quite heavy animals, so it does not always work with an aviary.
The second potential problem is low genetic diversity, because the zoo population is very small.
In the "Kaluga abatis" one of the most successful bison populations in the world. The reserve is such a long narrow forest of 120 kilometers in size.
Herds of bison live in different parts of it. Bulls go much further than the reserve, because the boys generally love to wander around the neighborhood, but cows and young heaps are around the feeding points.
Feeding points are needed not to maintain bison life, but to concentrate them in the reserve (they love cooked food) and to maintain fertility. Fat animals, satisfied with life, come to the hunt more often and reproduce much faster than those who are forced to look for something all day.
Without feeding points, they are quite capable of surviving, but the population in Vologda, for example, has stabilized at about 80 individuals and does not increase much.
There are no predators of the right size and the right skills in the forest. Wolves, in theory, are capable of blocking not the largest beast (there are two flocks in the reserve, 12 and 6 heads), but they simply do not know how. On the other hand, they perfectly learned how to hunt hunting dogs, and switched to beavers, as in other regions. Because there are a lot of beavers, and they are tasty, and after the swine plague there are few boars.
Poachers annoy, of course, but the main peak has passed. A deadly term is given for littered bison anywhere in the country (not only in the reserve), but according to Taras Sipko’s calculations, approximately 75 bison disappeared from the fertile Fibonacci sequence at one of the stages. Comparing with their natural mortality, he believes that about 50 of them were shot.
And here he met him in a village in the middle of the forest. He wrote an excellent history of bison reintroduction in the Caucasus .
By the way, on the border of the reserve there are hunting towers directly close to its borders. This is for other animals that are protected only inside. The administration has been fighting for the buffer zone for a long time, but so far it is not working.
Returning to our healthy mammals - since there is no direct danger now, the number of bison is regulated, in fact, only by their ability to find suitable plants for eating.
This is also very interesting. They themselves increase their food supply. I have already mentioned several times how confidently the sheep, in particular, with their hooves, turn everything around into a desert . The bison has its hoofs too, also cool, but the special effect is different with them. It turns out that forest bison devour cereal feed.
It works like this. A small population of about 20 heads is quite normal feed in the forest. Then they trample a clearing, and there the earth is compacted in comparison with the usual forest. It turns out the glade where turf-like cereals begin to grow. Bison damage trees and eat small ones (because they are tasty). Consequence - clear the whole field in the forest. From this field there is a wide path to the reservoir and other feeding areas.
Just on February 23, while we were in the Kaluga Zaseki reserve, the scientist José Hernandez Blanco (in the photo) was just negotiating with the military unit about air accounting. We also met him in the village. But his beautiful post with a photo prikormochnoy with a copter. It is almost like their natural glade, only here it was created by man.
The population is reintroduced. There is a problem with a small genetic diversity due to the small number of ancestors (which we know well from Stevenson's Semieviyu, only here is the Twelve Subgenera). And close crossing. This is the view of 2011 that bison should be treated by shooting (sorting). There was also an attempt to cross them with bison, and excellent hybrids turned out, only during the Great Patriotic War all were lost. Now there is a new series of bison, more modern.
Accounting for bison is carried out by direct observation from the air (scientists even have a drone, but it helps a little, because the reserve is large, and all must be counted one at a time, otherwise they will move between drone missions and they will be counted twice). They also hung collars with GPS trackers. Taras now generally decorated their ears with orange tags, but the tourists complained that they had to switch to collars. They catch not the oldest bison, shoot him with an ampoule of sleeping pills for a bear (because the sleeping pills are banned by a specialist for bison in Russia), they hope that the dose is selected by visual assessment of the mass correctly, fit, catch the collar (so that the fist goes under outgrowth) and let go. At least once they even sat down, but on the whole they walk in them after a battery exhaustion in a year or two.
Now we got a thermal imager, they say, you can see the places of the paws and litter for some time, and the muzzles are generally well distinguished in the bushes (true, near it all).
In general, things are going. Look for the only mammal of the mammoth fauna that has survived in a relatively unchanged form to us. Before "lived through" could be the word "almost." If it were not for the labor of those who decided to preserve bison in the last century, when the population was in the smallest possible number for reproduction.
That's why bison shows language to skeptics (in fact, not).
- My God, a nightmare, it is necessary to leave from here!
- Why, Grandma?
- Devils come in the evenings! Look in the window! I'm afraid!
The postman did not really understand the devils, so the grandmother was almost hospitalized because of the cuckoo that had gone. But the rumor went wild. Unlike many similar stories, the grandmother of the devils described very accurately, not quite according to the canon, and she could give an orientation according to all the rules of the detective case. She saw them to the slightest hairs on the rotten faces. So they found bison, who decided to walk a little bit out of the aviary. These features gave rise to one of the reintroduced herds.
Just imagine what this window looked out to you at night:
')
In general, when everything around it dies out and ends, one of the coolest modern successes in the animal world is the reintroduction of a bison. Because they were nearly nailed to zero. By 1926, all available bison were successfully shot in the wild, and only 48 animals remained in the zoos on the entire planet, moreover they were Bison bonasus bonasus (lowland). Only one Bison bonasus caucasicus lived to 1925. He was predictably extinct, but came to Valhalla with shaggy Valkyries before that. Because I managed to spawn the calves and pass the genes on.
Today, there are about 7.2 thousand bison on the planet, of which 5 thousand are free-loving. 20% of them are in Russia. On February 21, a new bison accounting started.
UPD: About a share of 20% grinCo believes that this is because we have counted hybrids on purebreds, in fact the proportion is smaller.
The initial reintroduction plan was this: take bison into an open-air cage, then gradually expand it, and then release them after a few years. But the first three, which were brought to the Russian North National Park, did not wait and immediately ran away.
And in the forest, although about them they thought that they were flat. And lost. These were the same devils from grandmother. Here's another hellish face:
They brought two more to them, but these also ran away.
In general, feeding in the region was somehow not puzzled, so the bison calmly ate what they found. And the vegetation there is nutritious. In 2007, there were already 30 goals; 15 more were brought to accelerate from other places. Now there are about 80 of them, but have not done the exact re-counting yet.
But let's start from the very beginning.
Who is this bison at all?
This is the "European bison", more precisely, the bull, a relative of the bison. Fluffy and pretty kudlatovy pretty creature, weighing a ton (cows can be about 800 kg). If you scratch him behind the ear, he can quite lead his head and accidentally break your arm. Little bison is very playful and fearful. In adults, the character becomes more serious and cynical, because they understand that with their mass in the forest there is only one problem - the trees. All the rest and all the rest can be passed through.
Since they are not domestic, but very wild, you cannot come close to them. Especially in the open area, because something sudden might come into their head, and they decide to suddenly run off somewhere to the side. If you are not lucky - through you. They are very strong, capable of unexpectedly jumping up to 3 meters in length and taking obstacles up to 2 meters. In herds of matriarchy, and the female may decide that it is necessary to protect the herd. And attack. Enough is not enough, because they run faster than a man and immediately a crowd. But you can hide from a bison grumbling at you behind a tree. They are not very persistent.
They live 23 years, the first calving in 4 years. Cows are reproductive from 3 to 18 years old, bulls c 5 to 15 years old. A bison cow bears a cub of 9 months, the bison is born weighing 24 kilograms. That is, the rate of reproduction is not the highest, but with a good life, the conveyor itself is quite good. Plus, take good care of the cubs.
At the time of the first appearance of bison in the "Kaluga abatis", there were 9 of them (they came from the Orlovskoye Polesye park under their own power and settled down - this is a sore subject for some). Now, after 18 years, there are already about 200 heads, and this year there are 30 calves. Therefore, they are taken to other national parks for a long time.
More precisely, how many of them exactly - it will be clear after accounting. At the preliminary they counted 24 calves and 111 heads in total in broodstock. At the same time, “small mother groups that are very shy at the beginning of winter, as well as adult males, who prefer not to be caught at all by the accountant’s eyes, have not yet arrived at the wintering sites . ”
What is reintroduction?
This is when we soaked someone, then repented and delivered anew either from zoos or from another place where there is a lot of such animals.
For example, they somehow drove musk oxen to Taimyr from Greenland. True, in Taimyr, it was not we who ate the oxen, but they themselves had already smoked something long before the beginning of the industrial era.
The term is applicable to plants too.
One of the problems of reintroduction is that animals lose the necessary adaptive properties, for example, the skills of searching for food collection in the wild, defensive and attacking properties. Therefore, they are often released gradually. With bison, too, so it was planned, but they are quite heavy animals, so it does not always work with an aviary.
The second potential problem is low genetic diversity, because the zoo population is very small.
What is happening in the reserve now?
In the "Kaluga abatis" one of the most successful bison populations in the world. The reserve is such a long narrow forest of 120 kilometers in size.
Herds of bison live in different parts of it. Bulls go much further than the reserve, because the boys generally love to wander around the neighborhood, but cows and young heaps are around the feeding points.
Feeding points are needed not to maintain bison life, but to concentrate them in the reserve (they love cooked food) and to maintain fertility. Fat animals, satisfied with life, come to the hunt more often and reproduce much faster than those who are forced to look for something all day.
Without feeding points, they are quite capable of surviving, but the population in Vologda, for example, has stabilized at about 80 individuals and does not increase much.
There are no predators of the right size and the right skills in the forest. Wolves, in theory, are capable of blocking not the largest beast (there are two flocks in the reserve, 12 and 6 heads), but they simply do not know how. On the other hand, they perfectly learned how to hunt hunting dogs, and switched to beavers, as in other regions. Because there are a lot of beavers, and they are tasty, and after the swine plague there are few boars.
Poachers annoy, of course, but the main peak has passed. A deadly term is given for littered bison anywhere in the country (not only in the reserve), but according to Taras Sipko’s calculations, approximately 75 bison disappeared from the fertile Fibonacci sequence at one of the stages. Comparing with their natural mortality, he believes that about 50 of them were shot.
And here he met him in a village in the middle of the forest. He wrote an excellent history of bison reintroduction in the Caucasus .
By the way, on the border of the reserve there are hunting towers directly close to its borders. This is for other animals that are protected only inside. The administration has been fighting for the buffer zone for a long time, but so far it is not working.
Returning to our healthy mammals - since there is no direct danger now, the number of bison is regulated, in fact, only by their ability to find suitable plants for eating.
This is also very interesting. They themselves increase their food supply. I have already mentioned several times how confidently the sheep, in particular, with their hooves, turn everything around into a desert . The bison has its hoofs too, also cool, but the special effect is different with them. It turns out that forest bison devour cereal feed.
It works like this. A small population of about 20 heads is quite normal feed in the forest. Then they trample a clearing, and there the earth is compacted in comparison with the usual forest. It turns out the glade where turf-like cereals begin to grow. Bison damage trees and eat small ones (because they are tasty). Consequence - clear the whole field in the forest. From this field there is a wide path to the reservoir and other feeding areas.
Just on February 23, while we were in the Kaluga Zaseki reserve, the scientist José Hernandez Blanco (in the photo) was just negotiating with the military unit about air accounting. We also met him in the village. But his beautiful post with a photo prikormochnoy with a copter. It is almost like their natural glade, only here it was created by man.
Total
The population is reintroduced. There is a problem with a small genetic diversity due to the small number of ancestors (which we know well from Stevenson's Semieviyu, only here is the Twelve Subgenera). And close crossing. This is the view of 2011 that bison should be treated by shooting (sorting). There was also an attempt to cross them with bison, and excellent hybrids turned out, only during the Great Patriotic War all were lost. Now there is a new series of bison, more modern.
Accounting for bison is carried out by direct observation from the air (scientists even have a drone, but it helps a little, because the reserve is large, and all must be counted one at a time, otherwise they will move between drone missions and they will be counted twice). They also hung collars with GPS trackers. Taras now generally decorated their ears with orange tags, but the tourists complained that they had to switch to collars. They catch not the oldest bison, shoot him with an ampoule of sleeping pills for a bear (because the sleeping pills are banned by a specialist for bison in Russia), they hope that the dose is selected by visual assessment of the mass correctly, fit, catch the collar (so that the fist goes under outgrowth) and let go. At least once they even sat down, but on the whole they walk in them after a battery exhaustion in a year or two.
Now we got a thermal imager, they say, you can see the places of the paws and litter for some time, and the muzzles are generally well distinguished in the bushes (true, near it all).
In general, things are going. Look for the only mammal of the mammoth fauna that has survived in a relatively unchanged form to us. Before "lived through" could be the word "almost." If it were not for the labor of those who decided to preserve bison in the last century, when the population was in the smallest possible number for reproduction.
That's why bison shows language to skeptics (in fact, not).
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442032/
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