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NYC – Bronx – Bronx Zoo: Bison Range
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William T. Hornaday, the first director of the Bronx Zoo, had a deep interest in the American bison and chose to make them the first conservation success story in the zoological society’s history. Once numbering 50 million in North America, bison had been decimated by hunting and westward expansion. In October 1899, Hornaday acquired bison Bronx Zoo and began to build the zoo herd. In 1905, with fewer than 1,000 American bison left in the wild, NYZS sponsored the founding of the American Bison Society at the Bronx Zoo’s Lion House. With Hornaday as the bison group’s president, the organization was instrumental in securing national protection for the bison and rangeland for the establishment of new herds. In 1907, 15 of the Bronx Zoo bison were shipped to Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountain Preserve. Subsequently, bison were provided for other refuges in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Gradually, the western herds grew and the bison population rebounded. Many of today’s bison in the western U.S. are descendents of those Bronx Zoo animals shipped at the turn of the 20th century.
In Western culture, the bison is commonly referred to as buffalo, but this is a misnomer. Although belonging to the same family, Bovidae, true buffalo are native only to Africa and Asia. Only two species of the genus bison still exist: the American Bison and the European Bison. They are the largest terrestrial mammals in North America and Europe.
American bison’s two subspecies are the Plains Bison (Bison bison bison), distinguished by its smaller size and more rounded hump, and the Wood Bison (Bison bison athabascae), distinguished by its larger size and taller square hump. Bison inhabited the Great Plains of the United States and Canada in massive herds, ranging from the Great Slave Lake in Canada’s far north to Mexico in the south, and from eastern Oregon almost to the Atlantic Ocean. Like their cattle relatives, bison are nomadic grazers and travel in herds,
Bison have a shaggy, dark brown winter coat, and a lighter weight, lighter brown summer coat. They can reach up to 2 6½ ft tall, 10 ft long and weigh 900 to 2,000 pounds. Biosn live to be about 20 years old and are born without their trademark "hump" or horns, which develop at maturity at around two to three years of age.
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The Bronx Zoo, located within the Bronx Park, is the largest metropolitan zoo in the United States, comprising 265 acres of parklands and naturalistic habitats and home to over 4,000 animals. Focused on conservation, it opened on November 8, 1899, with 22 exhibits, 843 animals. The zoo’s origins date back to 1895, with the establishment of the New york Zoological Society (NYZS), renamed Wild Conservation Scoiety (WCS) in 1993. Only the outer structure of the World of Reptiles remains much as it was in 1899. With the 1941 opening of African Plains, the Bronx Zoo was one of the first U.S. zoos to move away from cages and exhibit animals in naturalistic habitats.
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