2012-9 Remembrances Special EditionCity of Schertz Remembrances Publication Special Edition 2012-9
Presented by: Schertz Historical Preservation Committee
Historic Preservation of Another Sort – South Meets North in Mutual Effort
to Save the Buffalo (Source: St. Paul Minnesota Pioneer Press, Aug. 12, 2012)
Once teetering on the edge of extinction, prairie grasslands of Minnesota’s Blue Mounds State Park in Luverne, Minnesota are now the home of Minnesota’s only public bison herd. The herd
consists of nearly 100 animals but conservationists are hoping to see the heard grow to nearly
500. This is a far cry from the millions of bison that our European ancestors recorded seeing on the North American prairie before the population began decreasing in about the 1700s. In the span of 150 years 99 percent of the bison population in the United States was gone. By the late 1880s, the U.S. bison population was down to 200. Today, the U.S. has more than 500,000
bison, most of them privately owned. Canada has about 200,000.
What saved the bison from extinction was the work of a handful of ranchers who kept small herds of animals on private lands. Over time, ranchers began breeding the bison with cattle to produce something less that pure blooded bison. Today, the descendants of this cross breeding
carry a little less than one percent of cattle genes.
In the State of Minnesota, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Minnesota Zoo have begun a project that seeks to preserve and conserve the bison genetic line by ridding the Blue Mounds herd of its foreign cattle linage. If successful, this would return the bison herd to a
pure linage. The conservationists refer the resulting animal population as the “metapopulation.”
Collaborating with the Minnesota DNR is Dr. Jim Deer, PHD and Texas A&M Professor of Genetics at College Station, Texas. Dr. Deer and his team at A&M were called upon by the DNR to perform laboratory tests of blood and hair samples from 26 bison of the Blue Mound
herd to identify which might have cattle genes. Only one of the tested population was
discovered to have cattle genes. These results will assist the DNR in determining which bison should mate with each other to eventually produce the “metapopulation.” Dr. Deer’s team is also engaged in determining bison genetics by identifying the species DNA sequence for all its genes. The latter determination will, once and for all, establish the difference between cattle and bison
genes.
The Minnesota DNR hopes to eventually return pure breed bison populations to existing State of Minnesota park lands and to additional land within the state where bison once roamed freely.