USA 2007
18000 km in 70 days
 

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I was always fascinated by Bisons. Now I have met them in reality. They have been 3 feet beside our car in the Yellowstone National Park. That was a great adventure. But they are very dangerous and you should keep your distance and not annoy them. Very dangerous are female bisons with baby bisons. In our case we have been in the car and the bisons have accepted the cars and the traffic. When we left the car we had a larger distance. They can run with 30 km/h speed.

We visited Yellowstone in August 07 as a part of our large trip in the USA. We visisted many National Parks, but Yellowstone and Badland National Park are the only one with bisons. In the Wet Mountains in Colorado I saw hundreds of  bisons behind fences on huge farms. The farmers raise them for meat. In Keystone we had for dinner buffet and I could eat a bison steak, stew and burgers. Delicious!

I am very happy that the bison is back, because a century ago there have not been many of them anymore. The Indians have only killed them to survive in the wilderness. The white man has killed almost all of them. Only a few could survive. Today they are back and in the US and Canada are a few herds.

For me this animal is a symbol of power and strength. In many old stories about Indians we find descriptions and in Kevin Costners movie "Dancing with the Wolfes" the main actors are bisons.
 

Bison (sometimes referred to as the Prairie Cow) is a taxonomic group containing six species of large even-toed ungulates within the subfamily Bovinae. Only two of these species still exist: the American Bison (B. bison) and the European Bison, or wisent (B. bonasus).

In American Western culture, the bison is commonly referred to as "buffalo"; however, this is a misnomer. Though both bison and buffalo belong to the same family, Bovidae, the term 'buffalo' properly applies only to the Asian Water Buffalo and African Buffalo. The gaur, a large, thick-coated ox found in Asia, is also known as the Indian Bison, although it is in the genus Bos and thus not a true bison.

The American and European bison are the largest terrestrial mammals in North America and Europe. Like their cattle relatives, bison are nomadic grazers and travel in herds, except for the non-dominant bulls, which travel alone or in small groups during most of the year. American bison are known for living in the Great Plains. Both species were hunted close to extinction during the 19th and 20th centuries but have since rebounded, although the European bison is still endangered.

Unlike the Asian Water Buffalo, the bison has never really been domesticated, although it does appear on farms occasionally. It is raised now mostly on large ranches in the United States and Canada for meat. Wild herds are found in Yellowstone, Utah's Antelope Island, South Dakota's Custer State Park, Alaska, and northern central Canada (see Wood Bison).

Bison live to be about 20 years old and are born without their trademark "hump" or horns. With the development of their horns, they become mature at two to three years of age, although the males continue to grow slowly to about age seven. Adult bulls express a high degree of dominance during mating season.

On March 16, 2007, 15 American bison were re-introduced to Colorado to roam where they did over a century ago. A herd of 15 bison has been established in the 17,000-acre (69 km²) Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, a former chemical weapons manufacturing site.  (Source: WIKIPEDIA)