BANFF — As the final preparations are being made to bring plains bison back to Banff National Park, one of the world’s top experts on the animal says they will immediately change the environment in the area once they return.
Wes Olson, who has more than 30 years of experience working with bison, gave a talk Friday at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff on the ecological effects of having bison on the landscape.
“Bison are considered a keystone species,” he said in an interview prior to his speech. “The term keystone is a masonry term. If you visualize it as a stone arch in a fireplace or a door, it’s always a wedge-shaped stone at the top — that’s the keystone. If you take the keystone out of that arch, the entire structure collapses.
“In wildlife ecology, there are species that are keystone species. If you take them out of the system, the system collapses. Bison are a keystone species. They have an inordinate effect on every other species that live there.”
Officials with Banff National Park are planning to reintroduce bison to a paddock by January or February 2017, before they are released into a 425-square kilometre, partially fenced backcountry area called the Panther Valley on the eastern edge of the park.
The Panther Valley in Banff National Park.
Some ranchers and landowners still aren’t convinced by the plan, but it has received support from First Nations and conservationists.
“The bison restoration in Banff has always been based on three pillars: the cultural values, the historical values and the ecological values,” said Marieve Marchand, co-ordinator of Bison Belong, a group advocating for the return of native plains bison to the national park.
Plains bison roamed freely in the Rockies and along the Eastern Slopes for thousands of years, filling an important need for the lives and livelihoods of First Nations people and early pioneers until the 1880s when they disappeared.
As a result, they are an iconic part of Canadian history.
Bison are also known as ‘ecosystem engineers,’ playing an important role on the landscape to maintain meadows and grasslands that other animals depend on.
“Wes is an expert on keystone species’ relationship with the landscape,” said Marchand. “It’s just amazing, the relationship.”
By reintroducing bison in Banff, they will once again play that keystone role — and impact everything from bugs and birds to ungulates such as deer and elk to the wolves and bears that prey on the large mammals.
Olson, who’s helping with the Banff reintroduction, said the effects for birds and bugs will be almost immediate.
“Bison have the second-warmest natural hair in any North American animal, next only to the muskoxen, and they shed it in great quantities in the spring,” he said. “It’s landing on the ground at almost exactly the same time that migratory songbirds are returning so that means that birds, for hundreds of years, have been lining their nests with shed bison hair.
“There’s been research that has shown a 30 per cent increase in egg (and chick) survival in nests lined with bison hair versus not.”
Olson said he saw an example of the relationship when he was involved with a bison reintroduction in Alaska in the spring of 2015.
“Within 15 minutes of the bison arriving at the site, birds were flying over top,” he said. “And already they’ve found bison hair in the bird nests up there.”
Olson said that the bison dung is also important for both bugs and birds.
“There’s a tremendous amount of insects that use it,” said Olson, noting as many as 300 species of insects will live in one bison patty and 1,000 individual insects will occupy that same patty from the time it’s deposited to its removal.
The increase in insects — such as dung beetles — also feeds birds.
The dung also provides nutrients for the grass production, which benefits ungulate species such as elk and deer.
A plains bison bull in Elk Island National Park.
“As bison move through the landscape and start to change the vegetation in their grazing area with their dung, then other species like elk and deer and bighorn sheep follow along behind and benefit from the changes that the bison create,” he explained.
Olson said all of it could occur within days and weeks of the bison being allowed to roam in Banff National Park.
“In a place like Banff that hasn’t had a lot of high-density grazing for awhile, these patches grow up faster and more succulent than the grass around it,” he said.
In fact, he said he couldn’t think of one negative impact by having bison reintroduced — despite the concerns of nearby ranchers who have expressed worries that the bison won’t stay within the boundaries of the national park and could compete with their livestock.
“Wherever there are free roaming bison, there’s virtually no conflict with cattle … they don’t interact with them,” said Olson, noting there’s a herd of free-roaming bison in Prince Albert National Park that has been managed with the help of a stewardship group.
Banff, he said, is looking to create a similar group to help reduce any potential conflicts with landowners.
Wildlife officials in Banff National Park have said they will also use fencing and natural barriers to discourage bison from leaving the area, and fit some of the bison in the herd with GPS collars to allow them to track their movements on a regular basis.
Olson said every new bison population, which now includes 70 plains bison herds publicly managed for conservation across North America, adds to the overall recovery of the species.
“Bison reintroductions to the wild are incredibly important,” he said, noting it helps bison, re-establishes the ancient connection with bugs and birds, and helps restore the grasslands they live on.
They expect to see similar results in Banff National Park in 2017, he said.
Olson was brought to the Whyte Museum by the Network in Canadian History and Environment, which is gathered in Banff this weekend as part of its annual field school for Canada’s environmental historians.
“It seemed like a great opportunity to bring together the group in Banff before the bison are reintroduced and turn back and look at how Banff has developed as an iconic park,” said George Colpitts, a history professor at the University of Calgary.
“With bison coming back, we’ll see visitors start to understand a different story of the park.”
