06/17/2026
🦬 Wildlife Wednesday: Extirpated edition 🦬
This week's species: American Bison (Bison bison)
Picture bison roaming free in New York. Hard to imagine now, but it happened, and not as long ago as you might think.
Before European colonization, the bison's range stretched from the Great Plains all the way to the Atlantic Seaboard, reaching as far north as New York and south to Georgia, with some accounts placing them near the Catawba River in North Carolina as late as 1750. Historical records point to herds in central New York, including areas near Onondaga Lake, and bison sign in western NY too (it's part of why the city of Buffalo carries the name it does).
So what happened? The same story of so many extirpated species: unregulated hunting for meat and hides, plus rapid habitat loss as colonists cleared forests and grasslands for farms. By the mid 1700s, the bison's run in the New York was over.
Here's the New York twist to the bison's survival story: the Bronx Zoo played a role in saving the species from extinction. In 1905, the American Bison Society was founded there, with Zoo director William T. Hornaday as its first president. Just two years later, the Society shipped 15 Bronx Zoo bison out to Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains, the first wildlife reintroduction in North American history, kicking off a decades-long effort that helped pull the species back from the brink.
Today, bison are no longer wild in New York, though there is a heard of over 80 bison roaming on Onondaga Nation land in a 250 acre ranch. The animals you can see at places like the Bronx Zoo or on private farms upstate are part of managed conservation herds or raised as livestock, not a free-roaming, self-sustaining population. One of the most iconic animals of the American West once grazed where Central New York farms and forests stand today.
Learn more! ⬇️
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bison/bison-facts.htm
https://www.wcs.org/films/bison-homecoming
Photo Credit: Larry Master, Master Images https://www.masterimages.org/home.html
