Romanian bison beat near-extinction
Print Edition
Hoof prints in the mud, tree bark nibbled away: even if the newest residents of Romania’s Carpathian mountain forest shy away from visitors, their traces are there for those who know where to look.
They are signs of the success of a project to reintroduce bison to this region after a centuries-long absence, key to keeping the hairy giants off lists of critically endangered species.
Bison had all but been driven out of Europe by hunting and the destruction of their habitats, but their reappearance in Romania has brought back a key component of the region’s ecosystem.
Under gentle autumn sunshine on the edge of a centuries-old wood, young forest warden Matei Miculescu is on the lookout for members of the Carpathian herd.
The animals can be hard to spot, having been tempted further into the forest by the abundant vegetation and the possibility of extending their habitat.
Miculescu says the animals are thriving in the forest, in contrast to captivity which “creates the risk of inbreeding” and weakens their chances of survival.
Around 6,000 bison, Europe’s largest mammal and a distant cousin of the American buffalo, can be found on the continent. Most are on the Polish-Belarussian border where efforts to revive the population began in the 1950s.
Romania welcomed bison back in 2014 in the southwestern Armenis region, more than 200 years after it was last seen there.
Born in captivity in other parts of Europe — where they had been given names like Kiwi, Bilbo and Mildred — they were transferred to Romania in 16 separate stages.
Thanks to reproduction in the wild, “around 105 bison now live freely in the Tarcu mountains and have settled in well,” says Marina Druga, head of the project led jointly by the WWF and Rewilding Europe.
“In the past two years, there haven’t been any deaths in their ranks,” says Druga, explaining that the goal is to get to a population “of 250 individuals in five years’ time.”
The program is well established: first the animals spend several weeks being re-acclimatized to life in the wild and are only then released and left to fend for themselves.
They can be found making use of around 8,000 hectares in a protected area which stretches over 59,000 hectares.
The southern Carpathians are ideal: “a vast region with a thinly spread human population and no intensive agriculture,” says Wanda Olech-Piasecka from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Since 2014 there have been 38 bison calves born in the area.
“Without them, the project would have no future,” says Miculescu, who recognises each of the creatures by their horns of the color of their fur.
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