“What national parks are trying to do is present to the Canadian public, and to the world, examples of landscapes, processes and ecosystems that were here when Europeans first arrived,” says Karsten Heuer, who is managing the project for Parks Canada. Up until the late 1800s, an estimated 30 million to 60 million bison lived in North America, including in the Banff region, where a bison skull found buried beneath the Banff townsite was dated at 4,000 years old.

For the first year and a half of the project, the bison — the six bulls and 10 pregnant females who were brought to Banff from Alberta’s Elk Island National Park last February, and now their calves — will be fed and protected within the pasture, which will improve both their chances of survival and their ties to their new home before they’re released as a free-roaming herd in the summer of 2018.

Heuer will oversee their journey. He watched one of the pregnant females labour through a series of spring snow squalls. She alternated between standing up, lying down and writhing on her back in the snow, pawing at her belly until finally her calf slid from her onto the ground.

Within moments another female, a new mother herself, came to help her lick the newborn clean. Soon, the calf struggled to its feet. “In the first 10 minutes it was taking its first steps,” says Heuer. “You could almost see the calf grow into its own skin — the skin of an animal designed to move.” 

Although there are those who have expressed concern about the bison moving out of the park and onto private or provincially managed land once they are released in 2018 (see “Bison beyond Banff’s boundaries” sidebar, page 37), many welcome the idea of the animal returning to the park to wander freely again. Leroy Little Bear is one of them.

The Blackfoot elder has been instrumental in building support for a return of wild plains bison to Alberta, and was a key player in the creation of the Northern Tribes Buffalo Treaty, an agreement that 10 First Nations from Alberta, British Columbia and Montana signed in 2014 and that is in part aimed at restoring the bison to the Northern Great Plains.

“Our culture is very closely tied to the buffalo, both for subsistence and spiritually,” says Little Bear. “Some of our sacred societies, such as the Buffalo Women’s Society and the Buffalo Horn Society, arise from and revolve around our relationship with the buffalo. So when the buffalo were almost exterminated, we became a whole lot less Blackfoot. The beliefs and the stories were still there, but the physical aspect was lost.”

Since then, plains bison have been reintroduced to Blackfoot territory in Montana and now Banff, and Little Bear believes the cultural reconnection has begun. “With this restoration,” he says, “the stories are being reaffirmed.”

The relationship between groups such as the Blackfoot and bison in Banff were literally forged in fire. “The vast majority of fires that shaped this landscape and the age structure of the forest is not due to lightning — it’s due to Indigenous burning,” says Heuer. Historically, Indigenous people ignited fires as they moved out of valleys for the winter. The fires promoted growth come spring, drawing bison and other large mammals that local First Nations hunted.

Parks Canada adopted this ancient practice in 2015, when it burned approximately 865 hectares of meadow in the Panther River Valley in preparation for the bison’s arrival. Over the next three years, an additional 635 hectares of meadow will be burned in the valley, conditions permitting. “We hope that what comes up next spring is a burst of succulent growth that is full of nutrients,” says Heuer. “What we’re doing with meadow-burning is actually mimicking an age-old human relationship not just with bison, but with an entire landscape.”

Before the picture-perfect scene of plains bison roaming across a verdant expanse of meadow unspools in reality, however, there is poop to scoop. And fencing to maintain. And feeding systems to fine-tune. And bison behaviour management to oversee. And the safety of staff to ensure. There are, in fact, dozens of moving parts that Heuer is responsible for, each of which can help determine the project’s success or failure.

Removing patties from the pasture, for instance, helps reduce parasites in the bison population while they’re enclosed in such a small area. It’s not a quick or easy job; bison can defecate up to 12 times per day — no wonder dried patties were such a plentiful fuel source for Indigenous people and early European settlers — and it takes many hours daily to shovel up the pie-sized mounds that dot the pasture. 

Another part of supporting the bison through this early reintroduction phase is feeding them, because there isn’t enough to graze on in their current enclosure. Heuer announces the arrival of alfalfa cubes with bursts from a referee whistle he keeps around his neck, creating an association between the sound and feed. This might prove useful later if the bison need to be lured from one place to another.

The payoff for all this labour is already apparent, even though the bison have been here for less than four months. The great meadow makers are, once again, redefining this landscape, mowing the brush and young evergreens in their paddock and maintaining grasslands that benefit myriad species. Their presence means old relationships forged over thousands of years are picking up where they left off. Earlier in the spring, ravens and magpies pulled shedding winter hair from the bisons’ shoulders to line their nests. Cowbirds, too, have found the bison and are already riding on their backs, feasting on the insects kicked up by their hooves. Over millennia, cowbirds evolved a clever strategy to keep pace with migrating bison — they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, which then raise the cowbird chicks as their own. Even ground squirrels are benefitting, the cropped grasses now too short to allow coyotes to sneak up. In return, the rodents dig holes everywhere, providing the loose, dusty earth bison love to roll in.