Checked out some laws on shipping a ranch buffalo skull to japan and the only thing covered is the wood bisen.what is the difference between the wood bisen and the buffalo on the huntung ranches?2 different animals?Thanks
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Look up Bison on the google search and check out Bison bison. There are only two main species of bison on the planet: The European Wisent, Bison bonasus and the American, or Plains Bison, Bison bison.
Free ranging bison only occur at Wood Buffalo National Park, NWT, Canada and Yellowstone National Park, USA. The term "woods bison" generally refers to those free-ranging animals at the Canadian Buffalo Range. There may be a sub-specific named after someone's cousin, but you would have to research to locate it.
I would assume that buffalo from captive herds can be shipped and that the animals from the Yellowstone and Canadian herds are regulated. It would be best to check out the CITES specifics and USFWS regulations.
Hi.Im not sure of the U.S regs but here in Aust i need a cities permit as they are listed on cities two.even thou there are thousands ranched.it may be do to the wild heards being not so common in the U.S also wood bison are in Europe.Anyway they can be shipped with permits i currently have one comming from canada .check cities first.Hope i have helped.
There are 3 sub-species of buffalo (Bison) The plains buffalo,bison bison bison, the Woods buffalo,Bison bison athabaca Rhoads, and the Eastern buffao, Bison bison pennsyvanicus. Some mammalogists distinguish a fourth race,the mountain bison, Bison bison haningtoni Figgins which was peculiar to the mountains of Colorado.The eastern race of Pennsyvania,Maryland, and Virginia were extinct by 1815.
The fate of the buffalo in Canada parallels that of the buffalo in the US.Where thousands roamed the country near Calgary,not one remained by the turn of the century.Far to the North, near Great Slave Lake, a small isolated herd of wood buffao remained. A reasonably successful attempt to re-establish the plains buffalo between 1906 and 1912. The buffalo in Woods Natl Park are descentants
of this attempt.
This is quotes from the New Hunter's encyclopedia.
the Woods Bison was at one point described as Bison Canadensis, and being described as smaller than the Plains Bison, Bison Bison. Check with your local taxonomist to verify, they're the ones responsible for all the name changes. You might want to also consider digging into some older literature on the subject, such as information printed prior to 1960.
Glen, I think you have it backwards. The woods bison was larger. Read the following, a copy from the web site.
The North American wood buffalo, Bison bison athabascae, commonly exceeded its plains cousin in size, with bulls exceeding twenty-five hundred pounds and cows weighing in at sixteen hundred pounds. Formerly, the wood buffalo inhabited much of the montane regions of North America. The wood buffalo's traditional habitat ran from the Great Slave Lake in Canada south along the spine of the Rockies into northern Mexico. From East to West, the wood buffalo roamed the foothills of the Front Range, spilling over into the great river valleys of the Rockies, across the Continental Divide, and into the varied habitats of the Great Plateau, the Southwest, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Rim states. In 1872 the territorial legislature enacted legislation to regulate the hunting of mountain bison (i.e. wood buffalo), however, the animal was, by that time, all but extinct in Montana. Today, many authorities argue that the wood buffalo as a unique sub-species is extinct, as the last pure-bred population, the herd at Canada's Wood Buffalo National Parks, was cross-bred with plains bison in the 1920s.
The mountain men knew the wood buffalo as the mountain bison, with, it seems, good reason. The wood buffalo often wintered in the open ranges and river bottoms along the foothills, moving up into the meadows and high valleys of Rockies during the spring and summer months. There are documented cases of mountain bison negotiating a twelve-thousand-foot pass near Pikes Peak, Colorado, during their migrations to and from summer pastures. Skeletal remains of mountain bison, in context demonstrating that the animals were alive at the time the remains were deposited, have been found in Wyoming's Medicine Bow Range at altitudes in excess of 11,500 feet.
I said that was from memory! I must be loosing memory function with age, I had frog tympanums reversed on the sexes recently also. BUT I do distinctly remember Canadensis as a species and not as a sub-species in old literature. I have to go feed and water some hoof critters at this time, BUT I will come back to this post.
Glen
Hey,Glen.
I have those problems too. I think they are called "Senior Moments.
you're trying to make it sound as if I'm a candidate for Depends.
I could not make up my mind if I saw a yellow or red flag with the vagueness of the initial post. The common name Woods Bison is what caused my ears to come to a point. Common names can get a person in trouble.
When the Endangered Species Act was first implemented, one of the guys I used to run around with was THEE FIRST person to get busted. Needless to say, his trial (10 days) set the first precedents. All charges against him that were presented publically in print, were based on common names. They had enough charges filed against him I thought he wouldn't get out of the big house until he was old enough to wear Depends.
I do not remember all the counts for what, as to what was involved, but I do remember the charge of possesion of an Eastern Cougar being one. I am thinking there were other charges along such lines as the cougar charges. Regardless, it took an expert witness to get most of the charges thrown out. The Eastern Cougar had already been extinct for years. Probably every one has already got my point.
He did have to serve time in the big house for six months (he was released on parole) for possesion, interstate transport and sale of an American Alligator. If I could remember the year (another senior moment), I could tell you if we were even old enough to vote at the time.
Shortly after that a guy by the name of Bronson starting getting hammered with charges. Bronson had an attorney for his first two or three trials, but Bronson was a sharp cookie, and after that took up legal matters as his own defense. He was the first to start getting a little more clarity on the books on the subject of endangered species. He was able to prove that in many cases of endangered species that the captive populations were greater than those existing in the wild. The obvious here being that protected captive populations could well prevent the extintion of a species in event of natural disaster.
There is a growing number of bison farmers in this area. I was talking to one of them not too long ago. The Woods Bison term came up in that conversation also. Apparently the Woods Bison is being viewed as a different species amongst that crowd also.
Protecting endangered species is a huge and ambitious project, and as far as I am concerned, has great merit. However, since initial implementation, species have came on and gone off the list.
I would have to have a lot more clarity on this subject of Woods Bison before I would get involved in an international sale. The last I knew, it was still illegal to shoot buffalo from a moving train. In other words, if the laws were never brought up to date on possesion or sale, a person could find themself in violation. Call me old fashioned, but I would not want to build my defense off of something down-loaded from the internet. I want it on paper, with official looking seals and every thing.
the info guys.I learned quite a bit.
You guys are confusing race with species. Some jerk off comes along and hangs a sub name on a critter and all of a sudden it becomes a sub-species. The sad thing is that many folks buy into it for what reason I have no clue. Perhaps it is a researchers way of getting his or her hands on funding.
The taxonomic criteria for sub-specifics is pretty loose, but basically the standard for a species is so established by assigning the genus name to the specific. An example is Bison bison, where the genus is Bison and the standard for the American mammal is bison. During the 18th and 19th centuries, taxonomists and mammalogists raced across the US naming a hell of a lot of critters after old professors, in-laws and friends in some sort of contest to see who could find the most species.
The European bison may be called the "wods" bison by some, but the correct name for the critter is the Wisant.....why, I do not know. When creatures have names like Bison bison bison, it is usually redundant and only used to indicate that there are some hair splitters sitting around somewhere trying to justify a "new" race of the specific.
I personally seldom buy into that argument, and have many biologist associates who agree. When I prepared a list of the mammals of the Arkansas Prairie Counties, I found a previous list, compiled in the 19th century by a taxonomist who spent just three days in the region during a train stop over. One reptile he listed was listed as a sub-species due to it's blue stripes. The snake, a prairie garter snake, had blue instead of yellow dorsal stripes. I caught one and kept it in captivity long enough that it shed. When it shed the old skin, the stripe was the same ochre yellow as in all other similar snakes. The blue coloration came from some effect of the tannin in the water in that region, and was not due to skin pigmentation.
Another time, the irridescent earth snake of Indo-China was listed as a carrion feeder by the famous Schmidt and Inger of the Field Museum Staff. When I ran the MACV Serpentarium in Vietnam, we had a fair number of the snakes in captivity. They all ate live prey. Mostly sparrows and other reptiles and amphibians. Their skin is a rich, irridescent oily blue/black. Their tail tip is bright orange. The species used the tail as a lure to capture prey. They would burrow under loose leaves and other detrius with the tail exposed. The head would stick out just past the eyes. When a bird or other prey was attracted to the lure, a quick strike would procure dinner.
I visited those hallowed herpetologists and asked why the snake was listed as a carrion feeder. I was told that the museum had never had a live speciman, and only housed seven wet specimens. They found birds in the stomachs and assumed that such a slow terrestial snake could not catch a live bird. When they saw our films, they said, "damn" but they never changed the text.
Another example is of certain tropical fishes. Four leading taxonomists list one type of fish as belonging to from two to eight genera with from 14 to 38 species. I like the guy who decided on the two genera and 14 species. He is my kind of guy.
If those fish became a topic on the forum, four individuals could cite four taxonomists and argue till the heaven's fell about the number of genera and species in the group.
Whether there are four species or one species of bison in North America is a moot point. Speculation based on weights and measures of the bison on the Wood reservation has little to do with the wild bison of the plains, since they were discovered and studied after the millions of other bison were eradicated by our ancestors. Too often, when one finds the light at the end of the taxonomy tunnel, it is a candle burning on a thin manuscript that resulted in the study of just one or two individual specimens or the remains thereof.
As a man of science, I have little faith in the hair splitters. I have lived too long and studied or read too much to put a lot of faith in their works.
There IS a genetic difference between the Wood Bison (Bison Bison Athabascae and the Plains Bison (Bison Bison Bison) and the European Bison or Wisent (Bison Bison Bonasus). You might check out http://www.cws-scf.ec.gc.ca/cws-scf/es/bison_e.pdf to learn more. I was fortunate enough to be able to hunt Wood Bison in the Yukon Territory last February and John J. Jackson III of Conservation force is now trying desperately to get the thing into the country for me. You should, however, have no trouble exporting a plains bison skull from the US and even if it was an older pre-endangered species act (this is the only thing really complicating the Wood Bison issue) Wood Bison skull, I also doubt you would have trouble exporting it since CITES upgraded the Wood Bison from endangered to threatened in 1997 I believe. Japan should have no trouble with the importation of either sub-species.
Good luck and feel free to email me if you have any questions.
John Saelvurakis