We’re on our way to the National Bison Association meetings in Denver, Colorado. Kathleen being a Western Bison Association board member, we’re obligated to attend the Thursday board meeting where Kathy will be brilliant, and Michael will try to keep his mouth shut. The thrust of this years meeting is petitioning the US Fish and Wildlife to delist Woods bison from the Endangered Species Act. Why? Recent genetic research has shown woods bison and plains bison to be the same crittur. Woods bison, living where they do in Northern Alberta look slightly different than Plains bison living in, say, Oklahoma. These are what we call phenotypic differences. And, amazingly, if you move plains bison from Oklahoma to northern Alberta, after about 5 or six generations, guess what? Yep. The begin to look a lot like “woods” bison. It all makes sense if you think about it. Prior to the arrival of the white guys, buffalo ranged all over North America, clear up into Alaska. And, believe us, those four feet work just fine. From the Peace River down to the Gulf of Mexico there were no barriers to gene flow–mating–between moving populations of buffalo. Yukon buffalo mated with Alberta buffalo who mated with Montana, buffalo and so on down to Texas. It was only when biologists in the early Twentieth Century began to study them, that a distinction was made because, well, buffalo in Alberta look different from buffalo in Texas. So why should the US Fish and Wildlife manage woods bison differently from their plains cousins? We’re hoping that the National Bison Association will join the Western in our petetion to have the woods buffalo delisted.