Restoring Alaska’s Wood Bison through Dedication and Collaboration

Two wood bison settling into the soft release pen in Minto Flats State Game Refuge.

by Mark Lindberg

I always thought it a bit ironic that people in the wildlife profession, despite choosing a career path working with animals not people, are also some of the most collaborative people when dedicated to a common goal. That collaboration and dedication was on full display when I joined the wood bison restoration team on 26 August for a 40-hour odyssey to transfer 17 bison from the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center (AWCC) in Girdwood to a soft release pen along the Tanana River in the Minto Flats State Game Refuge.

By my count, no fewer than 31 people collaborated on this herculean effort, including staff from the Alaska Departments of Fish and Game (ADF&G) and Natural Resources (ADNR), US Department of Agriculture, and AWCC as well as drivers from Carlile trucking and the tug crew at Ruby Marine.

The soft release pen is a temporary holding area where the bison will spend the winter getting familiar with the landscape and environment. The pen itself represents an amazing five-week collaboration of ADF&G staff and volunteers to erect a two-and-a-half mile-long fence enclosing a 100-acre meadow, and half-mile fenced alley for transferring bison from the barge at the river to the pen. The fencing effort was led by ADF&G biologist Luke Rogers who also led the field effort for the AWCC transfer.

Matt Sweetsir, owner of Ruby Marine, and his son Hank work together to erect a fence
along the ramp that allowed the wood bison to travel from the barge to soft release pen.

The 17 bison on this trip were joining the 41 bison that were transported to the release site from the Large Animal Research Station (LARS) on 29 July through a similar collaboration. The AWCC transfer was done in a fashion similar to the transport in July. Starting at around 9am on
26 August each individual bison was tranquilized, fitted with a radio collar that will provide location data for several years, and transferred to large shipping containers customized specifically for this purpose.

Veterinarians from both ADF&G (Dr. Annette Roug) and AWCC (Dr. Michelle Oakley) monitored the animals during the loading process and Roug accompanied the animals on the rest of their journey. This sounds simple, but some of the larger bulls weighed roughly 1,300 pounds, which
presents some challenges for loading when they are tranquilized.

The entire loading process lasted from about 9am to 5pm and it went largely without a hitch — except for the broken hinge on one of the shipping container gates which ADNR Forestry staff quickly welded back on. After the bison were loaded, Carlile trucking drivers showed up around 8pm and accompanied by ADF&G staff, drove the bison through the night to Ruby Marine in Nenana, arriving about 6am.

Staff at Ruby Marine loaded the bison and other gear onto the barge. The barge left Nenana around 9am, headed down the Tanana River, and arrived at the Minto Flats State Game Refuge site, near the confluence of the Tanana and the Kantishna River, around 3:30pm where captain Matt Sweetsir expertly guided the barge to shore. I was really impressed with the professionalism of the barge staff and the capability of a tug with 1800hp to position the barge in about 1ft of water.

After constructing a fenced ramp off the barge that led to an alley and the release pen, Darren Bruning (Deputy Director of ADF&G and Roug started opening containers around 5pm and releasing bison, which also went mostly without incident except for one stubborn bull who wouldn’t leave his container. Ironically, that bull was in the first container that was opened and after several failed attempts Bruning moved on to the other containers where bison willingly left their pens. Bruning returned to the stubborn bull later and after coaxing him with some alfalfa pellets, he left the barge at around 10pm. The last of the gear was offloaded around midnight completing the 40-hour odyssey.

All the bison were healthy, and the staff held up quite nicely. Bruning was rightfully proud to tell me that they have not lost a single wood bison during transport. This is the sixth major transportation effort moving these large animals to a remote location since 2015, more than 200 animals total, and all have gone smoothly. Each experience helped fine-tune the planning, preparation, and implementation of the transports.

Staff from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the Alaska Wildlife
Conservation Center work together to load a tranquilized wood bison into a loader for
transport to a shipping container. Once moved to the container the tranquilizer was
reversed.

I stayed at the release site until 28 August and watched the AWCC bison quickly settle into their new setting and interact with the bison from LARS. Rogers will camp at the enclosure through the winter and shepherd the herd until their planned release into the wild in the spring 2025.
Although there is much support for the wood bison restoration project, and several successful plains bison herds in Alaska, there are also some reasonable concerns about the prospects for success, which for now is defined as the establishment of self-sustaining populations. “The effort to establish a new wood bison population is an experiment that stands to benefit bison conservation and create a valuable renewable resource for people,” said Lead Wood Bison Project Biologist Tom Seaton.

No one is certain why wood bison disappeared from Alaska less than 200 years ago and if the conditions that led to their extirpation still exist. Most scientists believe that Interior Alaska habitats are becoming more grassland dominant rather than forests especially post-burn, which should favor grazers like wood bison. One thing that isn’t in question is the dedication of those working to restore wood bison.

This story first appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner in Sept. of 2024.