That's cool to see, obiously Fermi has had them as someone else mentioned.<p>I grew up in Kane County, in the 90s it was the edge of the suburban-rural interface of Chicagoland (used to be the last commuter rail stop from the city).<p>Random fun tidbit is the WW1 code-breaking[0] that took place there as well, which today remains an acoustics lab[1].<p>[0]<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220521185943/https://northwestchicagoland.northwestquarterly.com/2018/11/21/codebreakers-on-the-fox-genevas-secret-role-in-world-war-i/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220521185943/https://northwest...</a><p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbank_Laboratories" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbank_Laboratories</a>
There have been bison at Fermilab for some years, but they are just over the border in Dupage County, not Kane County.<p>Kane Country has had cougars for quite a while. :)
The Fermilab herd was always one of the highlights of visiting there. I always thought that was a really good use for the space inside the accelerator, a nice version of nature and science coexisting. I have it in my head that we used to be able to just drive through Fermi to see the Bison (late 80s/90s).<p>More on the bison at Fermi: <a href="https://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/bisoncam/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/bisoncam/</a>
There's a couple dozen at Midewin, too: <a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/midewin/animals-plants/bison-project-homepage" rel="nofollow">https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/midewin/animals-plants/bison-pro...</a>
I honestly thought Fermilab was in Kane. I could see it from my front yard growing up west of Geneva.
Look at that our little midwestern county is on the front page of HN.<p>Are they going to be able to free range, the way we commonly see whitetail deer roaming around the county?
Stuff like this gives a satisfying sense of restoring order. This is the way things were before dramatic human intervention. The ironic part is that the restoration itself requires human intervention. I always find myself wondering what would happen if humans just disappeared overnight. How things are now would be the starting point of the "new natural." Ecosystems probably wouldn't return to the way they were before Europeans arrived; they would proceed along some new pathway. Not least because of how much we've already changed the climate, and the species we've introduced. Then I think about a time 100,000 years after this hypothetical disappearance of humans and picture conservationists of whatever species, aliens maybe, concerned with protecting the indigenous species they found like wild cows, Himalayan blackberry and kudzu, that are now endangered by overdevelopment and global cooling.<p>Anyway it would be really interesting to be able to chart the changes to this microcosm of a prairie ecosystem over thousands of years if there were no human intervention whatsoever.
Wild cows won't really happen, aside from them being easy prey, milk cows can't even feed their young because they produce so much milk that they drown them. They have to feed the babies with a bottle.
More like a managed herd in a fenced paddock. A spring tourist attraction.<p>I wonder how climate change is going to affect the idealistic "restore the ecosystem" plan.
You should read "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman.
Seconded. I was going to say the exact same thing. Brilliant thought exercise that I still think about on a weekly basis 20 years later.
Hah, was just about to write that. Also recommended.
I love American bison and try to eat bison burgers and steak as much as possible to reward the ranchers who choose to raise them over cows.
Unfortunately there are apparently no real true American bison anymore. A sturdy a while ago showed that all American bison in all of North America have varying degrees of cattle DNA. They’re basically all “beefalo”. They are quite different from cattle in many ways, but they aren’t actually really American bison anymore. Those technically are extinct by objective measures, not all that different than if you breed one dog with a different one, the offspring is neither of the parents and also basically nothing at all until some defining characteristics are identified, reproduced and named at least as a sub-breed.
They have less than 2% cattle DNA, sometimes as little as 0.25%. That they were crossbreedable at all though shows they were already highly related.
Bison and beefalo are different animals. Beefalo can't be marketed as either bison meat or beef.
A lot of coyotes are mixed with dogs and wolves too
There are several extant herds that have been genetically tested and proven "pure", although they're the minority
Do you recall anything about where those herds are, because I’ve only seen research showing that all treated herds have identifiable cattle DNA, i.e., <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09828-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09828-z</a>
I was told when I worked at Philmont Scout Ranch [1] that they had a pure herd.<p>Other than that, I know Steven Rinella listed a few pure herds in his (excellent) book [2] on the American Buffalo, but I'd have to dig it out to find them for you.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzyMrBUys90" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzyMrBUys90</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/American-Buffalo-Search-Lost-Icon/dp/0385521693" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/American-Buffalo-Search-Lost-Icon/dp/...</a><p>ETA: <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/wind-cave-bison-genetics.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/wind-cave-bison-genetics.ht...</a><p>"Wind Cave and Yellowstone National Parks are the only two federal herds to have population sizes large enough for sufficient testing. Both herds show no evidence of cattle introgression."<p>So there are at least two
Yellowstone
For a second I read it as a return to Illumos. Some GCC related story.
For you, this is the day that Bison return to Illinois’s Kane County. For the bison, it’s Tuesday.
I’m mad we had a thriving heard in Florida and then they decided to sterilize them.
This is good to see. Also, I didn’t realize until now that Burlington was Kane and not DeKalb!
When you're walking around rural Illinois and you hear music start playing: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72aSGvXeOTs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72aSGvXeOTs</a>
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
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