Everyone’s favourite comeback kid, the American Bison was almost extinct in the late 1800s. Their numbers hovered at a mere 541 individuals when they once covered the American and Canadian wilderness. Herds were once so large they blacked out the plains with population that soared into the millions.

However, the westward push by colonists and their genocidal tactics against the indigenous nations of the Americas, slaughtered this ‘thunder of the plains’. With the extinction of this national animal on the horizon, ranchers, zoos - most famously the Bronx Zoo - and scientists teamed up to breed the American Bison out of an inevitable end. To do this, they developed a system of creating ‘beefalo’ or ‘cattle’, which was a hybrid of domestic cattle and the buffalo that remained.

This system, though it brought the American Bison back from the brink of extinction, never returned them to their once enormous populations. 500,000 remain with only 15,000 living wild as ‘true bison’. Their loss from the plains for so long has devastated native ecosystems along with the infringement of cattle on lands that were once only grazed by the mighty buffalo. However, there is hope in many grassroots organizations that work to revitalize grasslands and grow herds and other native species back to more sustainable sizes.

ARTIST’S NOTE: Every 10th entry will be a ‘Conservation Spotlight’ entry, to prevent this project from being all environmental doom and gloom.