The stern bison is beautiful and mighty, striking in its size and power. Once upon a time, large herds of these animals roamed freely in the Caucasus Mountains, harming no one …
Bison lived calmly, slowly moving from place to place, eating juicy grass. The old horned bulls watched vigilantly to see if some stupid calf had strayed from the herd, if a predator was waiting for females with cubs behind the bushes. But everything is calm around, hardly anyone dares to attack such strong animals. Local residents sometimes hunted bison, but they did not cause much damage to the herd, they took as much as they needed for life, no more.
Extermination of bison
But trouble came. After the end of the Caucasian War of 1864, settlers poured into the foothills. A fierce hunt for bison has begun. The animals were constantly exterminated, not recognizing any rules, even females with cubs were shot in the spring. The number of bison was rapidly decreasing.
A small part of the individuals fled for some time in the Velikoknyazheskaya Kubanskaya Okhota nature reserve. Although hunting for bison was prohibited in Russia, the animals continued to be mercilessly destroyed. Even the creation of the Caucasian State Bison Reserve in 1924 did not save the day. In 1927, the last bison were killed by poachers on Mount Alous. So the Caucasian mountain subspecies was completely wiped off the face of the earth through the fault of man …
The return of bison to the Caucasus
Scientists undertook a search, hoping that a few animals survived, but to no avail. In Europe, the situation was also not happy, the bison was exterminated and there almost completely, only a few dozen individuals remained in zoos.
In the middle of the century, work began to restore the population of the species. But in its pure form, such an animal was nowhere to be found. In the Askania-Nova reserve there were hybrids of bison and bison, the population was also restored there. But they had a short snout and a more massive front. Fortunately, these species are closely related and produce offspring capable of procreation.
In the summer of 1940, four females and one male were moved to the Caucasian Reserve. They perfectly settled down and adapted to the mountainous terrain and gave birth to offspring that occupied an empty ecological niche.
For a long time, selection was carried out to breed an animal that outwardly almost indistinguishable from the exterminated subspecies. Bison females were artificially fertilized with the sperm of Belarusian-Caucasian males until the percentage of bison blood decreased to 6%.
Currently, the reserve is home to over a thousand bison. This is an excellent result of the hardest and painstaking work of scientists, breeders, livestock specialists, foresters, gamekeepers. The artificially bred mountain bison (this is the name of this subspecies) is morphologically almost indistinguishable from the aboriginal who lived here for hundreds of years.
Wikipedia mentions the names of people who have dedicated their lives to saving bison. H. G. Shaposhnikov, B. K. Fortunatov, S. G. Kalugin, K. G. Arkhangelsky and many others. Thanks to them, the mighty bison again graze freely on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.
