WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BUFFALO?

• Buffalo (bison) are the heaviest land animals in North America. Their average weight is 725 kilograms (1,598 lbs).
• Buffalo stand 1.5 to 2 metres (5–6.5 feet) tall at the shoulder3 and are 2 to 3.5 metres (6.6–11.5 feet) long.
• Buffalo have an average life span of 20-40 years.
• Both the male buffalo (bull) and female buffalo (cow) have a large head, scraggly beard, and sharp, curved horns that can grow to be 61 centimetres (2 feet) long.
• Buffalo can jump vertically up to 1.8 metres (6 feet) and are able to turn quickly and change direction to fight predators.
• They can run up to 65 kilometres (40 miles) per hour for as for as 0.4 kilometres (0.25 miles).
• Buffalo are good swimmers. They float easily, and their head, hump and tail stay above the surface of the water.
• Though buffalo have poor eyesight, their hearing and sense of smell are excellent. Buffalo can smell another animal from about 3 kilometres away.
• Buffalo have a winter coat so thick and well insulated that snow can cover their backs without melting.
• A buffalo’s hump is made up of muscle supported by long vertebrae. The strength of these muscles allows them to use their heads like a snowplow when looking for food in winter.
• Buffalo travel far and wide to graze, moving continuously to feed on plains grasses, herbs, shrubs, and twigs as they roam. They regurgitate their food and chew it as cud before digestion.
• Cows lead family groups of buffalo as they roam to graze. For most of the year, the bulls stay on their own or in small groups, but they rejoin the herd during mating season.
• Buffalo eat early in the morning and late in the afternoon, but they are mostly active at dusk and nighttime. During the day, they rest, chew their cud or wallow in dirt.
• Buffalo break up the soil with their hooves, which helps many plant and animal species to flourish.
• Grizzly bears, grey wolves, and cougars still prey on North American buffalo.
• Buffalo are one of the most dangerous animals in North America. In Yellowstone National Park in the United States, three times more people are killed by buffalo than by bears.
• Fossils show that Yellowstone National Park is the only place in the United States that buffalo have lived continuously since prehistoric times.
• For nearly 6,000 years, Indigenous Peoples of the North American plains hunted buffalo by stampeding them over a cliff at Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada.
• An estimated 30 to 50 million buffalo once ranged from northern Canada to northern Mexico, and across the Great Plains from eastern forests to the western Rocky Mountains.
• Loss of habitat due to extensive settlement, the introduction of rifles, and unregulated hunting for buffalo hides and sport deprived Indigenous Peoples of their most important natural asset. To survive, most Indigenous Peoples signed treaties that forced them onto reserves. By 1889, the buffalo population had been reduced to only about 1,100.
• There are approximately 400,000 buffalo in North America today. Only 20,000 are considered wild.
• In Canada, about 5,000 buffalo now roam freely in protected areas in southern and northwest Saskatchewan, northeast British Columbia, and in the Northwest Territories.