March 17th, 2020 : Bison

[xoxoxoBruce]

♫ Oh, give me a home where the Bison do roam
and munch on green roughage all day.
♫ I can’t afford digs in the hood of the herd
it’s so unlikely I’ll get there some way.

That’s because these five young ladies live in San Francisco, and not some jive-ass semi-suburb industrial zone.
Oh no, it’s on seven acres of lush Bermuda grass in Golden Gate Park. Pretty posh digs, methinks they’re living large.

Bison were first introduced to the park in the 1890s, and these big buddies are the first new faces in the herd since 2012. Since they raced out of the trailer that carried them from a northern California ranch, the yearlings have been eagerly getting to know their new digs, as well as the five old-timers who got there first.
The youngsters will spend 30 days separated from their wizened peers by a chain-link fence, but they can scope each other out from their neighboring pastures in the paddock. As soon as the new arrivals barreled out of the trailer, they scampered right over to the barrier to say hi. “Both sides regarded each other with curiosity,” wrote the Recreation & Parks Department in a news release. (The zoo tends to the bison themselves, while Recreation & Parks maintains the enclosure.)

I noticed meeting at the wall, the two of the old guard that we can see their back end have their tails up.
Marking their territory? So happy they could just shit?

But some group dynamics will be smoother than others. “Females and young males will be much more likely to group up with the current herd,” Merkle says. Merkle hasn’t studied the Golden Gate Park herd in particular, but based on his knowledge of dynamics in Yellowstone, Prince Albert, and Banff National Parks, as well as the scientific literature, he says, “adult males tend to spend most of the year on their own or in small bachelor groups.” The males typically only mingle with the rest of the herd during mating season, he adds—and then they’re likely to cozy up to several ladies.

As often happen when youngsters from the sticks hit the big city they gravitate toward the hip trendy practices. Here we see
one of the young ladies, who has maintained a svelte 550 lbs, tanning where the Sun don’t shine... a recent rage.

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