[HN Gopher] Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years
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Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years
Author : bikenaga
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-12-30 18:22 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| pfdietz wrote:
| There have been bison at Fermilab for some years, but they are
| just over the border in Dupage County, not Kane County.
|
| Kane Country has had cougars for quite a while. :)
| pushcx wrote:
| There's a couple dozen at Midewin, too:
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/midewin/animals-plants/bison-pro...
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Look at that our little midwestern county is on the front page of
| HN.
|
| Are they going to be able to free range, the way we commonly see
| whitetail deer roaming around the county?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's probably harder for bison to free range like deer these
| days. Deer are extremely agile and can leap most fences with
| ease. Deer are also pretty docile when they're not in rut.
| Outside of nature preserves it doesn't seem realistic.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| That's what I was wondering. Makes sense.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| An additional data point is that Midewin's bison area is
| surrounded by a double fence - a barbed-wire one to keep the
| humans out and a stout steel one to keep the bison in.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| The Fermilab bison used to have (probably still do) a sign
| in their field that said, amusingly, not to jump the fence
| into the field unless you can cross it in 9 seconds,
| because the bull can do it in 10. (grew up on the DuPage
| county side of Fermilab, got to take physics there too,
| which was awesome)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't think bison really care about fences either. While
| they don't leap over them, they just walk through them
| dhosek wrote:
| Deer have become almost a nuisance species closer in to
| Chicago. I've seen them in Oak Park about 2 miles away from
| the nearest forest land. In River Forest, which actually
| contains forest preserve, things got so bad the village
| wanted to hire a firm to shoot the deer, but the residents
| were too shocked by that proposal and it never happened.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| hopelite wrote:
| 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.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| There are several extant herds that have been genetically
| tested and proven "pure", although they're the minority
| 1123581321 wrote:
| This is good to see. Also, I didn't realize until now that
| Burlington was Kane and not DeKalb!
| cwal37 wrote:
| That's cool to see, obiously Fermi has had them as someone else
| mentioned.
|
| 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).
|
| Random fun tidbit is the WW1 code-breaking[0] that took place
| there as well, which today remains an acoustics lab[1].
|
| [0]https://web.archive.org/web/20220521185943/https://northwest..
| .
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbank_Laboratories
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| easywood wrote:
| You should read "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman.
| sorentwo wrote:
| 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.
| soperj wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Do you have a reference for that? Some googling says it is a
| myth, which sounds right.
| kitesay wrote:
| More like a managed herd in a fenced paddock. A spring tourist
| attraction.
|
| I wonder how climate change is going to affect the idealistic
| "restore the ecosystem" plan.
| proxysna wrote:
| For a second I read it as a return to Illumos. Some GCC related
| story.
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