Left side European bison / right side American bison.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Wenceslaus, 911-935, left bison alone. Successors alternately hunted & protected them.
BIALOWIEZA FOREST, Poland––European wood bison, also called wisent, at risk of extinction for far longer than their North American cousins, are no longer “vulnerable,” and have accordingly been removed from the “Red List” maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
The century-long recovery of European wood bison from one small Polish herd demonstrates that large land-dwelling wildlife with huge habitat needs can co-exist with humans, where humans are willing to make room for them, even in regions from which the species have been extirpated centuries and even millennia before.