The photo above – from the Houston Chronicle – may be your last chance to see bison roaming in Harris County.
Apparently, it’s time to say goodbye to the last sizable group of a species that once stomped the Katy Prairie by the thousands, and left its name on the waterway that provided the earliest transit artery in Houston - Harris County is sending the 11 bison penned in Deussen Park at Lake Houston to an animal sanctuary in North Texas
The last known sighting of a wild bison herd in the Houston area occurred in 1836, a few months before the Allen Brothers sailed up Buffalo Bayou and founded the city.
The departure of the herd apparently leaves only a handful of buffalo on public display in Harris County. There’s one pair at Pioneers Park west of town, and another twosome at the Armand Bayou Nature Center near Clear Lake.
County Commissioner El Franco Lee, whose precinct includes Deussen Park, says the decision to send the bison to the 6,400-acre Medicine Mound Ranch in Hardeman County was motivated by both the on-going drought here that has pinched food and water supplies, and by a concern that the herd was becoming dangerously inbred, having grown from an initial pair acquired in 1973. Inbreeding will not be an issue where they are going, since the ranch operators neuter all their animals.
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