Alaskan bison hunting is just one of the big game hunting sports in the state. Bison are huge animals that stand about 6 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh over a ton each. Bison are easily recognizable because of their larger and heavier front quarters and their smaller hindquarters. Most people are only familiar with seeing a dark brown bison. The dark brown coat is their winter coat. It lightens up toward spring. Bison also have huge curving horns that point upward.
Bison have an excellent sense of smell that allows them to survive the winter as long as they are healthy and they do get in a good area with food beneath the frozen snow. They are able to smell food even under inches of snow. Then they use their large head and upper body to shove the snow away from the food to get to it. Since they can smell so clearly through the snow, catching the scent of a hunter isn’t much of a challenge.
When you’re bison hunting you need to be sure that you’re not carrying a strong set. Wash in unscented soap, don’t wear cologne or aftershave or even heavily scented deodorant, and make sure your clothes don’t carry a scent from detergent or fabric softener. Try to avoid getting very sweaty in your clothes and stay away from things like campfires so you don’t absorb the smell of the smoke and cooking food. Bison are very difficult to stalk as you need to do a successful hunt so give yourself a better chance of success by eliminating your scent. Bison are also one of the more difficult animals to actually bring down. They are the hardest one in Alaska, at least. Their sheer size makes it difficult to kill one of these animals.
Hunting is allowed to control the population. Bison aren’t native to Alaska but were brought there instead in 1928 and quickly multiplied. Without hunting, experts believe that they would take over the areas where they live and start to do damage to the ecosystem. Bison hunting keeps that from happening.
Those who have problems with Alaskan bison hunting say that nature can take care of itself. But since bison are an introduced species and they have no natural predators to thin the herds, hunting bison is considered a necessity. Bison may look large and lumbering out on the plain but they’re actually very aggressive when they feel threatened. The only predators that have any hope of taking down the bison are wolves and bears and then they can only generally take down the young. Neither of these predatory animals will attack an adult bison because of the large horns and the size.
Some bison live in protected areas because the fear is that hunting will thin them too much as it has done in the United States. The settlers’ bison hunting actually thinned them down so much that their survival in the United States has been questioned. But Alaskan bison hunting is how the population is kept under control and something hunters are welcome to do in the frozen north.
Photo Credits: Alan Vernon.
Originally posted 2010-03-24 03:12:25. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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