Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years

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

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. :)

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.

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?

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.

For a second I read it as a return to Illumos. Some GCC related story.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

I’m mad we had a thriving heard in Florida and then they decided to sterilize them.

When you're walking around rural Illinois and you hear music start playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72aSGvXeOTs

This is good to see. Also, I didn’t realize until now that Burlington was Kane and not DeKalb!

For you, this is the day that Bison return to Illinois’s Kane County. For the bison, it’s Tuesday.

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