Canadian wildlife officials have delivered a shipment of 30 wood bison from a national park in Alberta to a historic buffalo stomping ground in sub-Arctic Russia — part of a unique, intercontinental gift of natural heritage aimed at boosting the species' long-range chances of survival.

The bison airlift, carried out in late March, was the second transplant of the Canadian beasts in the past five years to the Siberian republic of Sakha, where Russian biologists are trying to recreate a long-vanished ecosystem once dominated by the related steppe bison before its extinction about 10,000 years ago.

The remarkable wildlife export — made possible with a heavy Russian transport aircraft that required special permission to land at the Edmonton airport — is a showcase project this year for Parks Canada, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its creation as an distinct branch of the federal government.

J.B. Harkin, the agency's first commissioner, became the key figure in ensuring the survival of the wood bison after its depletion to just a few hundred individuals in northern Alberta by the early 1900s.

Harkin "was one the first ones to really have a vision for parks as being areas where we can conserve species — provide habitat for endangered species — which was a pretty radical concept at the time," Todd Shury, a Parks Canada wildlife veterinarian involved in the bison relocation, told Postmedia News in a recent interview. "Parks up until then had been really places for tourism."

Canada's fragile wood bison species was initially protected in Wood Buffalo National Park near the Alberta-Northwest Territories border. That population — now considered healthy, but still classified as threatened because of its relatively small size and isolation — later produced enough individuals to establish a breeding herd at Elk Island National Park east of Edmonton, where the 30 young bison sent Russia were raised.

The Elk Island stock has "played an amazing role in the conservation of wood bison in the last 50 years," said Shury, noting how the herd was also tapped for a bison reintroduction program in Alaska in 2008.

The arrival of the Canadian animals is a "huge deal" for wildlife specialists in Sakha, said Shury, "because bison haven't been present in that part of the world for over 10,000 years."

The first transfer of 30 bison in 2006 was successful, he said, but the additional animals are necessary to achieve enough genetic diversity for the Siberian herd to become self-sustaining.

"Once they build up enough of a breeding population," Shury said, "they'd like to release bison into the wild and restore a large herbivore into that landscape that hasn't been there for a long, long time."

rboswell@postmedia.com

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