Young bison bull born

On Mon­day, April 27, 2020, a bull calf saw the light of day on the wild bison pas­ture near Criewen. Under the car­ing and care­ful care of farmer Nor­bert Meene, it quick­ly got back on its feet, sur­vived the dan­ger­ous first days in the life of a bison and is now the youngest and cutest mem­ber of our wild cat­tle group. So matured, it can now be pre­sent­ed to the pub­lic and exam­ined by res­i­dents and vis­i­tors. Please do not feed the bison under any cir­cum­stances! Farmer Meene pro­vides them with suf­fi­cient grass, hay and trees.

Thanks to suc­cess­ful nature con­ser­va­tion efforts in Poland, bison are increas­ing­ly appear­ing on the Oder. A bull who had swum across the bor­der riv­er was shot imme­di­ate­ly on the Ger­man side not so long ago, although he, like his rel­a­tives on the Pol­ish side, had lived there peace­ful­ly with the rur­al pop­u­la­tion. But the returnee was not wel­come. That has to be dif­fer­ent in the future. We should be hap­py about the return of the rus­tic cat­tle to their old home.

We imme­di­ate­ly chris­tened our brawny young bull Dirk. Imme­di­ate­ly after his birth, lit­tle Dirk turned to big Dirk, his god­fa­ther, the nation­al park man­ag­er, with his birth­day wish — rep­re­sent­ed by his guardian, the Nation­al Park Foun­da­tion — and asked him to allo­cate a small part of the neigh­bor­ing nation­al park for­est to the bison pas­ture. So far, the bison have been com­plete­ly locked out of the nation­al park. We would like to change that so that the ani­mals get shade and retreat, includ­ing the new cit­i­zen, whom we warm­ly welcome.

dr Ans­gar Vöss­ing (Man­age­ment Board)