Classroom lesson · Wildlife · 🇷🇴 Romania

The European bison

Europe's biggest land animal - back from the brink in Romania

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

The European bison is the biggest land animal in Europe today - bigger than a cow, shaggier than a bull, with a huge head and shoulders. They used to roam all over Europe, but they almost completely disappeared a hundred years ago. Today, slowly, they are coming back to Romania's forests.

Tell me more

A male bison can weigh up to 900 kilograms - about the same as a small car. They eat grass, leaves and tree bark, and they walk in herds of around 20 to 30, led by an older female. Calves are born in spring and look a little bit like fluffy ginger cows.

By the early 1900s, European bison had been hunted so much they had almost vanished. Only a few survived in zoos and parks. Scientists in several countries started a huge project to save them - breeding them carefully, then releasing them back into wild forests.

Romania began bringing bison back to the Carpathians in 2014. Small groups were carefully released into the forest, where there hadn't been wild bison for 200 years. The first calves born free in Romania for two centuries arrived a few years later. The herd has been growing steadily ever since.

Bringing a species back is called 'rewilding'. It is slow work - the bison need quiet, lots of forest, and rangers who keep an eye on them. But when it works, the whole forest changes. Their hooves open up new ground for plants to grow. Other animals follow where they go. It is one of the most hopeful conservation stories in Europe today.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01What does it mean for an animal to come back to a place where it used to live a long time ago?
  2. 02Why might bison change the whole forest when they move around in it?
  3. 03What is a story you know where something or someone disappeared and then came back?
Try this

Classroom activity

Imagine a part of the world you know that used to have a missing animal. (For example: Britain used to have beavers, lynx and wolves.) On A4, draw what your local park would look like if one of those animals came back. What would be different?