Bison probably don’t top the list of charismatic mega fauna you’d see in San Francisco. But there they were, right in the heart of Golden Gate Park on a sunny Friday afternoon.
They do top my “unexpected encounters with bison” list. Second on that list would be the time I spotted a wood bison, grazing in a forest along the Alaska Highway somewhere in the Yukon, circa 1990. I didn’t even know about wood bison back then. I just thought one crazed beast had gone walk-about. But no. The wood bison is a subspecies of the plains bison, significantly bigger, probably just as crotchety, that’s found mostly north of the Canadian border and up into Alaska.
Almost extinct by the 1880s (less than a thousand remained of vast herds estimated at 60 million individuals), the massive creatures caught the interest of Golden Gate’s superintendent at the time who brought the species (by ones and twos) to the park starting in 1891. They’ve stuck around.
Today, there are between 400,000 and 500,000 bison in North America, mostly managed as commercial herds. The largest free-roaming herds of about 4,000 can be found in Yellowstone National Park.
Atlas Obscura has an article about Frisco’s bisons, noting that they have a history of escaping, once in 1924 when a couple dozen followed a big male who charged and broke through the fence. They scattered across the city, munching flowers and grass in urban yards and requiring more than a day to be recaptured.
An electric fence and a sturdy metal one surrounds their little plot of ground in the park today. Bison munching placidly while city traffic drones nearby.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 