Picture this: Long, rolling hills covered in a thick coat of pine trees, as a bison ambles through the spotted shade below.
Where do you imagine this place to be? Because if you’re picturing the American West, you soon may have to let your imagination hop an ocean—as European bison are being reintroduced in greater numbers to Europe in the hopes that one day they will roam freely again.
In fact, Rewilding Europe, an organization devoted to returning wildlife and wild places to the European continent, has just released 11 European bison (three bulls, eight cows) into a nature reserve in the Netherlands, in the hopes they will begin to repopulate the area.
The bison are slowly being reintroduced into the wild and into sanctuaries. Credit: Staffan Wildstrand, ReWilding Europe
Not to be confused with American bison in Europe
Some of you may be just now finding out that a breed of bison is native to Europe—and you’re not alone.
“A lot of people don’t know about nature in Europe,” Frans Schepers, the Managing Director of told, Outside Online. “People don’t know that we even have a European bison. And, in Europe, it is our largest land mammal. This is something maybe we could say to European conservation organizations; we’re not selling our story well enough.”
The European bison, otherwise known as wisent, is an enormous creature, weighting in at up to 2,000 pounds and standing up to six feet tall at the shoulder—making it taller than the American bison. They went extinct in the European wild nearly 100 years ago, following the events of World War I.
Fortunately, some of the bison had been given away as royal gifts to zoological gardens around Europe, and while the captive population was only 54, the remaining bison were carefully bred in order to increase the population while attempting to maintain genetic diversity.
And these efforts were, for the large part, a success: More than 5,000 European bison exist today. Of course, that number still places them in the Vulnerable category of the IUCN Red List—and in fact, there are fewer European bison than there are black rhinos in Africa.
So there are 5,000 captive bison?
These bison don’t exist solely in captivity nowadays—there are wild populations of roughly 900 bison between Poland and Belarus—but reintroducing them to Europe has been a slow but extremely important process. These bison positively affect the entire ecosystem around them, from spreading seeds to improving soil quality (and thus the quality of the plants other herbivores eat), as well as providing a new food supply to predators, scavengers, and fungi.
Which is exactly why Rewilding Europe and their partners have been working to introduce bison across Europe. So far, the bison have been released into Romania (2014) once and twice in the Netherlands (2015 and 2016)—great successes aided by the fact that many of those in the country have been moving to cities, thereby freeing up land for the animals.
The ultimate goal of Rewilding Europe is to introduce bison and other “lost” animals—like beavers, which play a key role in shaping wetlands; wild horses; and aurochs*, the currently extinct ancestors of modern cattle—to 100 million hectares (3,681 square miles) of Europe by 2022.
It’s up to you
But regardless of their success, it will mean very little if the most recent release of European bison into the Netherlands—as well as other rewilding projects—fail to garner public attention.
“How can you love something, or even vote for it, if you don’t know it exists? So the awareness about what Europe has to offer is priority number one,” said Frans. “Rewilding is not going back to the past. We’re looking for wild nature in a modern, 21st century, Europe. There are huge opportunities and possibilities for that.”
*Aurochs themselves went extinct nearly 400 years ago, but thanks to records and aurochs remains from the time period, scientists know what they should look like, and are actually attempting to back-breed them from old lines of cattle, which are more genetically similar to the extinct bovine.
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Image credit: ReWilding Europe
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