by Mark Sproxton
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 19/97) - Canada will lobby on the world stage this summer to have the wood bison taken off a list restricting the sale of the animal across national borders.

Federal scientists' confidence in the future of the herd is thanks in part to the efforts of a breeding program near Fort Resolution.

The Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) has the wood bison on its endangered species list.

Canada, on the other hand, is the only country with wood bison and has the animal listed as only threatened.

A proposal to downgrade the wood bison from Appendix 1, a list reserved for them most endangered species, to the less critical Appendix 2, will go forward next month at a CITES meeting in Africa.

If the 135 other countries that signed the CITES agreement approve the change, wood bison raised on farms should be treated as animals acceptable for sale across international borders.

Wood bison have been legally acquired in Canada for the last couple of years, said Chuck Dauphine, a scientific authority for CITES with the Canadian Wildlife Service. He also helped write the proposal that will be discussed at the June meeting.

Plains bison, the wood bison's smaller relative, can already be sold across international borders.

Whether or not the delegates at the meeting approve the change, however, it will not affect the free-roaming heard at Hook Lake near Fort Resolution.

Efforts to breed a disease-free wood bison population around Hook Lake continued last month with the capture of 24 newborn calves.

Twenty of the calves were free of tuberculosis and brucellosis. The four diseased buffalo were returned to the free-roaming Hook Lake herd.

The 20 clean buffalo will remain in captivity and be treated with antibiotics until next year, said Danny Beaulieu, chairman of the aboriginal wildlife harvesters committee in Fort Resolution.

Then they'll be placed in a 100-hectare fenced compound with the 20 calves rounded up last year.

"Then we'll repeat the process next year," Beaulieu said. "We're hoping by 2015 we'll have 2,000 buffalo roaming the country again."

But the Fort Resolution crew may need some help.

The bison population at Wood Buffalo National Park is known to carry disease. This heard regularly mingles with the Hook Lake herd.

"They're working on it but we're pushing hard for them to do something with the diseased buffalo," Beaulieu said.

In 1970, the buffalo population around Hook Lake was 1,700. By 1990, the population had dropped to 200.

Disease and healthy natural predators, such as wolves, helped with the decline of the buffalo in the area.

"That was one of the reasons we started the recovery program," Beaulieu said.