Smart collars help Elk Island National Park staff learn where and why the buffalo roam

Elk Island National Park staff are equipping bison with smart collars to find out where and why the buffalo roam.

The national park, 35 minutes east of Edmonton, is home to about 1,000 wood and plains bison. Ten female animals from each herd were randomly selected to wear the high-tech trackers, says Jonathan DeMoor, Elk Island National Park ecologist.

"Our GPS collars record a location every two hours and they transmit that data via satellite once a day so those maps are a snapshot of each point from one day," DeMoor says. 

Which means while park staff may not have up-to-the-minute locations, they do have a pretty good idea of where the bison spend most of their time.

That intel is shared on a map in the visitor centre to "increase your odds of finding the herd," DeMoor says.

Often the herd is just out of sight, over a hill or tucked into a stand of trees, he says. 

"The information we get from those collars lets us understand how the bison are using the park, what kind of habitats they're using, and the difference in different seasons in terms of where they head."

The collars also reveal something of the herd's social scene.

"It's one large herd that breaks off into little groups and then they come back and then mingle up and they split off into different groups," DeMoor says. 

You can see more from Elk Island National Park on this week's Our Edmonton on Saturday at 10 a.m., Sunday at noon and 11 a.m. Monday on CBC TV and CBC Gem. 

The collars also have an accelerometer, a Fitbit-like device, built in to record how much the bison move.

The park has been collecting data from the collars since 2016, but recently one of the animals was also equipped with a camera.

"It's actually a radio collar combined with a video collar on the bottom of it," says Brian Eaton, chair of the Friends of Elk Island Society (FEIS), which purchased the $5,000 camera.

The camera, attached to the five-year-old bison nicknamed Feisty, records 20 seconds of video every hour during the day, Eaton says.