Buffalo Lessons: How Bison Returned to Banff National Park

by Karsten Heuer

The breathtaking true story of the return of wild bison to the Rockies, as told by the wildlife biologist who helped lead them there.

Featuring behind-the-scenes photographs from one of North America’s most ambitious conservation projects.

For thousands of years, wild bison numbering in the millions roamed across a range spanning half of North America. Then, in the 1800s, they were nearly exterminated by European settlers. Buffalo Lessons shares the story of their triumphant return to a mountainous corner of their historic range, nearly a century and a half after they last walked the land.

Karsten Heuer, the conservationist tasked with leading the project, chronicles the groundbreaking reintroduction of plains bison to Banff National Park, beginning in 2017, when ten pregnant females and six males were airlifted into an enclosed pasture. It was a complex and ambitious project, designed to restore North America’s largest land mammal to its important ecological role in the landscape and its cultural role for Indigenous peoples. Despite meticulous planning, Heuer and his team found themselves repeatedly “buffaloed” by the animals, who had a knack for doing the unexpected, and teaching the humans lessons along the way.

Heuer packs his narrative with thrilling a horseback chase to tranquilize a bison, a helicopter-assisted translocation into the rugged backcountry, and the tense tracking of wayward bulls that scale steep, treacherous terrain. Throughout, his encounters with these massive creatures—both awe-inspiring and humbling—force him to confront his assumptions about control, nature, and conservation.

In 2024, Heuer was diagnosed with a terminal brain condition, and he completed the manuscript for Buffalo Lessons in the weeks and days before his death. His narrative ends seven years after the initial introduction, with a thriving population of around one hundred bison and the organization of the first Indigenous hunt in the region in over 150 years. Buffalo Lessons stands as a testament to the resilience of bison, and as the culmination of a life’s work in conservation.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Animals, Environment, Canada

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 10, 2026

About the author

Karsten Heuer is a wildlife biologist, park warden and author of Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail. He has worked in Banff National Park in the Rockies, in Inuvik in Canada's far north, and in the Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa. He is a recipient of the Wilburforce Foundation Conservation Leadership Award.

Reviews

[Reading Still Matters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greystone Books recently sent me Buffalo Lessons: How Bison Returned to Banff National Park by the late wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer. Buffalo Lessons chronicles the remarkable story of the reintroduction of wild bison to the Canadian Rockies in 2017. For thousands of years, plains bison roamed the mountains of what would become Alberta until hunting pushed them completely out of the area and almost to extinction.

I was excited to read this book because Banff National Park is just down the road from me, and I followed the reintroduction of the bison into the Park closely. But like all news reporting, the story was fragmented and I never really heard much about the bison after that initial period of their introduction. And so, I was really looking forward to reading about the entire story.

The book itself is relatively short, written for a general audience and includes a lot of beautiful photographs of bison in the area, as well as the staff involved. And so, you don’t need to be a wildlife biologist to be interested and get something out of the book. If you love nature, the mountains and the thought of bison roaming free then you will really get into this book.

Heuer starts the story near the end as he is traveling into the backcountry by horse to shoot a male bison that has strayed from the Banff National Park into Alberta’s jurisdiction. Part of the deal between Parks Canada and Alberta was that the bison were to stay in the Park due to concerns about the transmission of diseases into cattle country.

Springboarding from those dramatic moments, Heuer then takes us into the entire story of the reintroduction of bison into Banff. From the initial building of the political coalition, to the research into the failed reintroduction experiment in Jasper National Park, to the logistical and site preparation, Heuer takes us through the process with the passion of a person who clearly wanted to be part of a process to heal some part of the wild and restore a little balance in nature.

Ultimately, 16 plains bison were airlifted into an enclosed pasture in Banff National Park. The reintroduction was supported by local indigenous peoples who worked with the Parks Canada staff throughout the process. And so in many ways, the reintroduction process was also an act of faith and reconciliation.

Although Buffalo Lessons ends with the successful reintroduction of the bison into Banff National Park, this is a story that’s not over. As the herd grows, there will inevitably be conflict between the bison and local ranchers, predators and potentially users of Banff. This is a story that I look forward to following over time.

This book was provided free by Greystone Books. Greystone books "is a leading independent publisher of books about nature, science, health, and social issues, with a commitment to environmental stewardship. Greystone Books is a proudly Canadian owned and operated company."

[Alberta Views Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail.

In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

Review by Pamela Banting
Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/buffalo-lessons

[Bill Leach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heuer provides an account of the re-introduction of buffalo into Banff National Park (BNP), a project which he lead.

The terms bison and buffalo are used interchangeably, noting that the nane buffalo is used extensively in historical accounts. A sort history of the buffalo is give, but suprisingly no mention is made of the distinction between plains bison and wood bison.

The buffalo were introduced into BNP largely as the province of Alberta had a "no bison policy". unfortunately Heuer does not elaborate.

Analysis of DNA from ancient bison bones shows a high C3 to C4 ratio suggesting that the ancient bison fed on cooler grass species and perhaps lived in the mountains. It is not clear, however, whether this means bison from the nineteenth century, or Bison antiquus which lived to about 10,000 years ago.

Buffalo need grass in quantity. In establishing a location for the reintroduction, early scouting reveals only patchy grassy meadows.

The strategy for introduction was to place 12 pregnant females and only a few bulls. When the cows gave birth, it anchored the herd.

By 2023, the herd had grown to more than a hundred. "Responding to every excursion out of the park became impossible." "Perhaps their ancestors were speaking to them: 98 percent of the bison's movements pointed northeast, to the Ya Ha Tinda area outside the park."

The next objective was to move the bison to a strip on land adjacent to the park, and establish a hunt. However, to solve the immediate over-population, they staged a hunt by Indigenous hunters in 2024. This increased the pressure on the buffalo to leave the park.

Strangely, the author envisions a future where bison would be introduced into all of the alpine meadows of the Siffleur, White Goat and Willmore Wilderness Areas and Jasper National Park.

An easy read with great photos which are unfortunately not captioned.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

What. A. Read. The author has done an incredible job balancing ecological concepts with whimsical descriptions of Bison, the Alberta backcountry, and their relationship to one another. Working in the field of ecological restoration, it is astonishing to me that this story isn’t more widely discussed. I hope that this book gets the attention it deserves so it can bring out a public passion for the species’ restoration and conservation. I have so much hope that this book will be a catalyst for changing the minds of the public and the Alberta government to bring back this species beyond the Parks!

[Tal Sarig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Llĺl

[Nancy Stonos-Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read all of Karsten's books, he is the reason I pursued a career in biology. This final book is a great culmination of his conservation efforts and of the final days of his life.