Escaped bison found eating garden plants in Polish village

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A bison has caused alarm after being spotted wandering through a village in western Poland and munching on garden plants outside a house, having escaped from a nearby enclosure.

The animal, named Pojar, is believed to have broken free overnight before being seen early in the morning near Dębowa Street in Tulce on the outskirts of the city of Poznań, the Babki Forest District announced.

“Early this morning, the police contacted us with a request for help regarding a bison,” they wrote on Facebook, later sharing a video of the animal chewing on decorative trees between two houses.

After the animal had been spotted, a veterinarian was called to the scene and sedated the bison before it was transported back to its owner, foresters said.

Local broadcaster TVP3 reports that officials are now investigating how the animal escaped from the private enclosure.

Police said the bison remained calm throughout the incident. “It did not cause any damage. No one was injured,” officer Anna Klój told broadcaster TVN.

Bison – an iconic and protected species in Poland – were hunted to extinction in the wild in Poland by the early 20th century. But a successful breeding programme has resulted in the country now having a quarter of the world’s population of European bison.

That led the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2021 to upgrade the European bison from “vulnerable” to “near threatened” – which means it is no longer at risk of global extinction – on its Red List of Threatened Species.

At the end of 2021, Poland’s bison population counted 2,429 individuals, including 206 living in captivity. The country has eight free-ranging populations, located mainly in forested areas across eastern and northeastern Poland, as well as some western regions.

In 2023, Polish media reported several cases of bison being killed in collisions with army vehicles. Earlier this year, the Polish armed forces said they had reduced such incidents using an app that tracks the animals’ movements, according to the officer in charge of operations along the border with Belarus.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Nadleśnictwo Babki/Facebook

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.