Three wild European bison died on Sunday morning after being hit by a train in Poland’s vast UNESCO-listed Białowieża forest, which straddles the border with Belarus, local police told AFP.
A herd of Europe’s largest mammals, whose male specimens can reach 900 kilogrammes in weight, wandered onto the tracks as a locomotive carrying some 50 passengers between Białystok and Warsaw was steaming ahead.
“No passenger was injured but three animals perished in this accident, which happened at 7 a.m. near the village of Witowo,” spokesman Konrad Karwacki told AFP on Sunday.
The ‘Żubr train’, which takes its name from the Polish word for bison, did not derail and was able to resume its journey around an hour and a half after the collision.
Biodiversity
Some 1,200 bison, an emblematic animal in the eastern European country, currently inhabit the Polish part of the great Białowieża Forest, considered the last primeval woodland in Europe.
The forest is a treasure of biodiversity and a giant carbon sink. Yet several bison fall victim to road accidents in the region every year.
“They are sometimes hit by trains, but these are usually isolated incidents,” Professor Rafal Kowalczyk, from a local branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences, told AFP.
“I don’t recall an accident where three bison were killed at the same time, run over by a train,” the mammals specialist added.
Saved from extinction
Devastated by hunting, deforestation and the expansion of agriculture, the European bison nearly became extinct at the beginning of the 20th century.
After disappearing from Białowieża, its last habitat in Europe, before the outbreak of World War II, the species was saved at the eleventh hour thanks to the release of bison reared in zoos back into the wild.
In the most recent assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2020, the European bison population was estimated at just over 2,500 and, although increasing, still placed in the borderline ‘near threatened’ category.
(rh)
