Ruthless killing by white men brought the wood, or northern, bison which once ranged from Edmonton, Alberta, north to Great Slave Lake, within sight of extinction, as it did the plains bison further south in the U.S.A. In 1893 the Canadian Government instituted a policy of conservation. Wood Buffalo Park was declared a protected area, and in 1906 the Government bought 600 plains bison in the U.S.A. and established them at Wainwright. These were so successful that twenty years later 6,000 were taken to Wood Buffalo Park. Here they interbred with the wood bison, and it was feared that the wood bison would disappear as a distinct subspecies. In 1957, however, a small isolated group of wood bison were discovered in a remote part of Wood Buffalo Park, and these are being kept separate. Miss Egerton studied the social behaviour of the North American bison while employed as a graduate student in the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, from September, 1960, to December, 1962. In this paper, while mentioning some aspects of bison behaviour, she is concerned mainly with the history and present standing of the species in Alberta.