Bull wood bison being loud.
Wood bison are tiny, with most falling into the 4-4.5' range at the shoulder and only the very biggest bulls clearing the 5' mark. Their legs are long, their build is lean, and their humps are narrow and relatively undramatic. Their herds tend to be on the smaller side, consisting of 8-15 cows and young whose movements are directed by a single dominant cow. Mature bulls are predominantly solitary outside of the breeding season, though subordinate breeding-age bulls may form bachelor herds, particularly in more resource rich areas.
They tend to be extremely shy of people, often encountered only as the distant sound of lowing bulls or a blur of brown and red-gold crashing away through the underbrush with alarming speed. They are interfertile with domestic cattle and occasionally known to breed with them, but hybrids are exceptionally rare compared to crosses between cattle and their wild aurochs cousins. Bison/aurochs hybrids are semi-legendary and unlikely to occur due to mechanical difficulties of reproduction alone, given the disparity in size between the species.
Wood bison most prefer mid-density woodland with good opportunities to browse. They exhibit preference for leaves over grass, and mainly consume the upper portions of their favored plants. They are a keystone species in much of their range, most notably for maintaining patches of meadow. They assemble in clearings to socialize and wallow and for communal activity during the breeding season, and preferentially browse young plants along the edges of these open spaces. In many cases, this activity allows for meadows to be maintained where conditions would otherwise be more than adequate for full tree cover, creating microhabitats for grazers and pockets of biodiversity for low growing plants and their pollinators. The seeds of meadow plants stick to their fur, and may be carried long distances to other open areas.
In most Wardi dialects they're referred to either as 'pine cattle' or 'hill cattle' due to this animal's near exclusive association with highland pine forest and the lack of other bison to compare them to, though the species as a whole occupies much wider variety of habitats across its range. Their association with alpine forests in the hotter parts of their range is the result of populations who spread during the LGM becoming stranded as relicts within "sky islands", which may often be the only sufficiently forested/cool habitats to sustain these animals.
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