Yellowstone National Park prepares new Interagency Bison Management Plan

By Benjamin Alva Polley EBS CONTRIBUTOR

In 1872, Yellowstone National Park was established as the world’s first National Park by an act of Congress, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant. A century and a half ago, the park’s founders didn’t have the foresight to expand its boundaries to include wintering ranges for antelope, bison, elk and deer. Ungulates like bison often migrate out of the park’s boundaries each winter to escape deep snowpack, seeking greener pastures at lower elevations. Much of the land outside of the park is owned in checkerboard sections by different landowners, including Custer Gallatin National Forest, the state of Montana and neighboring ranchers. 

Historically, ranchers have expressed umbrage with sharing grazing rights with bison, fearful of the brucellosis transmission to their cattle, as well as destruction of property and fences. Elk also migrate out of the park and can transmit brucellosis. However, they aren’t as aggressively managed by the state as bison, which are either quarantined, killed by the state of Montana, allowed to be hunted by eight Western tribes, or transported to other tribal reservations. 

Eastern Shoshone Tribal member and vice president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, Jason Baldes, said that dealing with the state has been a challenge.

“The state has generally been anti-buffalo and anti-tribal, so we have been navigating that process of restoring this relationship with buffalo for a long time,” Baldes said. A topic he’s intimately familiar with, Baldes is also the senior program manager of Tribal Buffalo Partnerships for the National Wildlife Federation and Executive Director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. “It has been an uphill battle. We have a good relationship with the park service because our goals often align with what we want to see for wildlife and habitat.”

To better address these issues, Yellowstone National Park is drafting a new Interagency Bison Management Plan for the bovines inside their boundaries. Anticipated for later this year, the plan will be the first revision since 2000.

The drafting of the new Interagency Bison Management Plan involves a partnership between the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, InterTribal Buffalo Council, Montana Department of Livestock, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, National Park Service, Nez Perce Tribe and the U.S. Forest Service.

The management plan highlights how the park manages bison in coordination with state and tribal wildlife officials. It guides park policy on how they will work collaboratively with other agencies through a workgroup created by the Interagency Bison Management Plan.

Three alternatives

The National Park Service presents the new Bison Management Plan in three alternative options:

1. The first option is maintaining the current plan, in which park managers would aim for a population of 3,500-5,000 bison and continue to allow existing hunting, hazing, quarantine and slaughter operations when the animals stray outside the park. 

2. The second option prioritizes treaty hunting by tribal members to manage herd size, continuing with the quarantine-and-transfer-to-tribes program. This option manages a larger bison population, ranging from 3,500 to 6,000 animals after calving. 

3. The final option involves a less intensive approach, where bison would be managed like other wildlife and allow for natural selection and bison dispersal. This option increases bison numbers from 5,500 to 8,000 or more animals after calving. This alternative ceases all trapping for shipments to slaughter.

All options still include working with stakeholders and using methods like capture and hazing operations if bison are seen mingling with livestock.

A key difference—while the current plan assumes bison transmits brucellosis to cattle, the new draft plan highlights scientific data showing that elk cause more wildlife-livestock brucellosis transmissions than bison—since 2000, elk have transmitted the bacteria to cattle more than two dozen times, explains Jennifer Carpenter, chief of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, in an informational video published on Aug. 28, 2023.

The new plan was drafted after a year of extremes for bison. Last winter’s deep snow caused many to migrate outside the park to lower elevations seeking food. According to data gathered by the Buffalo Field Campaign, in 2023, 1,272 bison were killed, and 282 were transported away from the Yellowstone ecosystem. Treaty hunts by tribes harvested 939, and there were 100 additional unknown hunts/harvests (it’s unknown whether by a state or tribal hunter), and 75 hunter lottery tags.

The plan also emerges as tension between the federal government and Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration over bison management. Last March, the U.S. Department of the Interior planned to invest 25 million dollars into bison restoration, citing their cultural, ecological and historical importance to tribes. In August of 2022, Gianforte joined the Montana Stockgrowers Association in opposition to allowing bison to graze on Bureau of Land Management land in central Montana. 

Opposing voices

There are some who disagree with the proposed alternatives.

One of those groups in opposition is the Buffalo Field Campaign, a West Yellowstone-based nonprofit devoted to conserving free-roaming bison habitat, and “to stop the harassment and slaughter of America’s last wild buffalo.”

“An additional justification to scrap this plan and start over begins with Yellowstone National Park’s range of alternatives, which are not based on sound science and do not meet the principles of managing buffalo as a wild species,” Darrell Geist of the Buffalo Field Campaign explained in an email to EBS.

The biggest complaint of the Buffalo Field Campaign is that “all alternatives and future plans fail to protect connectivity to habitat for wild buffalo” and “removing zones prohibiting buffalo’s freedom to roam National public trust lands.”

“The National Park Service’s planning process is flawed because it does not include the U.S. Forest Service and thereby excludes the buffalo’s National Forest range and habitat contiguous with Yellowstone National Park,” writes the Buffalo Field Campaign. “Without the involvement of the U.S. Forest Service, an ecosystem-based approach to restoring self-sustaining wild buffalo herds cannot be achieved because millions of acres of National public trust lands are left out of the planning process.”

Many tribal stakeholders also agree that the park is too small and that federal agencies like the Park Service and Forest Service must figure out how to work together to ensure habitat connectivity for wild bison. Baldes said the ability for tribal members to access those lands with live animals is crucial in maintaining their traditions—the ability to show their children how to get food and medicine and hunt and gather.

“We want to ensure we get live animals,” Baldes said. “We are supportive of sovereignty treaty rights and self-determination. But there’s a challenge with the treaty hunt that the state of Montana has opened up to the tribes and is essentially using us as their scapegoats to do the dirty work. We don’t want to see animals indiscriminately killed when there’s intrinsic value in those animals and keeping them alive to get to the tribes. We want to maximize that effort. It’s a tricky issue to navigate.”

Yellowstone’s conservation success

Before the westward expansion of settlers, Bison were widespread throughout North America, with numbers estimated at around 30 million. Only 23-24 bison were alive there when the park was first established, and now, 150 years later, there are about 5,000. In the summer of 2023, park biologists counted 4,830 bison in two primary herds. These numbers show that, overall, Yellowstone’s bison management plan has been a conservation success story.

“Yellowstone bison represent an ongoing conservation success story—a collaborative effort to bring bison back from the brink of extinction and see them restored more broadly across their native range,” Greater Yellowstone Coalition’s Executive Director Scott Christensen and partners wrote in an open letter to Gov. Greg Gianforte on the coalition’s website. “Bison are important ecosystem engineers. The North American landscape is less balanced in their absence. The State’s position threatens to halt bison conservation and dismantle the last two decades of progress—taking the Yellowstone bison population back to the diminished numbers of 20 years ago. This is regressive, short-sighted and damaging to the long-term health of the State’s economy and outdoor heritage.”

Despite this success, the Park Service fully knows that only some agree on bison management.

“I think most of you probably realize that there are a lot of opinions on bison management,” Cam Sholly, the park’s superintendent, said in a virtual public meeting on Aug. 28, 2023. “This plan does not solve every problem. It does not satisfy everyone. There are people on both sides of the issue. Some want unlimited bison in the park, some want fewer bison, and we’re trying to strike a balance in many ways to solidify progress that’s been made over the last two decades.”

Next steps

With the environmental impact statement complete and alternatives defined, the meat of the Interagency Bison Management Plan process is in the rearview. The public comment period closed on Oct. 10, 2023, and stakeholders are now analyzing public comment for their final decision, which will be released later this year.