EDITOR’S NOTE: One remarkable component of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is its complete suite of wild North American mammals living much as they did before European explorers arrived. In fact, no other place in the Lower 48 has such a collection of predators and plant-eaters; from lynx to grizzly bears and from beavers to bison.
That puts an onus on us as guardians of such a rare landscape to both maintain its qualities and share its lessons. This series of stories wrestles with how we define the word “wild,” in a place tangled with prehistoric food webs and artificial boundary lines.
So what can a Yellowstone grizzly bear teach a Eurasian lynx? Can a world-class wild trout fishery double as a world-class business? And do Polish free-roaming bison have advice for their American cousins? Is rewilding really wild?
In this Mountain Journal Sunday Read, here’s Part 3 in our series, “What Is Wild?”
—-
Patrick Kelly studies what people think about bison: Are they liked or disliked? Should they be hunted? Should the government pay if they break fences or eat farmer’s crops?
Should the Polish government pay, that is. The Utah State University researcher spent much of 2024 in Poland, surveying residents’ attitudes about żubr, the European cousin of the United States’ national mammal. Americans might not be surprised to learn Poles generally like the giant herbivore, once they absorb the fact there are more than 1,000 free-roaming żubr, or bison, in Poland.
“I wanted a snapshot of people’s tolerance and opinion right now on the ground,” Kelly told Mountain Journal of his survey project, published in 2025. “We’re measuring all these areas in Poland, like where can we optimize management interventions and prevent the most conflict? Where can we mitigate the most damage? Are there different approaches to compensation? There’s a lot we can learn from Poland, and a lot Poland can learn from the U.S. In the end, we’re all just people trying to get along with big fuzzy animals.”
Charismatic megafauna owe their charisma to the quality of being wild. An angus cow and a buffalo both like the same grass, produce palatable meat and have horns. But one spends its life behind fences while the other routinely ignores them. The American bison has a six-foot vertical leap, but often finds its wild status tangled in barbed-wire strands of politics and economics. We can’t even agree on what to call it: Bison or buffalo?
The European bison, Bison bonasus, looks almost identical to the American bison, Bison bison. Neither resembles the ox-like buffalo of Africa and Asia (Syncerus caffer and Bubalus arnee, respectively). But the first printed reference to North America’s predominant ecosystem engineer was “buffalo” in 1616, while “bison” didn’t gain printed currency until about 1690.
Along the Continental Divide, a wildlife policy-wonk joke defines bison as a large wild bovine around Yellowstone National Park that everyone hates, while buffalo live around Glacier National Park where everyone loves them. In Montana between the parks, no one’s sure what to call the beast on American Prairie’s Missouri Breaks compound.
The joke refers to a contradictory set of circumstances surrounding three major bison concentrations in Montana. For decades, Yellowstone Park managers have tangled with Montana wildlife officials when the park’s northern herd follows its migratory instincts and seeks winter range outside its federal boundary. Private ranchers suspect the bison might spread brucellosis to their cattle even though there’s never been a documented case of this disease transfer. Montana has responded with strict quarantine and movement restrictions, slaughter programs and pressure on Yellowstone officials to cull its population.
About 250 miles to the north, the Blackfeet Indian Tribe has been expanding its genetically pure buffalo herd and negotiated an agreement with Glacier National Park officials to let the animals roam freely into Glacier’s eastern grasslands. The Tribe has two buffalo pastures within the Blackfeet Indian Reservation separated by miles of cattle ranches, and is able to trail hundreds of animals between summer and winter quarters without controversy. When November 1st’s federal SNAP payments were suspended due to the ongoing government shutdown, the Blackfeet slaughtered 15 buffalo from their herds to supplement food banks.
Equidistant from both Yellowstone and the Blackfeet reservation sits the nonprofit conservation organization American Prairie, which in October celebrated two decades of acquiring hundreds of bison and hundreds of thousands of acres of grazing land in central Montana. While American Prairie’s stated mission is to rewild its lands to the benefit of Montana’s native wildlife, including bison, the group has legally turned its Pleistocene megafauna into domestic livestock.
“I can’t explain that difference between Yellowstone and Glacier,” said Beth Saboe, American Prairie public relations manager. “Sometimes it seems bison is the new four-letter word in Montana. It used to be wolf.”
Engineers of ecosystems
Whatever we call the big shaggy beast, biologists have a little-known word for its present situation: Refaunation, or the reintroduction of animals into an environment (following a previous defaunation). Refaunation can lead to rewilding: ecological restoration to increase biodiversity and self-sustaining natural processes.
Whether returning lynx to Ireland, removing Yellowstone cutthroat trout from westslope cutthroat waters or restoring free-roaming bison to the Great Plains, refaunation and rewilding tend to raise a ruckus. The landscapes those wild creatures need are often claimed for other uses, like farming or housing. The prehistoric natural processes that supported wild food chains have been shredded. And who’s going to pay for it all?
The questions matter because there aren’t many places where rewilding is even possible. Only 5 percent of the world’s mammals are considered wild, as measured by biomass. In other words, the collected bulk of domesticated mammals makes up 95 percent of the earth’s mammalian biomass. Wild land mammals such as bison and grizzly bears actually comprise less than 2 percent, with whales and other marine mammals providing the rest. In 1860, that division between domesticated and wild mammals was 50-50.
“Sometimes it seems bison is the new four-letter word in Montana. It used to be wolf.”
Beth Saboe, public relations manager, American Prairie
The Crown of the Continent region of the Northern Rocky Mountains, with Greater Yellowstone at its core, is one of a small handful of places on Earth considered an essentially intact ecosystem. Like the Congo Basin, Siberia, the Amazon and the central Asian steppes, Greater Yellowstone’s wild ecosystem still has most of its prehistoric parts functioning as they evolved.
“It’s one of those places you can look at from space and see minimal human footprint — that are the last of the wild, still whole and intact,” said Travis Belote, landscape ecology assistant professor at Montana State University in Bozeman. “Only 3 percent of the world is relatively intact from a landscape perspective. It [Greater Yellowstone] is on par with those other wild areas.”
Belote told Mountain Journal that many parts of the world don’t have much visible human impact, but they don’t have much else either.
“The Outback of Australia is extremely wild,” he said, “but it’s lost most of its indigenous species.”
The remaining few face constant pressure. A recent refaunation study in Namibia found efforts to maintain wild elephant populations alongside domestic cattle could greatly benefit the grazing plants and soil quality, and improve local economies. But the transformation also brought constant governing challenges.
Establishing wild auroch cattle and tarpan horses in the Netherlands’ Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve in 1983 was a dramatic experiment in ecological nonintervention. It nearly foundered in 2018 when thousands of the transplanted creatures were shot before they starved to death over a hard winter. The Dutch government subsequently switched to a more hands-on management approach, including supplemental feeding and population control. Today this Manhattan-sized reserve is known as “The Serengeti behind the dikes.”
A Historic Impact
Yellowstone wildlife photographer Tom Murphy prefers to call his current muse bison, although he admits that “Bison Bill doesn’t sound quite the same as Buffalo Bill.” Regardless, his images for a new bison book with Yellowstone National Park biologist Chris Geremia will be featured in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s 2026 bison exhibit in Cody, Wyoming.
The animal’s identity confusion, Murphy told Mountain Journal, may trace back to an incident that saved the buffalo as a species but erased it as a wild animal.
“The Lacey Act, which came after that poacher was caught in [Yellowstone’s] Pelican Valley, was a response to the lack of penalty for killing bison,” Murphy said. “It became the basis for most of the game laws in the U.S. But when that was set up there were no wild bison, so they were classified as livestock.”
Murphy was referring to infamous Cooke City buffalo poacher Edgar Howell. On March 12, 1894, Howell was in the process of butchering five of Yellowstone National Park’s last surviving buffalo in a meadow along Astringent Creek when rangers captured him. He was so engrossed in his task that he failed to notice the rangers’ approach across 400 yards of open ground.
At the time, perhaps 200 buffalo remained in Yellowstone. They were the last of what used to number upwards of 60 million animals covering the Great Plains before the arrival of Lewis and Clark.
Howell bragged to his captors that he would make about $2,000 for his buffalo heads from wealthy Easterners who wanted them to decorate their saloons and clubs. At risk was his rifle and camping equipment, worth $26.75, and his freedom, which involved a brief time getting regular meals in the Yellowstone Park stockade before release because “there was no law authorizing the punishment of trespassers in the Park, or persons depredating upon the game therein,” in the words of Interior Secretary Hoke Smith.
George Bird Grinnell used the incident to ignite his national campaign for restoring North American buffalo. By coincidence, one of his Forest and Stream magazine reporters, Emerson Hough, was at the Mammoth Hot Springs park headquarters when Burgess reported Howell’s capture. Hough recruited local photographer F. Jay Haynes, and they met the ranger patrol at Norris, about 20 miles away.
“The Lacey Act, which came after that poacher was caught in [Yellowstone’s] Pelican Valley, was a response to the lack of penalty for killing bison. It became the basis for most of the game laws in the U.S.”
Tom Murphy, wildlife photographer
Hough’s interviews and Haynes’ photos soon appeared in Grinnell’s magazine, which the publisher ran as both breaking news and a front-page editorial on March 24. Grinnell had been agitating for wild game protection for more than 20 years. After the capture and notoriety of Howell, it took just 56 days to pass the National Park Protective Act, also known as the Lacey Act.
“But Yellowstone bison were a special case as a museum display animal,” Murphy said. “They just needed to stay in Yellowstone.”
Except bison won’t stay in Yellowstone. And for a range of reasons, perhaps they shouldn’t. Geremia’s recently published research adds to a growing pile of evidence that roaming buffalo activate a landscape rejuvenation of remarkable impact.
Geremia was furloughed during the current federal government budget impasse and did not return requests for comment. But his paper, coauthored with biologists William Hamilton and Jerod Merkle, showed that even though larger herds of bison appear to mow meadows into “lawns,” the end effect is positive.
“Our findings suggest that the return of freely moving bison is actively stimulating and transforming Yellowstone grasslands,” the authors wrote. That transformation results in “top-down control over plant composition, fire suppression and increased diversity of smaller animals” similar to migratory wildlife sanctuaries such as the African Serengeti.
The Spirit Animal
Beyond their ecological impact, buffalo play a huge role as a cultural character, according to every Tribal government in Montana. While the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have the best-known herd on the Flathead Indian Reservation’s Bison Range, the Blackfeet Tribe has made expansive developments in allowing buffalo to roam truly wild.
In addition to making more space within their reservation for their wild herds, the Blackfeet sought and got a secretarial order from the Interior Department committing the National Park Service to “restore wild and healthy populations of American bison” through collaborative projects. Glacier Park also received a special allocation of $1.5 million to fund additional bison rewilding work such as archaeological and biological surveys of the bison grazing grounds.
The Iinnii Initiative, based at the Buffalo Spirit Hills Ranch southeast of Browning, Montana, oversees the Blackfeet’s genetically pure “cultural” buffalo. The Tribe maintains another “commercial” herd of about 750 animals raised mainly for meat production. The animals underpin spiritual ceremonies, traditional skills, and community bonds linking the Blackfeet in Montana with their Blackfoot Confederacy First Nations in Canada.
In 2023, the Blackfeet Tribe released 49 cultural buffalo into the reservation foothills east of Chief Mountain, in what was expected to be the start of a free-roaming herd able to cross Glacier National Park and possibly Canadian boundaries just as wild elk and grizzly bears do. However, the herd of mostly young animals didn’t take to the new ground and to be re-captured and returned to Buffalo Spirit Hills Ranch.
“We just have some fencing issues,” Blackfeet Tribal Buffalo Program Director Ervin Carlson told Mountain Journal. “The park is still giving great cooperation. And the Canadians are working out some things with the ranchers there. Maybe next year, we’ll try another release.”
Carlson is preparing a herd of about 75 animals to be transferred to the Chief Mountain area on the Glacier National Park border for release in 2026. That could dovetail with related bison rewilding programs in the Blackfoot Confederacy.
Meanwhile, American Prairie is preparing a 50-animal herd for donation to the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation buffalo program this fall, and has assisted several other tribes in developing or maintaining Indigenous-managed programs. It also announced it had acquired the Anchor Ranch south of Havre, Montana, and restored public access to the notorious Bullwhacker Road, which former owners had closed to restrict hunting access to 50,000 acres of public land in the Missouri Breaks National Monument.
We’ve got 7,000 head of cattle and we lease over 500,000 acres of grass to 25 local cattle ranchers. We’ve got 900 bison. If we’re not working to save the cowboy, I don’t know who else is.”
Beth Saboe, American Prairie
But American Prairie’s efforts to earn public support have met steady push-back. Most recently, a September 5 letter cosigned by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, and representatives Ryan Zinke and Troy Downing accused American Prairie’s bison program of degrading Montana’s agricultural communities: “The effect … threatens the economic vitality of our most important industry,” the state’s elected leaders told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. They asked Burgum to block American Prairie’s attempts to convert Bureau of Land Management grazing leases from cattle to bison use.
American Prairie’s Saboe told Mountain Journal the Anchor Ranch was not acquired specifically for bison. Rather, its public access and its wildlife migration linkages to the surrounding Missouri Breaks National Monument, Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, Little Rockies, and Bears Paw mountain ranges made it an ecological keystone landscape.
“While bison are part of our mission, it’s not the only piece of the puzzle,” Saboe said. “We’ve been focused on creating a place for wildlife in perpetuity, and we’re trying to not get entrenched in the politics. We’ve got 7,000 head of cattle and we lease over 500,000 acres of grass to 25 local cattle ranchers. We’ve got 900 bison. If we’re not working to save the cowboy, I don’t know who else is.”
Wherever They Roam
Kelly, the Utah State researcher, is currently replicating his bison tolerance survey with Americans. It’s still in the questions stage, so American answers are a ways off. But he expects to see some similarities, including a strong urban-rural divide.
“We look at distance and experience and how that plays into management opinions,” Kelly said. “People living just outside nondesignated habitat have a large spread of opinions, and tend to react strongly to bison in what they think are areas they should not be. Those people have lower opinions of managers.”
One factor Kelly found that drove most other answers was whether the person had a bad experience with a bison, or knew someone who did. That same principle drives attitudes toward grizzly bears, according to University of Montana survey research. Someone living in Poland’s Białowieża Forest, where about 350 żubr are allowed to wander freely, may have been thrilled by a glimpse of their own national mammal, or enraged by a discovery of a crushed fence and a grazed field of rapeseed.
“If you move 100 kilometers away,” Kelly said, “you see very compressed opinions: We love them, we need more of them, we want them everywhere. It’s a very urban-rural split.”
Beyond Poland, other European bison refaunators have raised the numbers of Bison bonasus to nearly 10,000. And efforts are underway to return bison to England’s Forest of Kent, where they haven’t roamed for thousands of years.
North America has about 20,000 bison in eight free-roaming populations, including about 5,000 in Yellowstone Park. Those wild animals occupy and affect just 1.2 percent of their former continental habitat. Another 400,000 live in various levels of confinement and commercial management. Wherever they roam, they draw attention.
“Yellowstone Park has done surveys, and the No. 1 thing people want to see in the park is not Old Faithful,” said Murphy. “It’s not the Grand Canyon. It’s bison.”
—-
Click here to read Part 1 in the “What is Wild?” series: “Missing Lynx: Rewilding the World”
Click here to read Part 2: “Give a Man a Fish: How Stocked Waters Blurred Lines Between Wild and Native Trout“
