Back to StoriesYellowstone, Montana Officials Disagree on Bison Management
November 13, 2023
Yellowstone, Montana Officials Disagree on Bison ManagementMontana and Yellowstone National Park have disagreed for years about how to manage Yellowstone bison. Those tensions recently ratcheted up.
Bison have for centuries migrated from the area now known as Yellowstone National Park north into the land controlled by public and private interests in what's now the state of Montana. With many interests vying for control over bison management, who's acting in the interests of the bison? Photo by Jim Peaco/NPS
by Julia Barton
Once roaming the Great Plains in
the tens of millions, the American bison is arguably one of the West’s most
iconic species. After a near brush with extinction, roughly 20,500 Plains bison
are now in conservation herds across North America, according to the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, a quarter of which call Yellowstone National Park home.
Nearly a quarter million more live in commercial herds.
Yellowstone bison are comanaged
by a handful of organizations, not all of whom agree on priorities and best
practices. When they’re inside the park, bison are under the management of the
National Park Service. But when herds migrate outside of park boundaries into
Montana, control shifts to the Interagency Bison Management Plan, a group consisting
of the Park Service and seven other federal, state and tribal organizations,
that was created in 2000 as a result of a court-mediated settlement regarding
management rights to Yellowstone bison.
At its annual fall meeting on
Oct. 31, members of the interagency group expressed disapproval of a draft Environmental Impact
Statement released in August by Yellowstone officials seeking to update the
park’s bison management program. The statement is the first new guiding
document to bison management since the IBMP was formed, and the park fielded
thousands of public comments in response to the proposed initiatives.
A staggering 27 percent of Yellowstone bison were killed or removed from the park last winter, resulting in an estimated low of 3,960 bison in May.
“Historically, success in bison
management has only occurred when NPS and the State have cooperated and managed
together,” wrote Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte in a 17-page Oct. 10 letter that will be evaluated by the
park alongside the nearly 30,000 public comments submitted. “YNP’s
uncollaborative and obstinate posture is reminiscent of a time before the IBMP,
when tensions between YNP and the State were high and litigation prevalent.” In
a recent interview
with Mountain Journal, former Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk discussed the
interagency tensions surrounding bison conservation and management before the
IBMP, among other topics.
A staggering 27 percent of
Yellowstone bison were killed or removed from the park last winter, resulting
in an estimated low of 3,960 bison in May. Following a productive 2023 spring breeding
season, the current population has rebounded to near the 10-year average of
4,890, according to a recent IBMP report. Although populations have
seemingly recovered, the loss triggered alarm bells for park officials,
prompting the draft EIS statement to suggest that IBMP groups should not remove
more than 1,100 animals this upcoming winter.
Montana law limits where bison
can move outside of the park, and the animals are valued by both state and
tribal hunters. As such, management seeks to strike a balance between
supporting a healthy population and avoiding mass migrations that could cause
problems outside of the park, according to the IBMP website. A primary concern
in Montana is the transmission of brucellosis, a harmful bacterial disease,
from bison to livestock. New research, however, suggests that bison are no
longer the brucellosis-transmitting culprits they’ve been made out to be.
“Brucellosis in [Greater
Yellowstone] cattle are traceable genetically and epidemiologically to
transmission from elk, not bison,” according to a 2020 study by the National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. It is new data and
circumstances such as this that prompted Yellowstone to update its
management protocol.
“Brucellosis in [Greater Yellowstone] cattle are traceable genetically and epidemiologically to transmission from elk, not bison." – National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
The
primary ways the population is currently controlled is through hazing, tribal
and state hunts outside of park boundaries, capture and transfer to tribes for
shipment to slaughter, and capture for transfer to tribal herds following
brucellosis testing through the Bison Conservation
Transfer Program.
Yellowstone’s EIS outlines three proposed options for future management.
Despite the data presented in the
EIS, a slew of Montana state officials and organizations, including Gianforte,
the Montana Department of Livestock, and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks,
don’t believe Yellowstone’s plans would do enough to manage the population. The
spread of brucellosis to Montana livestock is still of primary concern to
officials.
“In its haste to blame elk, YNP
fails to address or examine how increased bison population and distribution
will affect elk presence, movement, and distribution in [Greater Yellowstone]
and thereby exacerbate the spread of brucellosis to other wildlife and
livestock,” Gianforte wrote in his letter to the park.
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