Buffering bison from the butcher

Two conservation groups are attempting to raise $500,000 by June to help pay for modifying and building new quarantine pens near Yellowstone National Park so more bison can be transferred to tribes and avoid slaughter.

“We’re a little over halfway to our goal,” said Scott Christensen, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

The coalition pledged to raise $250,000. Yellowstone Forever, the park’s fundraising arm, is pursuing another $250,000.

“This is one of the park’s highest priorities,” said Lisa Diekmann, president and CEO of Yellowstone Forever, who added that her group also is more than halfway toward its goal. “I think in some ways bison are even more iconic than other Yellowstone wildlife. Hopefully, our constituents love them as well.”

The Park Service will provide another $500,000 to fund the million-dollar project. Construction could start this summer, with a goal to have the expanded facilities available by next winter, according to Chris Geremia, the park’s lead bison biologist.

“We’ve shown this can work on a smaller scale,” said Cam Sholly, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park.

The new facilities will require an increase in park personnel to oversee their operation, as well.

“There’s still a lot to be done, but this is a step in the right direction,” Sholly said.

Quarantine

In a nod to the new effort, the park is now referring to the quarantine program as its Bison Conservation Transfer Program.

“It’s an indication of how important bison are, not only in Yellowstone but far beyond,” Sholly said. “Ultimately, I’d like to set a longer-term goal of not consigning Yellowstone bison to slaughter.”

Quarantine facilities are used to hold a small selection of park bison for disease testing, a protocol that takes months of isolation and tests to ensure the animals are free of brucellosis. The sickness can cause pregnant cattle and other ungulates, such as elk, to abort.

Although bison movements outside the park are feared and regulated, wild elk infected with brucellosis freely roam what’s known as the Designated Surveillance Area in Montana near Yellowstone.

The Fort Peck Tribes built a state-of-the-art quarantine facility in northeastern Montana four years ago, but the state of Montana won’t allow Yellowstone bison to be shipped to the facility until they have passed the first two of three phases of quarantine. However, diseased animals can be trucked to slaughter facilities to reduce the park’s bison population.

In total, the quarantine program takes more than three years before bison are declared disease free and can be moved to other herds.

“The tribes have done a good job as an assurance testing facility,” Sholly said. “That’s been an incredible partnership.”

In the Montana Legislature, House Bill 312 would have allowed the Fort Peck Tribes to take bison into its quarantine pens to conduct the phase two brucellosis testing, providing an opportunity for 600 bison to be isolated and tested on the reservation. The bill was tabled in committee.

“So they aren’t going to be fully utilized, which we find extremely unfortunate,” said Chamois Andersen, of Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group that helped fund the transfer of bison to tribes.

Funds

The money being raised for the new Yellowstone pens, along with federal funding, will pay for fencing to divide an existing 20-acre pen in half and build two new pens. Each pen requires double fencing so the animals don’t make nose-to-nose contact, which is one way brucellosis can be spread.

A corral used for testing the animals also would be built, in addition to water infrastructure.

There already are two quarantine facilities near Gardiner, Mont., one at the Stephens Creek corrals inside the park and the other on private land leased by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency known as APHIS. Yellowstone National Park is currently maxed out, with 105 bison in these pens.

Adding the new pens would increase the capacity to 250 animals and is projected to cut the park’s slaughter program almost in half. The new pens could boost bison transfers to Fort Peck Tribes from about 30 to 80 animals a year.

“By 2023 this could result in almost 400 wild Yellowstone bison being diverted from slaughter,” according to Yellowstone Forever’s fundraising plea. “By 2024 these bison will be ready for transport to other tribal or conservation herds.”

“We’re charting a path forward that is safe and reasonable without threatening the livestock industry,” Sholly said.

Tribes

Diverting bison into the tribal program allows the much-valued genetics of Yellowstone’s wild bison to be dispersed to other tribal herds across the state and country. Since the program began in 2016, 154 bison have been transferred to the Fort Peck Tribes.

Once bison finish the mandatory testing and quarantine phase at the reservation, they can be distributed to other tribes through the InterTribal Buffalo Council. So far, 45 of these Yellowstone bison were provided to 17 tribal entities across the United States, including Alaska.

“The Bison Conservation Transfer Program has led to the largest transfer of Yellowstone bison among Native American tribes in history,” the authors of the Bison Conservation Transfer Program wrote in a November 2020 update.

“Trailers of bison leaving Yellowstone was as significant a moment as trailers of wolves entering the park.”

Today there are about 400,000 plains bison in North America, with nearly 20,000 of them protected in about 60 publicly owned conservation herds, according to the Park Service.

In addition to providing quarantine and transfer facilities, the Fort Peck Tribes have their own herd of more than 300 bison.

“There’s so much positive momentum now with Native American tribes to do ecological and cultural restoration of bison,” Christensen said. “The thing I like about this is it has us all pulling in the right direction — conserving and transferring Yellowstone bison to tribes to divert them from slaughter.”

Why?

All of this work to preserve Yellowstone bison has been developed as an alternative to the existing capture and slaughter program. Each spring, Park Service staff rounds up bison that have migrated into the Gardiner Basin and ships a portion of them to slaughter plants. The meat and hides are provided to participating tribes.

The slaughter program is one tool used to reduce the park’s bison population, part of an agreement the Park Service made following a lawsuit with the state of Montana.

In addition, tribal and state hunters remove bison from the herd when animals migrate out of the park into the Gardiner Basin and near West Yellowstone. The hunts have become more controversial since the areas where they take place are small, concentrating the activity and making some nearby residents feel unsafe.

Seven tribes have exercised their treaty rights to hunt Yellowstone bison. Montana issues only 44 tags to state hunters, who must apply for a permit that is awarded through a lottery.

Anywhere from 200 to 400 bison are killed by hunters each year. So far this year the harvest is lower, only about 100 animals, Sholly said.

“It’s been a really light migration so far to date,” he said.

Ideally, what the Park Service and conservation groups would like to see is an expanded “tolerance zone” outside the park where bison can migrate in winter so tribal hunts aren’t so constricted, as well as providing an overflow area for bison. That will take work with the state of Montana, county officials, legislators, landowners, conservation groups, tribes and federal partners, Sholly said.

“It’s time for a discussion,” he said. “We’ve been in this framework for 20 years, what does the next 20 years look like.”

Bison

During last summer’s count the Yellowstone bison herd numbered 4,650 animals spread between a central and northern herd. Because of slaughter and hunting, the number of males in the population is increasing. They are less likely to migrate out of the park.

Since 2012, hunters have killed nearly 2,500 bison outside the park, according to the Park Service.

“Currently there are about 1.25 males for each female,” according to the Park Service. “The population is also becoming older, with animals younger than 2 years of age now making up about 25 percent of the population.”

Removing more calves from the population is skewing the age older, said Geremia, the park’s bison biologist. Such “biased demographics” are to be expected in any managed North American herd, he added. Yellowstone bison can live 12 to 20 years.

“When you manage a population, it’s going to have some indirect side effects,” Geremia said. “But it’s not at a level that’s affecting long-term conservation.”

French may be reached at french@billingsgazette.com.