National Parks Traveler

A $25 Million Boost For Bison

By Kurt Repanshek

Mythic, iconic, and nomadic, bison are something of an American relic, the continent's largest mammal that once roamed from Canada to Mexico and from Nevada to Virginia.

The Plains bison long wandered the prairie, both tallgrass and shortgrass, wearing "traces" into the landscape as millions of hooves pounded the ground. There are places where ancient wallows, the roughly oval spots in the dirt created by bison rolling on the ground, still dot the landscape. Bison were, and still are, revered by many Native American tribes. But bison, designated as the national mammal by President Obama in 2016, have vanished from the bulk of the country. 

The species was on the cusp of extinction at the turn of the 20th century due to the vast slaughter of bison herds during the second half of the 19th century. But a few conservation-minded individuals, including President Theodore Roosevelt, wouldn't have that, and together they mustered plans that saw the species rebound from a few hundred in 1900 to about 15,000 wild bison today. But even 15,000 is a small number compared to what once blanketed the prairies in herds so numerous it could take hours for them to ford a river or pass a point on the plains.

Since 2008, when then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne launched the Bush administration's Bison Conservation Initiative, the Interior Department has been working towards the "ecological and cultural restoration" of the species, as Brendan Moynahan, chief of the National Park Service's Wildlife Conservation Branch, told the Traveler in 2020. Now the effort is getting a huge financial lift, with the Biden administration committing $25 million from the Inflation Reduction Act for a variety of projects and initiatives, ranging from establishing new bison herds and supporting bison transfers to tribes to improving the quality of grassland ecosystems, restoring native plant communities, and supporting prescribed fire efforts.

"This is the first time this initiative has been funded, other than the [federal] agencies trying to scrape money together for it since 2008. So it's a big deal," said Elaine Leslie, the Park Service's chief of biological resources until she retired in 2019. "It's a big vote of confidence in bison restoration."

Restoration Planning

Under a Secretarial order Interior Secretary Deb Haaland issued earlier this month, a Bison Working Group with representatives from the Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Geological Survey, as well as a tribal leader, is being formed. Within 120 days this group "will initiate formal tribal consultation toward development of a Department Bison Shared Stewardship Plan. The plan will establish a comprehensive framework for American bison restoration, including strengthening long-term bison conservation partnerships." A draft plan, due by year's end, is expected to: 

• Pursue restoration of wide-ranging herds on large landscapes to support ecological and cultural restoration by facilitating discussion among federal agencies, Tribes, states, and other partners.
• Collaborate with states, Tribes, landowners, conservationists, and other interested parties toward shared bison stewardship that respects livestock health, private property rights, Tribal sovereignty, and state interests in wildlife management.
• Ensure bison herd management is informed by the best available science, including Indigenous Knowledge and adaptive management techniques, and engage with scientific and Indigenous partners to fulfill natural, cultural, and human dimensions information needs.
• Prioritize Tribally led opportunities to establish new, large herds owned or managed by Tribes and Tribally led organizations, and advance shared stewardship with Tribes on Federal land.
• Manage bison health to address the risks that disease in bison may pose to human health, domestic animals, or other wildlife, and advance application of low-stress handling principles.
• Restore and manage wild bison as native wildlife, and promote high levels of bison genetic diversity and minimize cattle introgression. 

“The American bison is inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology and American history. While the overall recovery of bison over the last 130 years is a conservation success story, significant work remains to not only ensure that bison will remain a viable species but also to restore grassland ecosystems, strengthen rural economies dependent on grassland health and provide for the return of bison to Tribally owned and ancestral lands,” Haaland said when she announced the $25 million initiative.

“New historic funding from the Inflation Reduction Act will help support the Department’s efforts to restore this iconic species and integrate Indigenous Knowledge into our shared stewardship goals," she added.

Exactly how the effort will be implemented and the $25 million will be spent remains to be seen, but with roughly 11,000 of the estimated 15,000 wild bison contained within Interior Department herds, such as those at Badlands, Wind Cave, and Yellowstone national parks, there are expected to be many projects to tackle, ranging from those as relatively straight-forward as fencing and invasive plant removal to ongoing genetic work and establishing new herds and everything that goes into that, such as developing a sound genetic blueprint for the founding animals and the on-the-ground logistics of moving animals.

There also will be costs involved with working with tribes that desire their own herds, and dealing with wildlife diseases, such as brucellosis, which can cause bison, elk, and livestock to spontaneously abort fetuses, and Mycoplasma bovis, a bacterial disease that can be deadly to bison.

And, of course, when it comes to establishing new herds, those proposals have to be run through the National Environmental Policy Act process, which takes time, studies, and money.

Leslie, who worked on bison conservation before retiring, said about $12 million of the $25 million is expected to go to the Park Service for its bison programs, and that "a little over $3 million of that is going to run the program, administrate it. So that would probably mean making sure that the Bison Conservation Initiative and the Bison Working Group have the ability to function and probably dole out some project money to certain parks and places," she said. 

Some money might also be spent in Alaska, where there are restoration efforts with Wood bison in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, said Leslie.

The working group also is expected to develop a strategy to both enhance genetic diversity within the herds and identify areas where new herds could be established. Interior Department wildlife biologists have for some years been working to decipher all the genetic lines in their herds. It's generally thought that coming out of the "great slaughter" of the late 19th century most remaining bison were held in five or six herds, ranging from Charles Goodnight's bison in Texas to a private herd in New Hampshire and even one held in New York City by the New York Zoological Society, the predecessor to today's Wildlife Conservation Society.

Under the 2020 Bison Conservation Initiative adopted by Interior, one goal is to develop "an interagency, science-based approach to support genetic diversity across  DOI  bison conservation herds." Such work would ensure that when Interior creates new herds, such as one envisioned for Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado, bison from several herds offering a robust mix of genes would be used to establish the herd and so avoid inbreeding problems. While there currently is a Nature Conservancy herd that roams part of Great Sand Dunes, it is viewed as undesireable because of the cattle genes the bison carry.

Some help on the genetics could come from Dr. Jim Derr, a Texas A&M veterinary professor who long has worked on bison genetics, including those of Yellowstone's herds. He's been working on genomics tools to uncover specific genes and their variants (e.g., true albinism, immune response genes and others). Derr and his team also are wrapping up a study of Yellowstone's bison to take another look at whether there are two genetically different herds in the park, one on the northern range and one in the center of the park.

The Park Service also is being tasked to meet with tribes to discuss how additional quarantine facilities can be established to handle Yellowstone bison involved in a protocol to ensure they are free of brucellosis, a disease that can spur spontaneous abortions. Yellowstone's work in recent years to move bison through that protocol has been successful in sending bison to tribes. Under an agreement with the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana, bison that have completed Phases I & II of the brucellosis quarantine protocol at Yellowstone and federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service facilities are sent to Fort Peck to complete the protocol. This past January saw 112 bison sent from the park to the reservation, bringing to nearly 300 the number of bison that have gone to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes there.

In addition, the evolution of managing Yellowstone bison that roam outside of the park to the north in winter has greatly reduced the number of bison sent to slaughter by relying on a hunting season in Montana and allowing treaty tribes to harvest some as well. Whereas more than 3,000 bison were sent to slaughterhouses from 2013-2019, in 2021-23 just 107 went to slaughter. So far this winter fewer than 1,000 bison have been taken by state and tribal hunters. 

New Herds

The working group also will "actively pursue bison restoration on federal and tribal lands where appropriate..."

"Where appropriate" could be interesting. Tribal lands are obvious locations for expanding bison numbers. The Assiniboine and Sioux tribes at the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana have been building their herd, as have the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes. In Utah, the Ute Tribe has been working with bison since 1986 on its Uintah and Ouray Reservation, while in Wyoming the Eastern Shoshone on the Wind River Indian Reservation has been nurturing its herd.

There has in the past been interest in establishing a herd at the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico, and the eastern border of Glacier National Park in Montana touches the Blackfeet Nation, which has its own bison herd, making the park a logical location for an expanded herd.

"I suspect there'll be a good pot of money that goes to that project," Leslie said of Glacier. "The park is heavily involved and invested in that. They've already got bison on tribal lands, but how do we expand that and make that bigger? And so that would be more or less the establishment of a new, more free-roaming herd to some extent vs. what the tribe has right now, which is kind of a livestock production herd."

Also in Montana is the American Prairie Reserve, a nonprofit operation that is working to place 5,000 bison on a jigsaw puzzle of state, federal, private, and tribal lands possibly covering 3.2 million acres. Part of that acreage in theory could include the nearby Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge, a 915,814-acre tract managed by Interior's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has a seat on the Bison Working Group.

“American Prairie supports the return of bison to tribal nations and this proposal is an opportunity for tribes to lead the way in wildlife restoration," Beth Saboe, American Prairie's senior public relations staffer, said of Interior's announcement. "This proposal was the result of negotiations between sovereign tribal nations and the federal government. We support their proposal but we remain focused on growing our own private conservation bison herd and increasing public access and recreation opportunities on the lands we manage.”

Leslie said opening up the wildlife refuge to bison "would be an excellent model" for expanding bison range.

"Our goal is to get bison back to some sort of stable numbers, because we can't really say that restored right now from what they were at one time. We're hanging on to these small herds, really," she said. "So hopefully this [$25 million infusion] will jumpstart something bigger and better."

Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico potentially could welcome bison/Patrick Cone

At Valles Caldera, Superintendent Jorge Silva-Bañuelos said the park has the right habitat for bison.

"From a resource standpoint, Valles Caldera has all of the ecosystem components suitable for North American bison," he said. "We also have a number of tribes that are potentially interested in a bison herd here, and so I've had recent conversations with some tribes about a bison herd. That's probably something that will certainly require more planning to explore as a concept. But I think it's something that I'm certainly not opposed to exploring. A lot of people come out here and reflect that it reminded them a lot of the Hayden Valley and Yellowstone."

There's likely more room for bison at Badlands National Park, which in the fall of 2019 opened 22,000 more acres made possible through private fund-raising that obtained nearly $750,000 to pay for 43 miles of fence in the north end of the national park.

Look at other federal lands in South Dakota and you'll see that the 595,715-acre Buffalo Gap National Grassland wraps much of Badlands and comes close to Wind Cave, while in North Dakota the million-acre Little Missouri National Grassland surrounds Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Over in Wyoming is the 547,499-acre Thunder Basin National Grassland, which historically was bison habitat. While the prospect of possibly adding some of those more than 2 million acres into the equation for new herds is enticing, those grasslands are under the U.S. Forest Service within the U.S. Agriculture Department, and it remains to be seen if the Bison Working Group can make inroads there.

"It's critical that [the Agriculture Department] is in this mix, to be able to work with as a partner to say, 'Okay, where are those areas that we could have free-roaming bison and where can we buy out allotments or reduce cattle allotments so that bison can persist? It's critical, but Ag has to be at the table," said Leslie.