The Back Forty

The recovery of bison in North America is often described as a wildlife success story.  From the last remaining animals saved from the slaughter of the late nineteenth century, there are now about a half million animals spread across the continent.  Most of these animals, though, are semi-domesticated, with varying degrees of cattle genes as a result of past cross-breeding efforts.  Only a few free-ranging herds exist, such as those in Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park and in Yellowstone National Park.  Even in Yellowstone, however, the bison effectively are not allowed to leave the park due to fears about disease transmission between bison and livestock.

Coming back to the range?

While the bison is demographically abundant, the species remains mostly functionally extinct across its original range, which ran from Alaska to Sonora and Oregon to the Appalachians.  An essay in the April, 2008, edition of Conservation Biology, authored by 28 biologists, conservationists, and local landholders and Native American leaders, provides a bold and ambitious vision for restoring the bison to ecosystems across the continent.  The essay, titled ‘The Ecological Future of the North American Bison: Conceiving Long-term, Large-scale Conservation of Wildlife’, is an output of a collaborative process facilitated by the Wildlife Conservation Society. 

The authors review the bison’s status in terms of its historic range and the current distribution of herds across the continent, and provide an explicitly ambitious set of goals for recovering the North American bison over the next hundred years. Long-term and large-scale conservation visioning, indeed.

In the here and now, the situation is decidedly mixed for the bison across its highly fragmented former range. The recovery of semi-domestic and genetically mixed bison herds has been driven by, among other things, culturally-motivated recovery efforts by Native American tribes, and market-driven adoption of bison ranching as an increasingly popular alternative to beef.  The overwhelming barrier to re-populating the range with free-ranging wild bison is the interaction of bison with livestock, and the legal classification of bison as livestock in many places. 

The battle between local ranchers, politicians, conservationists, animal welfarists, and federal park managers along the northern and western border of Yellowstone has become an annual winter ritual.  The bison, like the ecosystem’s elk herds, attempt to move down from the park’s plateau to ranges at lower elevations during the winter.  This means moving out of the park, such as across the park’s northern boundary into Montana, where local ranchers live.  The interaction of bison and cattle in this area is problematic because the park’s bison carry brucellosis, a disease which causes abortions in cattle and which states and ranchers place a high premium, for a range of legal and economic reasons, in keeping out of their stock herds.  For the past decade or so, this has led to bison crossing out of Yellowstone being either herded back into the park by rangers, or culled or rounded up and shipped to slaughter.  More recently, Montana has tried to experiment with an annual sport hunt of the bison coming out of the park, in an effort to perhaps place some local value on these animals which often wind up being killed anyway.  This experiment met with hostility among national environmental and animal welfare activists, who protested widely a couple years ago during the hunt. 

 Ambitious visions are inspirational, but a bit more evidence of progress in finding common ground between bison conservation goals and local livestock interests would be even more encouraging, if those visions are to materialize out on the back forty.