Bison Dispatch #2

Transcript

 AMY: Hey, Threshold listeners, it's Amy Martin here with more on the bison at Yellowstone National Park. A few weeks ago, we told you about a new plan for managing the bison herd that Yellowstone National Park released in August. That plan is in draft form, and it maps out three alternatives for how to manage the herd into the future. Importantly, those three options are open for public comment until September 25th of this year. If you missed that dispatch, I'd recommend going back to listen to it now. It's my conversation with Morgan Warthin, who's the chief of public affairs at Yellowstone National Park. We also asked you to send us your questions about bison and what this might mean for the future of the herd, which we're going to try to answer in this dispatch. And to help me, I'm joined by two other members of the Threshold team, Erika Janik, Threshold’s managing editor.

ERIKA: Hello.

AMY: And Sam Moore, our social media storyteller and associate producer.

SAM: Hello.

AMY: So I think just to kick us off, I want to kind of put myself in the mindset of a person who maybe dreams of going to Yellowstone someday or had their dream trip. People come to this park from all over the country, all over the world, millions of visitors every year. And one of the big reasons why people come to Yellowstone is to see animals. It's really an amazing place in the U.S. to see all kinds of wild animals. And maybe this is obvious to some or maybe not, but it just feels important to make clear that it's not like Yellowstone has a fence around it. It's a huge landscape. And part of what makes it work, actually, is that it's got a lot of ecological connectivity with the surrounding landscape that's outside of the park. So that means that animals migrate in and out all of the time and a whole bunch of them do those migrations and nobody notices. But bison are different. And that gets us into this question from a listener. Why are bison managed at all? And I'm going to hand that one to you, Erika.

ERIKA: Yeah, I think that lack of a fence around the park speaks to why bison are managed. We really manage bison and other wild animals because of us humans. We're really managing our relationship with another animal. And we do this primarily through putting some kind of controls around the size of an animal population or its habitat. And this can be both to protect an animal that is endangered or maybe to reduce an animal population that we feel is too large for any number of reasons. And not every animal is managed. Your neighborhood squirrels and bunny rabbits, for example, are not under a management plan, though my dogs tend to feel differently about that. Among the animals that have management plans in the U.S., though, are black bears, elk and wolves. And as I said, these management plans are really about us we’re spreading out, we’re taking up more space. We're pushing animals into smaller spaces or different spaces, changing their habitats completely, disrupting their natural rhythms, all kinds of disruptions that humans are really causing for other animals and for bison. One of their natural rhythms, as we talked about before, is that they really love to roam, and lots of people aren't so keen on having bison roam wherever they want to go. There is some obvious reasons that bison are really big and there are some safety issues with them. But also there's something else that people are really concerned about, and that's fears of a disease called brucellosis. Brucellosis is a bacterial disease in all sorts of wildlife. Native to North America had caught it from European livestock. The disease basically causes pregnant cows to have miscarriages, and it's been almost completely eradicated from livestock in the U.S. But some wildlife, including elk and bison that live in and around Yellowstone, can still have it. And one of the scary things for some people is that it looks like those animals can give it back to the cattle. So part of the plan for managing bison has really been about controlling the spread of brucellosis. But it's really important to note that to date there haven't been any cases of wild bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle and the continued studying and monitoring of disease transmission. In this case, the lack of transmission of disease from bison is part of the reason that Yellowstone is considering management plans that could actually increase the size of the herd.

SAM: Another question we got that's pretty important is how do you actually leave a comment on the plan?

ERIKA: Such a good question. Like a lot of government things, it's a little bit clunky, but there are actually two ways to comment on the draft. One of them is by mail and I mean actual like put a stamp on it, put it in your mailbox kind of mail, and the other is online through the National Parks Services planning Environment and public comment site. We’ll include links to the page in our show notes and on our website as well as the address to actually mail your comment. And if that works better for you, if you're online, though, and go to that web. Site, you'll find a list of all the parks with plans open for comment on the home page, which I found kind of interesting just to see how much is going on at all of these different places, all kinds of different things from other animal management plans to the building of other structures at parks. But if you go to that page, you'll find Yellowstone on the list and you just follow the instructions right there for submitting a comment. It'll ask for your name and contact information, and then you can put your comment in the comment box there. You only have until midnight Mountain Time on September 25th to submit your comment. So if you're going to do it, you should probably do it soon.

AMY: Awesome. And with these environmental impact statements and management plans, I believe there's like a legal requirement even for them to review all the comments. So don't don't feel like your comment will just be thrown into some void. It actually matters that anybody who cares to submits their thoughts. So those are some of the mechanics of what's going on here, what the what and the why of bison management. But we also got some really great questions about what's happening on the ground.

ERIKA: That's right. Or what could happen. One listener asked us how many bison the area could support. Toss it to you, Sam.

SAM: Sure. Well, the biologists in Yellowstone have studied this a lot. They've developed population models for bison, and their interpretation is that the park could support up to 10,000 bison, which is a lot more than we even see as an option in the management plan. We can also put some links to a couple of the really good papers that go into this question in the show notes. But the second and I think the more important part of this question is that bison evolved to migrate. So we're talking about a carrying capacity for bison. What are the boundaries of what we're saying the landscape is that the bison are living in. So is it this huge landscape, which is basically all of interior in North America that bison evolved in that has a carrying capacity? Or is it just this sort of arbitrary landscape that exists based on the political lines that people have drawn over the Greater Yellowstone area? And pretty much all the scientists I read, regardless of how many bison they think Yellowstone right now can support, agree that it's a different question to talk about free roaming migratory bison than non migratory bison that are constrained by a boundary. And that's basically what the whole debate is about. And so that gets us back to square one, which is how many bison do you think should be in the park and how freely should they be able to roam outside the park? And that's what we're all being asked to comment on right now. And so the target population size that we're seeing in the alternatives in the bison management plan, it's less about what the physical landscape of Yellowstone can support and more about what the social and political landscape of the area can support, and especially how we feel about bison leaving the park and how many we feel can cross that political boundary.

AMY: That's so interesting. And it also kind of connects up to another question that we got from a listener that was talking about how circumstances outside of the park may have changed since season one. And as a person who lives in Montana myself, the state overall has gone through some really big changes in those, you know, 5 to 7 years, particularly with the pandemic there, just like a lot of people who moved to Montana bought property. Property values have skyrocketed. And yeah, it's a it's a quickly changing state and particularly around Bozeman and that whole area, that kind of corridor between Bozeman in the northern border of Yellowstone National Park, which is also the place where the bison like to leave. So I'm curious, you know, I don't want to speak for that community. I don't I don't live over there. But what did you find out, Sam, in terms of how circumstances outside the park may have changed since we released season one?

SAM: Yeah, well, like you said, Amy, a lot of that land next to Yellowstone, even though much of it is National forest and so is protected, the two counties north of Yellowstone, Gallatin and Park Counties is where most of the bison go to in the winter when they leave the park. But it's also one of the fastest growing regions in Montana. I've heard just casually people blaming that on the show. Yellowstone with Kevin Costner, which also takes place in the Paradise Valley where you interviewed people, Amy, for season one is just north of Yellowstone. And that show actually has a subplot involving brucellosis. There's there's a ton of other reasons besides a TV show that people are moving here. But the bottom line is that. Private land near the park where the bison go when they leave. The park is becoming more residential, and agriculture, which means farming and ranching, is declining as an overall part of the economy there. So it's not totally clear what this means. It might mean less conflict with ranchers in terms of brucellosis, but it could also mean less open space, less farmland, less of that connectivity for wildlife to move out of the park. And it could be more more conflict with people who are building and living in the communities outside the park.

ERIKA: That's fascinating. It really does sound like conditions outside of the park are are changing and changing fast. And that, as we've said, has a really big impact on how bison are managed. And another big part of bison management are the tribes that live in that area. And we did get a question about the input that tribal leaders have had in shaping the alternatives.

AMY: Yeah, this is a great question. So there are 27 different tribal governments that are associated with Yellowstone National Park. I was able to talk to Rich Janson, who is the head of Department of Natural Resources for one of those tribal governments, the Confederated Salish and Kootenay Tribes. And Rich said that at least from his perspective, his understanding was that there was a lot of conversation and consultation with the cascade in terms of shaping these alternatives. And I think just to place it in context, he said, more fundamentally, he feels like the relationship between the tribes and Yellowstone National Park is only getting better. There's definitely, you know, been some real conflict and and hard feelings between the park and the tribes. Because as much as we all love our national parks in the United States, the truth of it is, is that it is another way in which white settlers took control of land that was being controlled by indigenous people. And so there's a real, you know, mixture of things going on there of like in a way, thank God this landscape was preserved and these animals were preserved, but also a whole lot of people lost control and the rights to hunt and and move and live on lands that they had traditionally done all of those things on. So I was really happy to hear Ridge say that from his perspective that there is increasing conversation and increasing sense of responsibility to include tribal leaders in all kinds of different decision making. And he also said that although the tribes were consulted in helping to shape the alternatives, they are also now in the process of reviewing them themselves and will submit a comment based on their own science and tribal conversations about which alternatives they would prefer and why, or maybe even tweaks to some of the alternatives that were presented.

ERIKA: That is all the time we have to answer your questions. We really want to thank everyone for submitting their questions. It was really fun to hear from all of you and you asked such great questions that definitely were questions that we had and that made us think. We will keep following this plan and sharing developments as we have them, so be sure to stay subscribed to Threshold. Subscribe to our newsletter if you aren't already a subscriber and follow us on social media.

AMY: And don't forget that the deadline to submit your comment to Yellowstone National Park in terms of weighing in on what you think would be best for managing the bison in the park is September 25th and it's midnight mountain time, correct?

ERIKA: That's right. Midnight Mountain time. We'll post links to how to submit your comment, as well as the mailing address in case you want to mail your comment in, in our show notes and on our website. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.