Episode 10: Home on the Range

Bison have lived on the Yellowstone landscape for millennia, but the history of bison conservation has been fraught with challenges. In 2019, federal, state, and tribal partners came together to make history: charting a new path for this American icon and assuring a place for wild bison on the broader landscape.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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(Sounds of Stephens Creek Facility fade up)

Stephens Creek Worker: “OK. We’re ready for the first one”

Narrator: It’s not yet dawn when someone gives the signal. Dark figures in puffy jackets are up on a scaffold. They move into place against the pale sky. It’s quiet. Weirdly quiet for the number of people here and what’s about to happen. Everyone braces. It’s like there’s this giant, collective inhale.

(sounds of pulleys)

Narrator: At the Stephens Creek facility inside Yellowstone National Park, the staff works a system of ropes and pulleys.

(sounds of gate opening)

Narrator: A corral gate opens. And then a single bison rushes through a curved passage toward what’s called the “squeeze chute.”

(sounds of gate closing)

Narrator: The gate closes behind.

(sounds of squeeze chute)

Narrator: Inside the squeeze chute, mechanical walls close in on the animal’s flanks.

(sounds of scientists logging the animal’s I.D. number)

Narrator: His ID number is quickly logged.

(sounds of chute door opening)

Narrator: Then the chute opens. And this 3-year-old bison—a wild, American plains bison—escapes down a constricted alley in the only direction he can…

(sounds of bison running past and into the trailer)

Narrator: …and into a livestock trailer.

(sounds of loading fade)

Narrator: Many winters, hundreds of Yellowstone bison are loaded on trailers—trailers just like this one—to be slaughtered. They’re shipped to slaughter facilities to reduce the number of bison migrating outside the park and into the State of Montana. Because in the state of Montana, there is limited tolerance for wild bison on the landscape.

(sounds of truck starting)

Narrator: But these bison are not being shipped to slaughter.

(music, then sounds of truck driving away)

Narrator: These bison are going to a wide prairie on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

(music with sounds of truck fading out)

Narrator: Today on Telemetry, we’re talking about the rehoming of wild bison from Yellowstone National Park to the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. That rehoming is part of a program called “Quarantine.” The program is one of the only alternatives to shipping wild bison to slaughter. And it’s history in the making.

(music fades out, field sounds fade up: Chris Geremia talking about the biting flies at Stephens Creek )

Chris Geremia: Let’s go down to the facility.

Narrator: Doctor Chris Geremia is a wildlife biologist at Yellowstone National Park. He manages Yellowstone’s bison program.

Chris Geremia: Just be careful, sometimes there are rattlesnakes.

Narrator: Chris and I are walking around the Stephens Creek facility. It’s midsummer. Weeks before any bison will go to Fort Peck. The ground is threadbare: dead grass and dirt. The flies are pretty bad today. Stephens Creek is the epicenter of bison conservation. Bison are migratory and the states surrounding Yellowstone National Park treat bison differently than other migratory wildlife. And after a court-mediated settlement, Stephens Creek was built in the late 1990s to manage bison migrating out of the park. Today, Stephens Creek is where migrating bison are captured and either shipped to slaughter or held until they can be transferred outside of the park as part of quarantine.

Narrator: Chris says the story of quarantine is a story of success. It’s the result of decades of collaboration between a legion of federal, state, and Tribal stakeholders.

Chris Geremia: There’s so many people that want us to find another solution to sending bison to slaughter. They want us to find a way to get live bison out. We’re really just trying to show people how you can do it. That we can move live bison out of Yellowstone. We can reconnect Tribes and bison, and hopefully, in the fullness of time, reconnect bison with public lands.

Narrator: But like most stories of bison conservation, Chris says it’s also shot through with complexity and compromise.

Chris Geremia: You know, I kind of see it as you're standing in Hayden Valley—which is a huge valley in the middle of the park. And you’re waist-deep in snow. And bison conservation is like postholing across that valley. You just don’t go anywhere quickly and it’s an awful lot of hard work.

Chris Geremia: Let’s go to the original sorting pen, which we call the bullpen

(sounds of walking up metal stairs)

Narrator: We climb up onto the scaffold that overlooks the facility. This is my first time up here and I’ll be honest. The view is a little...unsettling. I’m used to seeing wild bison out in the big, green valleys of the park. Rivers and trout streams running through.

Narrator: But here, I see 55 male bison. Inside an ordinary pen. (music)

Narrator: And I’m thinking: how did we get here?

(music fades under)

Rick Wallen: One hundred or more years ago many wildlife species -- most wildlife species -- were harvested to sustain the pioneering way of people exploring the west.

Narrator: That’s Rick Wallen back in 2014. Rick used to lead Yellowstone’s bison program before retiring in 2018.

Rick Wallen: And elk, deer, pronghorn, all the large animals were of very low abundance after we colonized western United States.

Narrator: But with bison, the situation was even more troubling. It’s estimated that somewhere between 30 and 70 million bison roamed this land before European colonization. As settlers moved west, the extermination of the American bison began. Many saw bison as both a marketable commodity and a means to suppress the Tribes—Tribes who revered and depended on bison. And so within just a few decades, the bison were all but annihilated.

(music fades)

Rick Wallen: In fact, at the turn of the last century the only known wild bison were in Yellowstone National Park. There were only a couple of dozen.

Narrator: From tens of millions to a couple of dozen; A couple of dozen animals hunkered down deep in the interior of Yellowstone National Park. The only wild, free-ranging bison in the area remaining from the original great herds. It’s hard to grasp: such willful decimation. But national debate over that near-extinction of the American bison would go on to inspire one of the country’s first conservation achievements.

Rick Wallen: It was phenomenal that our forefathers had the insight to preserve Yellowstone National Park and I think they did it partly because they saw what was happening to wild bison across the country and partly to preserve the unique landscape and geological features of the landscape. So this is it. This is the location that preserved wild bison into eternity.

Narrator: In addition to the couple of dozen animals in Yellowstone, there were an estimated 300 or so bison that survived in privately-owned herds across North America. In fact, a few animals from those private herds were brought to Yellowstone to start a breeding program. And after decades of protection and restoration efforts, the number of bison in Yellowstone grew from a couple of dozen animals to a few thousand.

(music) Rick Wallen: That's a very successful program. With all of that success comes the propensity for them to wander and roam and now they want to roam well beyond the preserve we've set up here as Yellowstone National Park.

Narrator: And roaming beyond the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park has led to one of the most complex cross-boundary wildlife issues of our time.

(music)

Narrator: Three states surround Yellowstone National Park—Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Very few bison migrate outside the park into areas of Idaho and Wyoming. Most of the bison that migrate outside Yellowstone wander into the State of Montana where there’s limited tolerance for bison.

Rick Wallen: Bison are big. They scare people. They break things. Encountering a buffalo at 70 mph isn't very comforting sight.

Narrator: But there are also fears that bison could transmit a disease called brucellosis to cattle. Brucellosis is a bacterial disease that can cause miscarriages in animals like bison, elk, and domestic cattle. Domestic cattle introduced the disease to wildlife before the 1930s. Now wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone Area—including elk and bison—can give it back to cattle.

Rick Wallen: The concern about brucellosis is that if wildlife—let me back up—In the agriculture industry once an animal tests positive it has to be removed from the herd. So it's an economic loss for the rancher.

Rick Wallen: The concern really is that the livestock industry has worked really hard for many decades to eliminate the disease in livestock. So their concern is legitimate. They've worked hard, cleaned up their industry, and they'd like to see this additional threat eliminated.

Narrator: In an effort to try to eliminate or at least mitigate conflicts between humans and bison in the State of Montana, the State and the federal government reached a court-mediated settlement on how to manage Yellowstone bison. The idea was to limit the number of bison in Yellowstone and reduce the risk of bison migrating out of the park and transm