More bison info
Rick Smith
Bozeman (MT) Daily Chronicle
Sunday, January 24, 2016
The Stephens Creek Dilemma
The debate continues on how to reduce Yellowtone bison
By Michael Wright Chronicle Staff Writer
GARDINER— At the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park sits a meticulously designed labyrinth of narrow alleyways connecting plywood-lined corrals, a holding chute and larger corrals fenced in by chicken wire attached to tall wooden logs. It doesn’t look all that different from the average cattle operation. Animals run through a chute, are tagged and separated into groups. When shipping day comes, they climb a ramp into a truck that takes them to a slaughterhouse.
But this one is fundamentally different. It’s inside Yellowstone National Park and is used to help control the population of a species legally considered wildlife by state and federal government officials: bison.
The Stephens Creek Capture Facility has a poor reputation among some wildlife advocates. After all, it’s a place that has shipped bison off to slaughter — 861 in 2006, 1,288 in 2008, the most ever, and another 507 in 2015 — in the name of reducing the number in Yellowstone.
The only people allowed there on normal days are the park service biologists and rangers who work there, people with an uncomfortable job to do.
“They don’t like having to do this,” Yellowstone spokeswoman Jody Lyle said during a recent tour. “This isn’t what they signed up for.”
But, Lyle said, they have to. The agencies that manage the nearly 5,000 bison that roam Yellowstone and the southern and western edges of Montana have been trying to reduce the population to 3,000 animals, a goal set in 2000. That goal is part of the Interagency Bison Management Plan, a multi-agency agreement that grew out of a legal settlement between Yellowstone and the state of Montana over bison wandering onto state land, something that concerns livestock producers who worry the animals will transmit brucellosis.
Since then, many of the management decisions have been fueled by the concerns over disease transmission, and cutting down on the number of bison is part of that. This year, officials have agreed to remove at least 600 and as many as 900 bison.
Stephens Creek is expected to continue to play a major role in that effort. The facility is entering its 20th year, an anniversary that comes at a time when bison managers are debating the future of all bison management, including whether this system of corrals is even necessary. For now, their answer appears to be yes.
TWO DECADES OF CAPTURE
Trapping bison started as a way to fix a problem that some thought was kind of a fluke — bison migrating out of Yellowstone National Park. Keith Aune, now the bison program manager for the Wildlife Conservation Society, worked for FWP at the time, and he said the outmigration in the 1980s seemed to be a “new phenomenon.”
“I think people early on kept thinking it was a rarity, it was something unusual,” Aune said. “It was winter snow, it was fire ... there was some thing that made the bison come out.”
Eventually, that attitude changed. Bison were regularly wandering into Montana, a state that didn’t have any tolerance for them at the time because of fears over disease transmission. More than half of the female bison in Yellowstone National Park are believed to have been at least exposed to brucellosis, a disease that can cause cattle to abort their calves and is transmitted through afterbirth.
Trapping operations first happened in the early 1990s, and have continued off and on since then. Two other traps on the west side of the park have been run by the Montana Department of Livestock in the past. One was on private land, near Duck Creek, the one Aune called “the original trap.” Another was on Forest Service land at Horse Butte.
Marty Zaulski, director of the Montana Department of Livestock, said they had used the trap on private land in recent years for very small trapping operations. It doesn’t capture bison in large number, Zaluski said, because fewer animals migrate out there than do near Stephens Creek. The ones that do are part of the central herd, the smaller of Yellowstone’s two bison herds.
Trapping happened on the north side in 1992, but there wasn’t a permanent facility here until 1995, when construction on the Stephens Creek facility began. Its first full season of operation came the next year.
It sits on a flat area pushed up against the mountains, a section of land that is something of a thoroughfare for bison as they move north.
Mammoth district backcountry ranger Brian Helms has worked there since day one. There have been improvements made to the facility since then, he said. The railed catwalks lining the corrals are one. That’s where workers stand as they move bison around the place. Helms said that in the early days, the workers stood on two-by-six pieces of wood instead.
A holding chute bison are pushed into is relatively new, too. When bison are locked in the chute, park officials take blood samples, weigh the animals and estimate their age, data they use to get to know the population as well as they can. Animals that will go to slaughter get ear and back tags there too.
In the past, the facility had a run-of-the-mill squeeze chute. The staff would use nose tongs to pull the animal’s head to one side so they could do their work. In 2008, that old squeeze chute was replaced with a hydraulic one. Workers move levers to make the chute squeeze or loosen. The head catch automatically turns the animal’s head to one side, eliminating the need for nose tongs.
Behind the chute, a cattle prod lied on the catwalk. Another 20 feet or so behind that was a whip. Lyle said workers aren’t allowed to hit bison to convince them to go where they need them. They use noise instead, Lyle said, but the prod is used to push them far enough into the chute to lock them up.
For slaughter, bison are sent into holding pens in groups of 15. Trucks show up early the next morning. Bison are loaded on, and each trailer is sealed by a U.S. Department of Agriculture official. If multiple trucks are going that day, they all leave together.
Animals from this facility have been transported to research facilities and quarantine operations as well, but slaughter remains the most controversial aspect of bison management, one that wildlife advocates have long pushed to end.
After a record number of bison caught at Stephens Creek were sent to slaughter in 2008 (1,288), the use of the trap slowed. From 2009 to 2013, only nine bison were sent to slaughter.
That low number is due in part to then-Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer. In 2011, he issued an executive order that prevented the slaughter of hundreds of captured bison.
Other attempts to prevent slaughter have been done via civil disobedience. In 2014, a member of the Buffalo Field Campaign chained himself to a barrel in the middle of the road, a move that landed him in jail and delayed trucks taking animals to a slaughterhouse for several hours.
Despite the controversy, bison managers say that option is necessary to meet population reduction goals. In past years, the trap had been up and running and trucks had already taken animals to slaughter by now.
But snow was the only thing inside the corrals Wednesday. The trap won’t open until at least Feb. 15, and even then, how active it will be depends on how the hunting season goes.
In the fall, some tribal officials raised concerns that bison trapped early in the hunting season were taking away from their hunting opportunity. They called for completely shutting down Stephens Creek this year, which Yellowstone and Montana officials objected to. Instead they agreed to a compromise — not trapping until at least Feb. 15, and then only trapping if hunting won’t reach the reduction goal.
They agreed to that in hopes that hunting might play a bigger role in the controversial business of population reduction. Hunting is by far their preferred method of population management, but hunting doesn’t come without controversy.
THE FIRING LINE
Beattie Gulch is the first sliver of National Forest land reached by heading north on the Old Yellowstone Trail. That means it’s the first place where bison can be shot on the west side of the river. Each year, state and tribal hunters descend on this area, hoping to bag one of the big mammals and fill their freezer with meat.
Those who live nearby aren’t terribly enamored with the annual event. Sue Oliver and her husband have lived there full-time since 2013. Across the road from her house is the Beattie Gulch Trailhead, and next to that is a meadow dotted with skeletons and gut piles hunters have left behind. The park boundary is a mere stone’s throw south.
That pinch point has been an issue for years. Some hunters try to take their bounty the moment the animals cross the park line, sometimes causing the herd to rush back into the national park where they can’t be shot.
In an effort to try to let bison disperse farther on the landscape, three of the tribes and the state of Montana agreed to take four weekdays off from hunting every other week and to try to shoot the animals farther from the road.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional supervisor Sam Sheppard said now isn’t the time to issue a verdict on whether the agreement is helping the situation.
“It’s a little too early to tell,” he said. He added that he thought the deal between the three tribes and the state was a “thoughtful approach” to solving the problems at Beattie Gulch.
In some ways, it seems to have had some positive effects. Bison have been spotted as far north as Cutler Meadows, a swath of land near the mouth of Yankee Jim Canyon well north of Gardiner, an area wildlife officials hope the animals will use more. And early in January, officials and residents in the area said the gut piles hunters leave behind had been farther from the road compared to the past.
Yet, that agreement hasn’t eased Oliver’s concern. The hunting pressure hasn’t totally disappeared during the closure days. One tribal government with hunting rights, the Shoshone-Bannock, didn’t sign onto the agreement and has been spotted hunting there on the days when other hunters agreed not to go. Oliver said she saw them shooting a bison closer to the road than the other hunting groups had agreed to.
Officials from the Shoshone-Bannock didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Oliver is troubled that they aren’t beholden to the deal worked out with the other hunters. She is concerned for her own safety when she drives past the hunters. She has seen as many as 35 hunters line up and shoot into one group of bison. She said children sometimes play in part of the area where hunters take aim.
“I’m worried someone will be killed,” she said.
Public safety worries aside, officials worry hunting won’t remove enough bison. Historically, hunter harvest of bison hasn’t been robust enough to meet IBMP goals for population reduction. In 2015, for example, 223 bison were taken by hunters, far short of that year’s goal of removing 900 from the population. That year, 518 bison were removed from the population using the trap — 507 of which went to slaughter.
So far this year, FWP has confirmed the hunter harvest of 109 bison. FWP spokeswoman Andrea Jones said she believes there have been at least another 50 that have been taken but haven’t been officially confirmed.
Unless hundreds more are taken in the next few weeks, it’s likely the trap will run.
“Hunting cannot meet that goal for us alone,” said Lyle, the park spokeswoman.
NATURAL AND POLITICAL TERRAIN
Right now, the state and the park are in the middle of rewriting the IBMP. They hope to have a draft out later this year. In 2015, the public had a chance to comment on a range of alternatives that included changes to almost every aspect of it, including ideas like ending slaughter or introducing a sterilization program.
The population goal of 3,000 is even up for debate.
Yellowstone biologist Rick Wallen said during the tour that the park could potentially hold as many as 7,000 bison, but that social tolerance of the bison in Montana is a limiting factor. Bison like to migrate, and some people in Montana don’t want them in their backyards.
That attitude itself is part of the reason the Stephens Creek facility even exists.
“The state of Montana has told us repeatedly they want to limit the number of animals leaving the national park,” Wallen said.
Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock recently issued a decision to expand year-round tolerance areas on the west side of the park from Horse Butte north, ending at Buck Creek just south of Big Sky. The IBMP partners still need to approve that, and Montana legislators recently sent a letter to the partners opposing the proposal, citing public safety and economic concerns.
Bison advocates hailed it as a step in the right direction, but said it could have gone further. It expands area that the central herd of bison — the ones that migrate west of the park — are allowed to go to, though they haven’t been seen in the expanded area in great density in recent years.
The central herd of bison is smaller than the northern herd, the one that migrates out at Gardiner, which makes the northern migration a bit more contentious — especially since the areas where hunters can take bison are limited. In addition to Beattie Gulch, hunters take bison on the east side of the river in Deckard Flats and near Eagle Creek, but there aren’t many more options for hunters.
“The north side is the issue because there’s so few areas to hunt,” Yellowstone biologist PJ White said. “Over the future, we have to get bison more distributed on the landscape.”
After the tour of Stephens Creek was over, White looked to the north. The valley started wide, then the mountains narrowed, funneling into Yankee Jim Canyon. Bison want to be in the flatter areas, he said, they don’t want to be on the side of a mountain.
“Where they historically probably wanted to go was the Paradise Valley,” White said. “You watch them, they’ll follow the same places the elk go ... it’s in their gene. All these animals, they read the terrain.”
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