Study: More room for bison wouldn't result in fewer bison deaths

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

Giving bison more elbow room outside Yellowstone National Park probably wouldn't mean fewer dead bison, according to a new study released this week.

Rather, it likely would mean even more killing because it would increase the size of the herd, the study says.

"Increasing bison habitat exterior to (the park) is an effective strategy to increase the total regional population, but would not reduce the number of bison that would need to be culled annually in the regional landscape surrounding the park," says the study team, led by C. Cormack Gates, a professor of environmental design at the University of Calgary.

Bison often are killed or trapped if they wander too far into Montana because of fears they will spread brucellosis to cattle. It's a situation that pleases few people, but solutions have been elusive.

The National Park Service hired Gates last year to study bison issues, particularly how they travel. He was selected for two reasons: he's a respected scientist; and he had no connection with any of the factions in the ongoing debate over how to handle the park's growing bison herd.

Much of that debate centers around how bison use roads groomed for snowmobile and snowcoach travel.

Gates found that while bison use the hard-packed roads to ease their travels inside the park, they don't necessarily follow them to park borders, where traps or guns often await them.

One road has a particular impact on how bison use the park. That route, from the Firehole River to Mammoth Hot Springs, allows bison from the park's central herd to move to territory occupied by the park's smaller, northern herd.

Adding more animals to the northern range could cause problems. Since bison leave the park principally to find food, competition for forage could cause a mass exodus, which could lead to a lot of dead bison.

Killing too many bison "could jeopardize the viability of the northern range population," he said.

Gates advocates further research on that road, an idea the Park Service has discussed for a decade.

He also advocated setting aside more winter range for bison in the Gardiner area.

To compile the study, Gates pored over scientific literature, both published and unpublished, and interviewed scientists, government officials and environmentalists.

He also learned something that many bison observers have known for a long time.

Efforts to deal with bison "suffer from fractured governmental jurisdiction, inefficient and ineffective policy processes and have been unable to define the common interest," the study says.

He described the process used to create the 5-year-old state of Montana/federal bison management plan as "a divisive, deeply-rooted power-balancing struggle to protect fragmented and overlapping jurisdictions and avoid risk."

Meanwhile, the public feels shut out of the decision making process, so people resort to the courts.

He urged people to start collaborating and figure out what is acceptable.

The status quo isn't accomplishing much, he found.

"The result is ongoing conflict, substantial annual and incremental costs for the agencies in time and resources, and promotion of the notion that more science, more information, will somehow result in wiser incomes," he wrote.

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