Will wild buffalo ever wander the Wind River again?

Outside of Montana and Wyoming, most people don’t realize just how special a case buffalo, American bison, are within North American wildlife management. The few wild herds of buffalo that still exist are not allowed to wander where they want, like elk or deer. But Tribal leaders on the Wind River Indian Reservation and elsewhere are now forcing the question: What would it mean for us to live where the buffalo roam again?

Alongside a creek nestled between the shoulders of the Wind River Range in Wyoming, researchers and Tribal members are uncovering the ancient remains of one of the largest and most sophisticated communal hunting complexes discovered in the West. Use of this complex, spread over 18 square miles, may date back 12,000 years. It was built by ancient peoples to drive herds of buffalo and other game over cliff sides, called buffalo jumps. 

“We have a long history of buffalo as Shoshone people: We call ourselves the buffalo eaters,” said Jason Baldes, the Tribal Buffalo Program Manager for the National Wildlife Federation’s Tribal Partnerships Program and a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. “It’s good to see how our traditional knowledge of that place coincides with what we are finding in terms of archaeological evidence.” 

Ancestors of today’s Shoshone harvested perhaps hundreds of buffalo each year at these buffalo jumps. But today, the area around the archaeological site doesn’t have any buffalo. A herd of 2,000 elk spend their winter here after migrating 60 miles from the high-elevation meadows near the southern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Archaeologists and Tribal members working on the hunting complex project suspect that for thousands of years, up until about 200 years ago, wild buffalo made a similar migration. A movement to recover those migrations is growing, but it faces a litany of obstacles—practical, political, cultural and ideological.

“If and when we can create a situation where we could restore partial or entire buffalo migrations,” Baldes said, “we will have to find more contemporary ways to do it.” 

Wild buffalo restoration on Tribal land

Possessing a quiet intensity necessary for navigating the complexities of buffalo restoration, Baldes is at the helm of one such effort to restore ancient connections to an animal that was once central to many tribes’ cultures. In 2016, Baldes brought 10 buffalo to the reservation to start the first conservation herd in Wyoming. A few years later, he added five Yellowstone bulls through the first intertribal transfer of its kind, with the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. The Arapaho tribe that shares Wind River with the Shoshone followed suit, starting a herd of their own. 

Today, there are 131 buffalo on the Wind River Reservation: The Shoshone buffalo herd has 75 individuals, and the Northern Arapaho has 56. Baldes has worked extensively to secure habitat for buffalo on the reservation by reprioritizing expiring range units that were historically designated for cattle. The goal is for buffalo to serve as an act of reconciliation, a mechanism for ecological restoration and for the revitalization of traditional life ways, such as buffalo hunting.

Both buffalo herds are still confined within fenced pastures, but Baldes hopes they will be able to merge them together and manage them as free-roaming wildlife in the future.

“A benchmark for conservation populations is a minimum of 1,000 animals in order to maintain genetic heterogeneity and variability,” he said. “While some tribes across the West now have hundreds of buffalo…we could accommodate thousands of buffalo here. We have the habitat to do that.” 

An analysis by the National Wildlife Federation found that the Wind River Indian Reservation has more than one million acres of suitable buffalo habitat, which is comparable to Yellowstone National Park. And while Wind River’s herds are heralded as a conservation success story in the making, Baldes has faced opposition to expanding the herds’ range, from both within the tribal community and outside. Most opposition mirrors that surrounding Yellowstone National Park: fear of disease and competition with cattle producers for grazing. 

“We were forced into these ways of thinking by the federal government, some people adopted those lifestyles that are around agriculture,” Baldes said. “Tribal ag producers don’t deny that buffalo are important, but they also can’t jeopardize their way of living.”

“If and when we can create a situation where we could restore partial or entire buffalo migrations, we will have to find more contemporary ways to do it.” 

– Jason Baldes

The brucellosis debate

Revitalizing historic migrations and restoring buffalo to the landscape will be a steep challenge, even with the conservation herd Baldes currently manages as a strong start. At the heart of the issue is bovine brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to abort their fetuses and sometimes to become infertile. In the U.S., after decades of intensive nationwide quarantine and control efforts, bovine brucellosis currently persists only in the buffalo and elk populations in the Greater Yellowstone Area. For buffalo or elk to transmit brucellosis to cattle, they must abort a fetus or give birth to deposit infected tissues that cattle then contact. 

As former state veterinarian in Wyoming, where enforcing brucellosis control is a part of the job, and a rancher, Dwayne Oldham has a unique perspective. For him, the greatest risk is not from the buffalo themselves, who are currently brucellosis-free outside of Yellowstone, but from elk spreading brucellosis to both cattle and wild buffalo.

Usually, elk move to higher elevations on public land to calve in the spring, removing potential contact with cattle. But as elk populations have boomed in Wyoming, more and more elk have been spending the winter near or on private lands. These changing movement patterns may already pose a threat to the cattle industry in the region even without the added element of buffalo, according to Oldham. He believes that if buffalo shared wild landscapes with elk, their territories would overlap and elk could infect buffalo, ending their current disease-free status.

“If we have bison turned loose, we would get some crossover there between elk and bison, and with that, we increase the risk of having [disease] in the cattle,” Oldham said.  

Despite the low likelihood of any individual transmission event, the risks of a brucellosis outbreak are serious. Brucellosis causes cattle to abort their calves, reducing the livestock operation’s reproductive rates. But more importantly, the marketability of their animals declines substantially. Brucellosis-contaminated meat can’t be sold, and most buyers wouldn’t consider purchasing cows coming from areas known to have brucellosis cases. “If you hit a positive, you can do a three-year test and removal, and everything that is positive you pull out of herd and send to slaughter,” explained Oldham. “You have  to keep doing it until you have three years of no positives. Or you just slaughter them all and start over.”

The costs of this quarantine period can be more than just financially devastating, though. “You can’t graze your summer range, so you’ve got buy feed, and all of that compromises your grazing program,” said Erik Kalsta, Montana cattle rancher and Working Wild Challenge program manager for Western Landowners Alliance. “Three years without the cattle in rotation is basically a restart on any weed control or other range health work you’ve been implementing, too. Plus, the social and emotional costs are really incalculable.”

The most controversial hunt in the West

After Nez Perce Tribal representatives wrote to Montana claiming unfulfilled treaty rights to buffalo, the state granted them and other tribes the right to hunt buffalo migrating out of the park. In 2006, the first buffalo hunt took place. 

“Hunting is a very important part of our living and beliefs…we need more opportunity to have these experiences,” said Wes Martel, the Senior Wind River Conservation Associate for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and a tribal member who previously served as the Chairman of the Fish & Game Committee for the Shoshone & Arapaho Tribes.

Because development and geography constrain where buffalo can move out of the park onto other federal land where the tribes could access them, most buffalo hunting happens each year in a place called Beattie Gulch, just outside of Gardiner, Montana. In the late winter of 2023, particularly harsh conditions pushed over 2,000 bison out of the park, where the agreement requires that they be hazed back into the park or slaughtered. The winter saw record numbers of bison killed, over 1,100, many by Tribal hunters.

Wild buffalo advocates, animal rights advocates and some local residents have raised concerns that the hunt is unsporting, inhumane and dangerous. Bonnie Lynn, a board member of Yellowstone Voices and a Gardiner resident, told KBZK Bozeman in February 2023, “There’s no fair chase with habituated animals, and certainly this is not safe, nor is it ethical.” A month before, a Nez Perce youth had been struck by a stray bullet while field dressing a buffalo. An agreement between the Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation limits the number of tribal hunters in Beattie Gulch to 25 per day. Montana issues 40 permits total for the Beattie Gulch area each season, November 15 to February 15. 

Some of the tribes believe the government has used them as a tool for bison management rather than supporting treaty rights through a more ethical hunt and have pushed for permission to hunt bison within the park. But, “it would take an act of Congress to allow tribal hunting within Yellowstone,” Martel noted, “and [that] would be nearly impossible in today’s day and age.” The Lacey Act of 1894 prohibits hunting within national parks as well as the possession of wildlife parts from the park. Fostering the political will to amend the act would be a tall order. Restoring wild buffalo on tribal lands takes on even more importance under these constraints.

“Hunting is a very important part of our living and beliefs…we need more opportunity to have these experiences.”

– Wes Martel

Updating the IBMP

In August 2023, Yellowstone National Park released a draft Environmental Impact Statement that would update the Interagency Bison Management Plan for the first time in 23 years. A final plan is expected sometime in 2024. Visit here to read the plan or submit a comment: 
onland.link/IBMP-2023

Political animals

The heart of the controversy surrounding buffalo restoration plays out every winter outside Yellowstone National Park, where their migrations are the subject of intense conflict. When migrating buffalo seek forage in the lower elevation areas outside the park’s western and northern boundaries, they unknowingly walk into the crossfire between livestock producers, environmentalists, hunters, activists and management agencies.

Montana, like Wyoming, doesn’t recognize the species as wildlife, limiting their freedom to roam beyond the park. After Montana sued the National Park Service in 1995 over buffalo leaving the park, Yellowstone and the state developed the Interagency Bison Management Plan, which stipulates that the park should have no more than 3,000 animals to lower the risk of bison coming onto the surrounding private lands. 

Confining buffalo to Yellowstone National Park affords Montana brucellosis-free status, which is important for interstate exports and trade agreements. Montana’s Department of Livestock estimates that losing that brucellosis-free status would cost the state livestock industry millions of dollars. Forage competition; damage to fences, crops and other property; and the danger of road collisions with one-ton animals are concerns for private landowners as well.

Nonetheless, in light of recent studies showing the park’s ability to support higher numbers, park officials in August 2023 proposed updating the plan to manage for a population between 3,500 to 6,000 bison after calving. The proposal would seek to end the slaughter program and control populations through increases in hunter harvest and tribal transfer.

“[The 4,000 to 6,000 range] is generally where we are right now,” park superintendent Cam Sholly told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 2022. “That is generally where every single person sitting around this table, including the three state representatives, have agreed that we should be.” 

The plan has come under attack from both the livestock industry and wild buffalo advocates, however. “The Park’s plan represents a piecemeal approach to wild bison management that entrenches the status quo,” said Buffalo Field campaign executive director James Holt in a written response to the draft IBMP, “at a time when we must be acting in a holistic manner.” Meanwhile, in public comments before the most recent draft was released, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte expressed opposition to any alternatives that would increase herd size above the current plan’s target. (The state had not commented on the August 2023 plan publicly as of press time.)

Oldham’s other concern reflects another barrier to buffalo expansion: states’ abilities to fund a wild buffalo management regime that includes a robust compensation program for landowners who experience property damage. Buffalo are notoriously stubborn and difficult to manage, and Oldham believes property damage would be an inevitability.

“A barbed wire fence costs $13,000 per mile. It doesn’t take long for bison to destroy a fence,” he said. “If the rancher wasn’t afraid of having to foot that bill, that would build some buy-in.”

Free-roaming buffalo would not only encounter physical barriers like fences and roads, they would also move through the mosaic of invisible lines that divide property ownership and land use in the West. Even the Wind River Indian Reservation is a checkerboard of public and private lands with different uses, and even public lands are not necessarily open for bison reintroduction. Part of Baldes’ task is to retire cattle grazing allotments on the reservation so those parcels can be converted to bison habitat, opening up more range for them to roam. 

To this end, Baldes is partnering with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition to acquire land through voluntary grazing allotment buyouts, build social will for wild buffalo and fund more buffalo-proof fencing. “The hope eventually would be to buy out grazing allotments that butt up to the National Forest and allow bison to free range in the Shoshone,” explained Shana Drimal, Senior Wildlife Conservation Associate with the GYC.

While having access to public lands would dramatically increase the buffalo’s range, Drimal says that most potential bison habitat in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem is privately owned, meaning that the steepest challenge is creating an environment where landowners are willing to share their land with wild buffalo and have the tools to do so. 

“What I always go back to is that bison need to be here. There are ways to make this work that isn’t going to jeopardize livestock producers,” said Drimal. “I don’t believe it’s an either/or situation.”

“There are ways to make this work that isn’t going to jeopardize livestock producers. I don’t believe it’s an either/or situation.”

– Shana Drimal

Wild buffalo rising

Despite the myriad concerns, social momentum for wild buffalo is building, with Wind River poised to show what a successful reintroduction could look like. 

Tribal communities like Wind River “are creating a model showing Wyoming and other states like Montana how to do all of this successfully,” Martel said. “We are just a small version of Wyoming, really: Our game herds are doing amazing, we have successful ag industries and we have buffalo too. Even with two separate governments, we have found success and ways to work together to restore buffalo.” 

Baldes and Martel both believe more buffalo on the landscape would not only restore Native food sovereignty and ecosystem health, it also could have a positive economic impact. Baldes envisions tourism, hunting opportunities and scientific research all stemming from tribal management of wild buffalo herds. As Martel put it, “even in the non-Indian community, buffalo give people a special feeling.” Highway 226, which runs through the Wind River Reservation and next to the land where the buffalo graze, is often lined with tourists who are on their way to Yellowstone and other nearby destinations taking photos and admiring the iconic animals. 

The controversies surrounding Yellowstone put a fine point on how challenging it can be to connect wild landscapes to the animals that historically thrived in them. Baldes is facing pushback similar to Montana’s as he works to build support for Wind River buffalo on the reservation. Though there are many barriers still to overcome if buffalo are to become free ranging and return to their ancient migration routes, collaboration and strong management plans are a step toward fostering coexistence and connectivity. 

“Rarely are we able to introduce a species without having an effect on somebody,” says Oldham. “There is a concern for the producer and the taxpayer who have to foot those bills. On the same token, we would love to see the wildlife out there… we certainly can appreciate that.”