A lot more than hunters’ bullets are chasing American bison this fall.
In addition to an expanded capture plan coming from Yellowstone National Park, the United States’ national mammal faces new developments in federal court and potentially over a federal treaty. Running counter to those legal issues, a new report from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation undercuts many of the practical concerns domestic livestock producers have raised in the federal lawsuit about bison grazing on public land.
Bison news began streaming in last week when a meeting of the Interagency Bison Management Plan committee in Butte hit a procedural snag right after introductions. The committee oversees Yellowstone National Park’s bison as they migrate between park and Montana state lands, seeking to reduce overgrazing and the risk of transmitting brucellosis from bison to domestic cattle (which has never been documented). The gathering on Oct. 28 brought together federal and Montana state land managers along with the Intertribal Buffalo Council, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and the Nez Perce Tribe as formal members, with observation by several other Indian tribes having treaty rights to hunt Yellowstone bison.
Meeting facilitator Alex Hancock started business with an announcement that the Blackfeet Tribe had requested to formally join the committee. Since it wasn’t on the agenda, debate began with the committee’s rule book and soon went in unexpected directions.
Authors of the committee’s protocols questioned how such a membership discussion should land on the agenda, whether the Blackfeet met the requirements for membership, and if sitting members were ready to make a decision that day. The written rules provided few answers.
As Blackfeet representatives pressed their case that they’d been trying to get on the committee since 2022, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Christy Clark proposed postponing the matter and warned that if a vote was called that day, the state’s “vote would be ‘No.’” FWP Chief of Operations Kevin Rechkoff added that the Blackfeet should not be surprised by the state’s position, since the tribe had been in discussions with Gov. Greg Gianforte’s office about federal treaty hunting rights for more than a month.
“There’s a review of materials that [former Gov. Steve] Bullock’s administration in 2017 recognizing the Blackfeet intent to hunt Yellowstone bison,” Rechkoff told Mountain Journal. He referred further questions to the governor’s office, which did not respond to emailed requests for more information.
According to the Lame Bull Treaty of 1855, the Blackfeet agreed to share a “common hunting ground” with other tribes, encompassing much of what’s now Montana, for 99 years. When Bullock representatives asked if that clause expired in 1954, Blackfeet officials replied that it was instead their commitment not to attack other tribes in the hunting grounds during that time. The Blackfeet joined the Yellowstone bison hunt in 2018, and have participated ever since.
Meanwhile, the review of committee protocols revealed another wrinkle – there was no rule to have a vote on admitting new members. The only requirement was a letter from the Blackfeet Tribe pledging to be a responsible participant, which Tribal officials presented to the members at the meeting. Before it adjourned, the committee officially welcomed Blackfeet Tribal Fish and Wildlife Director Brandon Kittson to the table.
But that came after the committee heard Yellowstone National Park’s plans to remove approximately 1,500 bison this winter. The park aims to keep its bison population close to 5,200, according to National Park Service biologist Chris Geremia, and to remove up to a quarter of that annually by capturing animals for relocation or slaughter, or through permitted hunts outside the park. Numerous Indian tribes claim treaty rights to hunt those bison.
Yellowstone’s bison count currently sits at about 5,860, Geremia said, prompting the high cull number. The population has stretched between a low of approximately 3,000 in 2010 to nearly 6,000 this year, resulting in annual shifts in the numbers captured or hunted.
“We want to get as close as possible to that 25-percent limit through harvest, capture or quarantine,” said Geremia, who also runs the park’s bison program. “How that happens completely depends on how the winter plays out.”
Tribes send dozens of hunters to kill bison each winter near Gardiner and West Yellowstone where herds occasionally migrate out in search of graze. Montana also offers public hunt permits, limited to around 50 per year.
The number of bison leaving the park has declined by up to 70 percent in recent years due to mild snow conditions. It has prompted NPS to consider moving its capture areas farther into the park’s interior to ensure hitting the removal target. Geremia said the overwhelming majority of trapped Yellowstone bison are processed and distributed to Indian tribes.
But several tribal speakers responded that their traditions depended on directly handling the animals through hunting and field slaughter practices.
“To take an animal is a big thing in our culture,” Tom Wadsworth, director of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Fish and Game Department, said of the treaty hunts. “To get them in a box, already processed, that takes away from us and how we do things.”
Nez Perce Tribal Representative Erik Holt added that tribal hunters were frustrated by NPS capture efforts, which he said reduced the number of animals leaving the park and becoming available to shoot.
“All that trapping and hazing is having a huge impact,” Holt testified. “Especially with climate change and wintering conditions being a primary player, this adaptive management is taking precedence over treaty hunting. We can’t haze them into the hunting zone.”
Although a number of public speakers criticized the Yellowstone plan to remove 1,500 bison, the committee made no changes to it.
A few days later, Montana officials resumed a separate debate over bison. This round involved former Yellowstone animals now living on almost 500,000 acres of land along the Missouri Breaks controlled by the American Prairie Foundation.
On Nov. 2, Gov. Greg Gianforte filed a brief to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals challenging his recent loss in a legal fight over federal grazing rules. Gianforte had tried to prevent the nonprofit APF from putting 300 of its bison on three federal grazing allotments it owns in Phillips County, claiming that the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act limited their use only to “production livestock” such as cattle. The state-level federal judge in the case hammered that claim, ruling “no statutory language or judicial precedent exists” to make bison grazing different from cattle grazing.
“The district court fundamentally misunderstood what Congress authorized in the Taylor Grazing Act,” Gianforte said in a press release. “The Bureau of Land Management made the correct and lawful decision to cancel these permits. Our administration will continue advocating for the generations of Montanans who have stewarded our lands with care.”
Gianforte was joined by the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, Department of Livestock, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Natural Resources and Conservation in asking the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to revoke APF’s bison-grazing permits.
However, an 85-page DNRC Checklist Environmental Assessment published Oct. 26 found that letting bison graze the allotments “has a low risk of … direct, indirect and cumulative effects to range conditions.” The DNRC assessment also found the area’s condition suffered “decreased carrying capacity … under a regime of historic cattle grazing across multiple lessees since the 1950s.”
Shawn Thomas, the forestry and trust land division administrator for DNRC, concluded after reviewing 26 potential impacts, APF’s fencing and grazing plans were “not likely to result in significant environmental impacts.”
In September, the Montana State Land Board members approved an order to DNRC “not to authorize any new or pending bison grazing requests.” The Sept. 4 district court decision placed a temporary injunction blocking that order. The Land Board is scheduled to meet on Nov. 16 where it could weigh the matter again.
