Opening weekend of bison season yields slim harvest

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Though Saturday marked the return of a bison hunting season on the National Elk Refuge, one factor made the harvest particularly difficult: scarcely any of the herd had wandered onto the 25,000-acre reserve.

A bull and a cow were harvested Saturday, with another cow reported by Monday afternoon – a slow start for a season for which officials have already allotted 160 lottery tags and are eyeing invitations to more hunters based on the results of the coming weeks.

“We anticipated more bison on the refuge,” said National Elk Refuge Manager Steve Kallin, “but we expect they’ll be back.”

A 1996 management plan identified bison hunting on the refuge as a viable way of managing the growing herd that was affecting resources meant to benefit elk, but a federal injunction prevented such a measure until further analysis was done. In late August of this year, the injunction was dismissed on the heels of a new management plan that satisfied the analysis requirements.

Kallin, who participated in multi-agency effort to monitor the hunt, said between six and eight hunting parties were on the refuge over the weekend. He suspects rains late in the summer greened up range north of the elk refuge, and that lured or kept the herd in those areas.

In January, wildlife officials held a lottery to harvest bison from the elk refuge. Each hunter who won one of the rare tags for a wild bison is able to take either one bison cow or one bison bull, depending which permit he or she put in for.

Saturday was the start of a six-week window broken up into three two-week intervals. During the first segment, 50 hunters have two weeks to harvest whatever bison his or her tags allows for. The second interval, which begins Sept. 29, will see a jump to 60 hunters, then back to 50 for the third hunting window.

Even if 160 bison – a figure that already seems unattainable given the slow start of hunting season and unlikelihood each tag will yield an animal – are successfully culled from the overpopulating herd, that would still only counter the 165 calves the herd is expected to produce this year.

“If we were to get a harvest of all 160 [tags], we’d be breaking even,” said Mark Gocke, a Wyoming Game & Fish information officer.

Gocke said more hunting windows could open up beyond the initial six-week season, but would not go beyond Nov. 30, when wildlife agencies will close hunting to open up migration corridors.

Officials said they were not expecting the first year of bison hunting to have a significant impact on the herd. They are looking at it more as a beginning of an experimental effort to reduce the herd by more than half.

“We need to get them moving on a downward trend,” Gocke said.

Since the bison discovered the supplemental feed for elk in 1980, the herd’s population has ballooned to over 1,200. The Bison and Elk Management Plan, a doctrine prescribing the management of the two herds – each of which are too large to survive a winter on the natural forage of the National Elk Refuge – does not address the controversial feed program that opponents say have sustained too many animals on artificial conditions.
At the forefront of the opposition’s argument is the notion that bunching herds together and feeding them on man-delivered food in the harsh winter leads to the spread of brucellosis, a bacterial infection that causes aborted calves.

That disease now affects both herds, and there is a fear among many environmental groups that a host of other communicable diseases with more devastating consequences – like Chronic Wasting Disease – could eventually reach and decimate the vulnerable populations.

Just before his retirement in early July, former NER Manager Barry Reiswig lambasted the federal- and state-mandated feed program, which distributes alfalfa pellets and hay to elk, and consequently to bison, at the south end of the refuge. 

“[B]rucellosis was caused by our feeding program,” Reiswig said in a June interview, “[and] with the increase of the bison herd … we really have a lot of pressure on this relatively small winter range.”

While the Jackson bison herd is not without its share of allies (the Buffalo Field Campaign, for one, has criticized a hunt where the docile bison are given feed), a population boom for an animal that requires three times the amount of food an elk needs has led to a push by agency officials to offer hunters the rare opportunity to harvest a wild bison.

“Hunting on the refuge is the only way we will ever come close to the getting the numbers down to the population objective,” Doug Brimeyer, a Jackson wildlife biologist with Wyoming Game & Fish, said in a press release.

Since 1998, bison hunting has been permitted on forestlands away from the refuge and Grand Teton National Park, though that has produced a near negligible harvest for a lack of bison there.

The management plan calls for trimming the bison herd to 500, while the 12,500-head elk herd is proportionally much closer to its target of 11,000.

Gocke warns a bison herd growing at a rate of 15 percent a year will lead to an increase in problems off the refuge.

“Besides the [bison’s] impact to habitat – which is key – more start showing up in conflict areas,” he said. “We’ve had horses gored by bison, we have to deal with that damage [to habitat] issue … . They’re a legitimate threat to human safety and they’re not easy to deal with.”

Beginning in 1840 there were no bison in Jackson after their populations were nearly wiped out. It was not until three wandered south from Yellowstone in 1948 that the animal returned to the valley, according to a 1996 environmental analysis of bison in the valley. That same year, a New York wildlife society working with the state and federal governments brought a herd of 20 to what was then a wildlife park in present-day Grand Teton National Park.

Brucellosis was later discovered in that herd and it was mostly eradicated.
Then in 1964, a feral herd of 12 certified brucellosis-free bison was brought in from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. That herd, known as the Moran population, grew to 21 by 1968. Later that year 15 wandered out of an enclosure.
“And that’s the start of the Jackson bison herd,” Gocke explained.

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Opening weekend of bison season yields slim harvest | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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