Thanks to a quick, mild winter, few of the bison that normally migrate out of Yellowstone National Park haven’t traveled beyond the park’s boundaries this year.

That means Native hunters have had few opportunities to bag the beasts, as Brett French of the Billings Gazette reports.

As a result, Nez Perce tribal members who have driven hundreds of miles from Idaho to hunt bison have chosen instead to shoot elk outside the park’s northern boundary near Gardiner, as allowed under their treaty rights, rather than go home with no meat.

That hunting season ended Saturday. Some are worried that the hunts have eaten away at an elk herd with already dwindling numbers, which some say is due to wolf introduction.

Chris Kelly said tribal members are killing elk from an already severely depressed Northern Yellowstone herd. At last count in December, the herd numbered just over 4,600, a drop from their peak of 19,000 decades earlier. Numbers from this year have not yet been compiled; the count was taken Wednesday.

. . .

Bill Hoppe, a Gardiner hunting outfitter who lives on Eagle Creek near where the elk have been shot recently, said there’s no point in complaining about the situation.

“They can kiss this northern herd goodbye,” he said. “I don’t see any way they can come back.”

Hoppe said he has seen around 70 bull elk cross the road near his house this entire winter, compared with 100 bulls in one group before wolves were reintroduced.

Jenna Cederberg

Tags: bison, brett french, elk, migration, Nez Perce, Wolves, Yellowstone National Park

Several tribes are asking for more organization when it comes to managing bison in Yellowstone National Park.

The Bozeman Chronicle reports:

Representatives from the Nez Perce tribe, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes and the Intertribal Buffalo Council said there was a lack of protocol and choreography among the groups involved and asked that there be a written procedure for the way they make decisions, meet and conduct business.

Representatives from several government agencies said they agreed written protocol as needed.

Those at the meeting also asked about the fate of bison that are part of a quarantine project. The animals in question do not have brucellosis, a disease that can cause miscarriages. The disease has made bison a controversial topic once they wander onto state land because of a fear that the sickness could spread to cattle and threaten the livestock industry.

Pat Flowers, Region 3 supervisor for FWP, said environmental assessments are ongoing at four locations where quarantined bison could temporarily be taken. Flowers noted that though the Department of Livestock tends to have a say in the management of potentially infected bison in the state, it would not have jurisdiction over the quarantined animals because they are disease-free.

Jenna Cederberg

Tags: bison, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, intertribal buffalo council, Nez Perce, Yellowstone National Park

A story by Vince Devlin in today’s Missoulian about three grizzly bears on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana is a bittersweet tale of what too often happens when bears and humans come into contact. In this particular case, things went better than usual for the bears. But as staffers with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes explain, it didn’t have to be this way:

RONAN – Three western Montana grizzly bears will spend the rest of their lives in Kentucky, on display at the Louisville Zoo.

It’s a bittersweet end to a story that began east of Ronan in May, when an adult female grizzly with two cubs developed a taste for chicken.

She eluded traps set by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes for much of the summer, and by the time she was captured, the chicken habit was ingrained – and may have spread to include pigs as well.

Oftentimes, such behavior results in a death sentence for the bear.

“And that would have meant putting her cubs down, too,” says Dale Becker, wildlife manager for the tribes. “We had a problem doing that over chickens. I understand that people’s property is valuable to them, but killing three grizzlies is not something we want to do.”

Relocating the mother and her cubs, the tribes concluded, wasn’t likely to end the sow’s newly acquired taste for chicken – developed, it should be noted, because some people didn’t take measures that could have safeguarded their chickens from such attacks.

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Tags: buffalo post, Chris Servheen, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Flathead Indian Reservation, Germaine White, Glacier Run Bear Habitat, Grizzlies, Grizzly bears, John Walczak, Louisville Zoo, Native American news, Yellowstone National Park, ZooMontana

Millennia before the first tourist pitched a tent at Yellowstone, Native Americans spent summers beside the region’s hot springs and bubbling pools, a University of Montana archaeological team has discovered.

“It’s always been a destination resort,” Hale, park archaeologist, tells Brett French of the Billings Gazette, here. “For at least 10,000 years people have been using the lake area.”

Adds Douglas MacDonald, a University of Montana archaeology professor, “The lake may have served as a crossroads of sorts for Native Americans from multiple regions.”

MacDonald and 13 graduate and undergrad students at UM are excavating parts of Yellowstone as part of the university’s Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project.

“The lake area was clearly an important warm-weather hunting and gathering grounds for Native Americans from all over the northwestern Great Plains, northern Great Basin and northern Rocky Mountains,” MacDonald tells French.

They’ve discovered, among other things, 5,800-year-old Early Archaic hearth and an area where people quarried obsidian for spear points traded as far east as present-day Ohio.

Gwen Floro

Tags: archaeology, buffalo post, Early Archaic period, Gwen Florio, Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project, Native American history, Native American news, University of Montana, Yellowstone National Park

With this post, Buffalo Post takes a little vacation. We’re not nearly familiar enough with the concept, but we hear it’s really fun, so we’re willing to give it a whirl. We’ll be back and posting again on Monday. Meantime, enjoy our previous posts. It’s been a busy few days. Here’s the AP story on the bison issue:

Gwen Florio

MATTHEW BROWN, Associated Press

BOZEMAN, Montana — Ted Turner’s bid to get 74 wild bison from Yellowstone National Park is drawing stiff opposition from those who say the animals are being given up for private profit instead of conservation.

Turner has offered to take the animals at the request of Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

The media mogul would keep the bison five years and then return them to the state. As compensation, Turner would keep 90 percent of the animals’ offspring, meaning he would gain an estimated 190 bison from a herd prized for its genetic purity.

Turner is a longtime champion of bison conservation and owns an estimated 50,000 of the animals across the West. But rising criticism over his latest plan is putting the media mogul in an awkward position. His representatives insist he cannot take the animals without getting something in return.

Some conservationists and federal officials — plus a group representing dozens of Native American tribes — say the animals should not be commercialized.

At a Thursday public hearing over the Turner proposal, they said the bison belong on public or tribal lands. That’s what state and federal officials had promised over the last several years.

“You’re not being true to your commitment not to commercialize these animals,” said Glenn Hockett with the Gallatin Wildlife Association.

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Tags: bison, buffalo post, Native American news, Ted Turner, Yellowstone National Park

The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes who live on Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation, and the Northern Arapaho and Shoshone tribes on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming have long sought the several dozen bison corralled in holding pens for nearly four years now after straying beyond the borders of Yellowstone National Park.

Ranchers fear the park’s bison carry brucellosis, a disease that causes stillborn calves. For years now, when bison go outside in the park in search of winter forage, they’ve been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease.

But some bison, after being declared disease-free, were spared. They’re the ones in the holding pens, and the idea is to use them to repopulate public and tribal lands across the West with free-roaming bison, writes the AP’s Matthew Brown, here.

However, those animals apparently will be relocated to a Montana ranch owned by billionaire Ted Turner, under a recommendation made by state and federal officials.

Turner already owns about 50,000 bison, and his restaurant chain Ted’s Montana Grill serves buffalo burgers. But Turner Enterprises general manager Russell Miller says the Yellowstone bison won’t be served up on a bun, and that the genetically pure Yellowstone bison will be kept separate from the others on his ranch.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks administrator Ken McDonald tells Brown that giving up bison to Turner’s ranch was not his preferred choice, and that his agency already is getting “a lot of backlash over the whole privatization thing.”

The tribes’ applications were judged insufficient, but officials say they’ll be given first choice the next time bison are available.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Assiniboine, bison, brucellosis, Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Gros Ventre, Northern Arapaho, Shoshone, Ted Turner, Wind River Indian Reservation, Yellowstone National Park

A coalition of American Indian and environmental groups are suing the federal government in an effort to stop the killing of bison that migrate beyond the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, asks for the National Park Service and Forest Service to be barred from participating in the slaughter program, write Matthew Brown of the Associated Press, here.

In an effort to prevent a disease carried by bison from spreading to cattle, more than 3,300 bison have been slaughtered in the last decade, by federal agencies working with the state of Montana.

The groups filing the suit say the threat of the disease – brucellosis – has been overstated and that the Park Service and Forest Service are ignoring their responsibility to preserve the bison.

Yellowstone’s 3,000 bison comprise one of the largest concentrations of the animals in the world, Brown writes. Bison once roamed North America by the millions, sustaining many Native American tribes, before being nearly wiped out after the arrival of white people to the region.

During winters, bison range beyond Yellowstone’s borders in search of food. A 2000 agreement between Montana and the federal government allows those animals to be killed to prevent any contact with cattle.

Gwen Florio

Tags: bison, brucellosis, buffalo post, National Park Service, Native American news, U.S. Forest Service, Yellowstone National Park

North-central Montana’s Fort Belknap Indian Reservation wants to take a small herd of bison that have been held in quarantine for nearly four years outside Yellowstone National Park. This story says a similar plan by Wyoming’s Northern Arapaho Tribe fell through.

The nearly 50 animals have been spared from a government program that slaughters most bison leaving the park to prevent the spread of the disease brucellosis.

In addition to the Fort Belknap tribes, Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo and a private landowner near Fargo, N.D., also want the bison. Monday is the deadline for a second round of proposals to take the animals.

“We need to get the animals out in December,” says Ken McDonald, wildlife administrator with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “They’re crowded and the cows are pregnant again and ideally you want to get them out early in their pregnancy.”

Wildlife officials say the animals are living on about 200 acres near Corwin Springs, Mont., and could be slaughtered if no appropriate taker is found.

Here‘s a more extensive version of the story published in the Chicago Tribune.

Gwen Florio

Tags: bison, brucellosis, buffalo post, Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Native American news, Northern Arapaho, Yellowstone National Park