Tribes to receive bison intended for Yellowstone
In this April 2012 photo, a herd of bison roam on the Fort Peck Reservation near Poplar, Mont.
In this June 19 photo, bison graze near a stream in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
BILLINGS, Mont. – A group of Yellowstone National Park bison are due to finally arrive at their permanent home on a northeastern Montana American Indian reservation Thursday, almost a decade after they were captured and spared from slaughter.
The animals were to be loaded onto trucks late Wednesday and travel overnight to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.
The small herd will help tribal members regain a connection to an animal that helped shaped their ancestors’ nomadic existence, tribal officials said.
Bison, also known as buffalo, still play a central role in many ceremonies for Plains tribes.
The Yellowstone animals will be “welcomed with prayers,” said Tom Escarcega, one of a group of Assiniboine and Sioux tribal leaders who planned to escort the animals to Fort Peck.
“It starts to bring back our ceremonies that we kind of forgot,” Escarcega said. “In our culture, we treat the buffalo as a people and we’re the two-legged nation. They deserve respect.”
Yellowstone’s bison are highly-prized for their pure genes. Yet thousands have been killed under a government-sponsored program meant to protect livestock outside the park from the disease brucellosis, which many bison carry.
The bison for the tribes were culled from Yellowstone’s wild herds in 2005 and 2006 under an experimental program designed to start new populations elsewhere.
They are being shipped at night because they will be calmer and easier to move, said Tom Palmer with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The wildlife advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife is covering the shipping costs, Palmer said.
On the reservation, the bison will be kept in a 140-acre pen for a 10-day adjustment period, said Fort Peck Fish and Game Director Robert Magnan. Then they’ll be released onto a 13,000-acre pasture north of Poplar that already holds about 48 Yellowstone bison transferred to the tribes two years ago.
Earlier attempts to relocate the animals failed, in part due to opposition from livestock interests. They had been held since 2010 on CNN founder Ted Turner’s ranch near Bozeman. As compensation for caring for the animals, Turner gets to keep 75 percent of their offspring, or 179 bison.
Most of those offspring will be kept in Montana for the foreseeable future as part of a conservation herd, said Turner Enterprises General Manager Mark Kossler. Some of the bulls will be used for breeding to improve the genetics in other Turner-owned bison herds scattered over 15 ranches across the Western U.S., Kossler said.
“It’s worked out well for the bison,” Kossler said. “They’ve been preserved instead of going to slaughter, and they’re going to be used for conservation.”
The experimental program under which the original animals were captured as they attempted to migrate outside the park has since ended.
However, Yellowstone administrators have proposed reviving the program in hopes of establishing the park as a source of bison to start new herds across the U.S.