Bison - Learning Sustainability with an American Icon

Behind the Scenery

How can a diverse set of skills be used to solve complex problems? This episode explores the uniqueness of the North Rim bison herd, and what it takes to implement a bison management plan that prioritizes a healthy ecosystem.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Bison: American Icon Transcript

Jesse: Grand Canyon, where hidden forces shape our ideas, beliefs, and experiences. Join us as we uncover the stories between the colorful walls, and add your voice to what happens next at Grand Canyon. Welcome, this is Jesse and you're listening to Behind the Scenery. Samara: It’s just so nice seeing all the different sizes. Adam: Like I can tell there is an older male, some older females, as well as some younger calves. Skye: I get really excited I usually have my binoculars with me and then pulled over on the side of the road with all the tourists. William: It’s just exciting! Miranda: It’s tricky. Scott: I don't want to put get into the whole manifest destiny and genocide that occurred here, but I'll leave it at that. Danielle: they’re just such an important species in many many ways. Dave: you end up getting to know some of the animals when you spend time with them. Adam: It reminds me of an older simpler time. Margi: It’s just great to see them in the wild, which you don’t see very often. Danielle: To see them on the landscape anywhere is really special and really exciting. Adam: Just does my heart good to see things like this still. Really beautiful. Skye: Watching the calves play around and watching the males wallow. Samara: We're looking for bison, but we didn’t expect to see so many so close together like a little family. Dave: It's a very rewarding, not monetarily wise, but very rewarding job and experience to have working with the buffalo. Megan: People are starting to realize that Buffalo you know alongside humans that relied on them are the keystone managers of the North American ecosystem. Scott: The return of the Buffalo Nation to the Dakota people here. Jesse: Grand Canyon is not first place most people think of when they think of bison, but if you drive past the North Rim entrance station there's a decent chance you can see them grazing, wallowing, or lounging in the meadows. There's somewhere between 400 and 600 bison on the North Rim, but they haven't always been here. The story of bison on the North Rim is complicated. It’s tangled up with issues that reach far beyond the national park. Issues like over-hunting, climate change, colonization, and figuring out how to decide what belongs. To start untangling the story let's go back to the beginning. First, here's Megan Davenport from the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council to clear up a question I had: is it bison or buffalo? Megan: Both terms, bison and buffalo, are absolutely correct. There's also hundreds of native languages that have words for buffalo as well. We try not to get too hung up in this one’s correct and this one’s not. We think it is fully common and acceptable to use the term buffalo, but they are one in the same. Skye: Yeah, so our modern bison in North America are descended from Pleistocene bison. I'm Skye Salganek and I’m a biological science technician based on the North Rim and I’m the field lead for all studies related to bison. Jesse: I recruited Skye to help me understand the story of bison in North America, and the bison on the North Rim specifically. Skye: Their horns where about 7 feet wide. Jesse: What? Skye: Our modern bison are quite different. But they are one of the largest mammals in North America. They’re coming back from the brink of extinction. In the 1880s there were 325 individuals left in wild and now there's about 500,000, so not get back to the numbers they originally were. Jesse: What would those have been like? Skye: I've read 30 million. Jesse: 30 million. Skye: Yeah 30 million across North America. Jesse: From 30 million to 325. Skye: Yeah Jesse: And that was mostly from hunting? Skye: Yeah that was primarily from hunting in the 1860s and 1870s. After the bison had been haunted to near extinction there were a lot of carcasses and a lot of bones leftover across the plains. There were so many bones that they could fill two trains going from California to New York. But now they’re on the up and up and it is amazing thing to see them in a National Park or ranch or wherever the chance. Our bison herd was established in 1906 by Charles Buffalo Jones. In the 1860s and 70s he was hunting bison and was one of the best hunters out there. He boasted being able to hunt up to 10 bison in a day and skin them as well. Yeah, so it's kind of ironic but later on he felt a lot of remorse about playing a major role in the near extinction of the bison. When there was hardly more than 300 individuals left in the wild he was out there rounding up the last of the individuals, sending them to ranches to breed and re populate. In 1905 he went to Theodore Roosevelt and got him to create the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve and they brought in bison from a ranch in Texas and tried to re establish bison through re introduction but also interbreeding with cattle. He thought he could make a more robust cattle with tastier meat and the fur would still be valuable in the fur trade and he imagined that this would be a very valuable animal so he tried to cross Galloway cows with bison. Jesse: He eventually went bankrupt, right? Skye: He did. The project was unsuccessful. It went bankrupt. Jimmy Owens became the new game warden of Grand Canyon National Preserve. He took charge of the bison and later on Arizona Game and Fish bought the heard from him, and they managed them down in the House Rock Valley. 1990s they started moving up to the plateau spending more and more time. They would return the House Rock Valley for rut, they would go there during the hottest time. Jesse: Weird! Skye: Yeah, it is weird. Then, about 2009, they stopped returning to House Rock Valley at all and primarily spent their time in Grand Canyon National Park. With so much hunting on the boundary it really forces them into the national park land. Jesse: Right, there’s a year-round hunt on the forest for bison, and so they know where the boundary is now. Skye: They sure do, you can see it from the GPS data. Jesse: When the bison stopped leaving the park boundaries, scientists at Grand Canyon started to notice changes. To get a better understanding of what was changing and what Grand Canyon planned to do about it, I called Miranda Terwillegar. Miranda: I’m Miranda Terwillegar, and I'm a wildlife biologist here Grand Canyon. And I'm also the bison reduction project leader. This bison herd it either at the extreme edge of the natural range or outside of the natural range of bison, and as such it would have been a very small herd and they would have not stayed in one spot they would have moved and the area for periods of time, which currently does not happen. And part of that is because of people being everywhere and so they don't have the ability to move the way they did historically. That’s true of all bison herds every single unit that manages bison has a problem because they have areas where the bison are not allowed to migrate out to, whether that’s a city, or farm, or ranch, or whatever they're just a lot of places that the bison used to be that they can't go anymore. So because of this, their population was growing they were in fairly small area of the park and we started to notice resource damage. They were damaging springs – trampled, muddy, devoid of vegetation. Meadows - from tall grassland into well cropped vegetation, kind of like a pasture. Archaeological and cultural resource sites trampled and destroyed. A lot of things were happening that were of concern to resource managers here, and so we started talking to the Forest Service and the state of Arizona Game and Fish Department about our concerns. All the agencies agreed that heard was too high. The state had always managed the herd at about 100 animals while they were in House Rock. Jesse: There are as many as 600 now. Miranda: And so as part of that the agencies agreed to do some management to reduce the herd. Because the herd is primarily on the North Rim of Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon did natural and environmental planning and compliance in the form of an environmental assessment for a 5 year short-term reduction of getting the animal herd below 200 animals. Jesse: Herd reduction. What does that mean? Each of the last two years Grand Canyon has corralled bison and shipped them to a new home. Skye explains the process. [Background]Skye: When it’s full it’ll probably just start spurting out of that blow hole. [Background]Melissa: What about this one? [Background]Skye: Probably that one, too. Skye: Right, so we've been bating animals into a fixed corral for two years now, started in 2019. [Background]Skye: I left the corral early yesterday. I was pumping water and I pumped a full trough… Skye: We use water primarily, but we also use food and salt [Background]Skye: …was stuck in the capture pen, and it couldn't figure out how to get out. I was like “oh it's going to get it I'm just gonna stay here keep watering,” but it was like running against the fence… Skye: Just get it established as an area where there is food and there is water and there's all things nice it's a great place to hang. [Background]Skye: I’m gonna go leave you guys to figure this out because I don’t want you to get hurt and then I went, I like park the truck… Skye: And then we will shut the gates. For the actual corralling process once we've successfully captured it really takes a village. [Background]Skye: It was kind of cool. The herd wouldn’t leave without the calf. And all these females are on the other side of the fence… Skye: Veterinarians, biologists from not just our park, but other NPS parks, collaborating agencies that bring in biologists all of the North Rim staff help out – interp, law enforcement, and maintenance. It really takes a whole lot of people. The majority of the personnel at the corral are working up on the catwalks and there are these walkways raised about 6 to 7 feet above the ground. From up there and you can move the bison around with long flags and rattles. This is important because they are herd animals and they'll try to stay together, but for processing we really need one bison at a time. So we try to keep a quiet environment at the corral and use their natural behavior to separate them out. Processing includes running them through the corral and then biological team is collecting blood and tail hairs for genetics. We're putting a metal ear tag in and a pit tag that's like the microchip. We’re putting on collars to the larger individuals. They don't travel well so we'll just collar them and re release, same thing with the smaller calves. Yeah and then the trucks will come in from Inter Tribal Buffalo Council and we’ll load them up and they’ll start their journey cross country to go to various tribes that are receiving them. Danielle: A big bull once, I’ll never forget this, he just started just trying to bight me. Jesse: That’s Danielle Buttke. She's the one collecting most of the samples Skye just mentioned. Danielle: My name is Danielle Buttke and I am a wildlife veterinarian and public health service officer for the National Park Service, and I served as the on-site attending veterinarian for the corral operations. Typically what we'll do is individually identifying each of the animals so that we can go back in the heard and figure out who is who. We always take hair samples, that’s where we get the genetic material to look at the genetics of these animals. We collect blood samples so that we can test them for disease exposure to other diseases etc. And then we occasionally will also take nasal swabs too, because some of the bacteria that are an important pathogen for bison can be transmitted in the respiratory tract from animal to animal, and so that's another sample we often collect when we're handling these animals. And then we will look at the mouth and try and age the animal by looking at their teeth, and then look at their feet look for lesions that could be indicative of some of these diseases of importance when we're talking about transport and kind of get a get a look at the rest of the body of the animal really quickly. They don't understand why they're there. This is not a natural environment for them and so I'm at the same time just absolutely thrilled and also really feeling like wow I need to minimize the amount of time that they were there. You can see how terrified they are. Some of them react differently. Some get angry, some get quiet, some are a relatively unstressed considering the circumstances. I kind of read each animal and then modify the amount of exam that we're doing or the samples were collecting based on how the animal is in the shoot. But it's certainly a very humbling experience to be that close with them. So we're actually doing the little bit of examining we can under a high stress handling environment in the shoot, you know at least enough for us to understand if they're healthy enough for them to be shipped across state lines or not. Jesse: In order to ship bison the park has to test them for disease to make sure they won't carry pathogens to other populations. Through that testing process, bison managers have learned… Danielle: Generally these animals are pretty darn healthy and this is what we see with cattle, too. You know when you're out in open air, able to move around across the landscape, and grazing on your natural diet animals are generally healthier than say if you're kept in confinement, if you're not able to actually graze living food, and if you're not able to move around. One of the pathogens that are important to producers are the respiratory pathogens and then the parasites. And parassites are kind of a perfect example, if you live where you poop your at really high risk, and when you can graze and move around on the landscape you're going to have fewer parasites. We in the wildlife community are really trying shift away from this disease focus to a health focus, because you recognize that your resilience and your healthiness determines your disease outcomes. You know a lot of people can be infected with a certain pathogen and do just fine if they are healthy, and same for animals. You know if you've got a good diet, if you have the appropriate density, and this is in part why this operation so important, you have the resources you need you can fight off a lot of these pathogens. Once they exceed that carrying capacity they start degrading the quality of the resources which can then in turn degrade their health. Jesse: Genetic analysis was also conducted during the project the results were surprising. Danielle: A lot of folks assumed that there was a tremendous amount of cattle in genetics in the herd, and we did find some cattle genetics, but it was at a much lower level than I think a lot of folks had thought, and the really interesting part is we found some really interesting bison genes that didn't seem to be present in other DUI conservation herds. When you think about how you animals were left on the landscape, the overall North American bison population has had a pretty significant genetic bottleneck, which means that really any diversity of these alleles could be important given the selection pressure that was so placed on it back when they were hunted almost to extinction. So it highlights the conservation value of this herd beyond what folks had assumed with possible with a herd that had been traditionally interbred with cattle or at least attempted to be interbred with cattle. You know we don't know, for instance, that say maybe there's a gene present in the Grand Canyon heard that allows for them to withstand drought better. You know, we don't know that at this point in time. But what we do know is that maintaining as much genetic diversity as possible in general leads to a healthier population that's more resilient to any type of stressor, from disease to drought to heat. And with a warming climate it's really important for any species we're trying to conserve to maintain as much diversity as possible so that they have the best chance of adapting to the changes they will see. Jesse: After learning all this, the question I was left with was “how should we decide what belongs?” This is something that these three thinking about a lot. Here's Miranda: Miranda: It's tricky honestly and there's several reasons why we make this. One, I personally do not believe the science will ever be fully decided whether or not the North Rim of the Grand Canyon was in within the native range. Yes there are lots of maps that supposedly depict what the historic range was. Map making wasn't all that big of a strong suit in the 1900s. Archaeology tells us something but you know it's really reliant on what could be preserved in the system. Whether we will ever have enough hard data say yes or no is, I really think, unlikely. I think there probably were bison, probably not very many. They may have only come in every now and then. They are pioneering animals, you know the young males will wander miles and miles outside of their range, but again I don't think I don't think that is something that we can hang our hats on to make that decision. And I think early park management was trying to do that. There are honestly politics at play into this. These bison and are very important to the state of Arizona, and it is very important to them to keep them on. I don't think politically we would be able to get to a point where we say we're just going to eradicate them. Case in point, the state of Arizona has introduced 17 new bison to House Rock Valley. If we were to eradicate the ones on the Kaibab, they might just open the gates and let those ones up. And then when you throw climate change into these questions and the fact that species ranges are moving, I think that complicates the issue of when do you leave a species be, and what is native and what is range expansion and what is truly invasive non-nativity. And I think it's a question that the Park Service and all land managers are probably grappling with countrywide. If the habitat where, for example, the redwoods can no longer sustain redwoods but they can live somewhere else, do we move them and have them move somewhere else or do we have them go extinct. That, you know, this is a big philosophical question, it's a very difficult question to answer. And I think we are addressing that with several species within this park and there are no easy straightforward answers. A lot of different things play into it whether it's the biology, the practicality, the politics all those things have to feed into that final decision. Skye: Yeha, it is a difficult decision to make for resource managers that are trying to balance all these different resources. I think the park service motto - to preserve and protect - it's tricky when we're changing world. To preserve things as they were when the Park Service came into existence 100 years ago, it's preserving a snapshot in time and sometimes that's not super realistic. Danielle: When you think about why a National Park any National Park was created, oftentimes their enabling legislation is to conserve a specific set of species and conditions that were present when the park was created. And with climate change a lot of specific species and conditions are no longer possible on the landscape. And what this means is that our public lands established for conservation purposes can no longer, alone, accomplish the conservation goals that as a society hold dear. We’re looking at a future where we have to really think very broadly beyond our borders for conservation. It doesn't matter if it was native to an area or not, we need to instead, I think, ask the question does this species need conservation assistance and can this unit help out? We really need to change some of that really historic condition type mind set if we're going to continue to conserve these species with climate change. The idea of preserving this tiny mosaic makes sense when there's ecosystem integrity everywhere, but that's just not the case. There isn’t, in my mind, anything that's entirely natural anymore. You cannot go anywhere without seeing some aspects of human influence and because of that defining what's natural maybe isn't the right question if you know our goal is really to protect the planet. And as a scientist you're trained to be impartial, you know, and just let the data speak for itself, but because we are also dependent upon this planet as human beings we're never going to be impartial. We're always going to be biased. I think we need to do a lot more as a scientific community of, not necessarily, you know, I don't think advocate is the right word, but speaking up for conservation, speaking up for those resources, and being willing to kind of manage in the face of uncertainty a little more than we have in the past. And there's a really interesting effort that the Climate Change Response Program of NPS has done a tremendous amount of work leading to define what is native, and under climate change what can we expect from our interpretation of our policies, interpretation of our legislation in terms of accomplishing the greatest good for conservation. And this is really going to require this broader landscape, multi scale initiative that goes far beyond our borders. I think Grand Canyon bison are kind of are emblematic of this, right. There's this debate about whether or not the historic range of bison includes this part of the country or not, but that's not really I don't think the right question to ask under climate change. I think the right questions to ask is “is this suitable habitat and can it contribute to the conservation of the species, while still adding to the broader naturalness and natural resource value of that ecosystem?” And that's really I think the question we should be asking. And there's knowledge that I just don't think we're tapping into as much as we need to be to meet the goals that we have. Indigenous knowledge, particularly with the species that is so important to indigenous people, we're really missing a huge opportunity to make a bigger impact if we're not relying on that knowledge more heavily in their management. Jesse: Today people like Skye, Danielle, and Miranda are thinking about whether or not buffalo belong at Grand Canyon because of the decisions that were made about who or what belongs more than 100 years ago. The industrial scale bison hunting that nearly wiped out the species in the 1800s wasn't just about hides or sport, it was a tool for controlling indigenous people and for removing them from their homelands. I wanted to get a better understanding of this part of the story, and what it means for tribes today to receive buffalo from places like the North Rim. With some help from folks at Grand Canyon I got in touch with Megan Davenport from the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council, and she helped set up a call with Scott Anderson. Scott is land manager for the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, one of the tribes that received buffalo from Grand Canyon this year. Scott: I am Scott Anderson. I am the land manager for the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe of Flandreau, South Dakota. I’m also the manager of the buffalo herd and have been a member of the board of directors for Inter Tribal Buffalo Council for roughly 15 years now. Historically, you know, the buffalo was the economy. The Dakota people we supplement out diet with buffalo, but we're also on the edge of the woodland where there was deer and fishing going on. But as we migrated west like the buffalo it became a very important part of our economy, and to have that restored in last 30 years to the people here has been a blessing. My predecessor Wes Hanson, he was a part of ITBC when it first started I believe. We started with some animals from Badlands National Park and it's taken off from there. Jesse: Here’s Megan to give us a little more info on the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council. We'll hear from her again in a minute. Megan: My name is Megan Davenport and I'm the wildlife biologist for the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council. ITBC is a federally chartered tribal organization. We have a membership of 69 tribal nations that are restoring buffalo herds to their land. So of the things that ITBC does is provide technical assistance to tribes in managing their buffalo herds, or starting new buffalo herds, or growing their herds and everything kind of under the sun. So our organization has a couple different main programs. One of those is a grant program called the Herd Development Grant. We also have the Surplus Buffalo Program. Since 1992 we've been working with public lands, so places like the National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife refuges, and a number of other state, federal, and also private entities in order to transfer surplus buffalo from those places to tribes that want to grow or develop their herds. It's sort of a win-win situation for both the parks, and also for tribes because basically any buffalo that are behind fences eventually will grow and exceed the capacity of those lands. I mean it's a species that used to roam the entire continent in very very large numbers, so in order to kind of offset that grazing pressure and help maintain a healthy ecosystem on the public lands ITBC has been basically arranging the logistics and also transporting, paying for the transport of those animals, and helping match up those animals with tribes that want to grow their herds. Scott: It’s very important to diversify our herd’s DNA. We received 32 buffalo from 3 different national parks in the last year. 14 buffalo from Wind Cave National Park, two bulls that originated from Yellowstone, and then 16 buffalo delivered from Grand Canyon. It’s fun to watch. Initially the Grand Canyon buffalo were off on their own, and now today we pulled out into the pasture and they just surrounded us and were actually bouncing the truck around. The Grand Canyon herd has merged with the rest of our herd and has adapted well. We have a lot of our members that consider themselves to be traditional Indians and don’t practice Christianity, but our traditional religion, whether it be the Sun Dancing or other types of ceremonies. I, myself have Sun Danced since 1975. Buffalo play a role during the Sun Dance. It’s been a spiritual journey as well as cultural and economic. The return of the Buffalo Nation to the Dakota people here. There's 560 federally recognized tribes in the United States, you know, plus all the reserves in Canada. I would like to see more tribes become members of Inter Tribal Buffalo Council and expand these numbers to other tribes Turtle Island and start helping these tribes diversify their economy. Megan: Yeah I agree with Scott entirely. There's such a room for growth and ITBC’s membership. And what that actually means is many, many thousands and thousands of Buffalo returning to tribal lands and also returning to tribal people. You know, tribal people have always been the leaders in restoring buffalo, and have been managers of the buffalo for tens of thousands of years. A lot of times when people think of, you know, oh buffalo doesn't have any predators or you know that's just ridiculous. It's always been humans and some other large, you know grizzlies and wolves and things like that. But recognizing that many different nations within the US have been leading this movement of restoring buffalo, which now today is getting some well deserved recognition as a really important movement, people are starting to realize that buffalo, you know, alongside humans that relied on them are the keystone managers of the North American ecosystem, and are so very important in restoring grasslands, and maintaining habitat for other species, and you know all these other ecological roles. So, you know, the more tribes are able to manage buffalo in the way that they decide to do so as sovereign nations, and are also recognized outside of that for their expertise in managing and restoring buffalo, and restoring and managing, you know, all ecosystems across Turtle Island, then you know that's something that's positive for everyone. And that's something that you know everyone can learn from. Jesse: I think what struck me most in learning about the North Rim buffalo herd is just how connected it is to the world outside the boundaries of Grand Canyon, even though it rarely leaves them anymore. It's exciting to hear from wildlife managers who are adapting the way they think about buffalo and other species in response to climate change, but the question that still looms for me is how or if agencies like the National Park Service will include indigenous knowledge in the decisions about what belongs and how to manage changing ecosystems. Here's Megan with the last word: Megan: There’s a type of kind of western science, like European western science that, you know, has this myth that all of North America was a wilderness before Europeans came here. That's just garbage. The depth and diversity of how people have been managing sustainably for tens of thousands of years the North American ecosystems is really incredible. And not, you know, not as many people spend enough time or the education system doesn't necessarily teach those kinds of things either. So, you know, if you if you learn about how tribes are managing buffalo you get to see and learn about a lot of that. Jesse: And if you aren't a member of a tribe. Megan: We are all neighbors to, you know, 570 plus federally recognized tribes. And if you're listening and you want to know more about buffalo, look around you and find one of the tribes that's local to your area and maybe try to learn from them a little bit about buffalo, and about whether they have a current or historic relationship with the animal, or with any of the species that are local to your area. Jesse: Thanks to Scott Anderson and Dave Ross of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, to Megan Davenport of the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council, and to Daniel Buttke, Skye Salganek, Miranda Terwillegar, and Melissa Panter of the National Park Service for lending their voices to this episode. We also heard from visitors Adam Allred, Margi Ness, Samara Rangel, and Williamson Semple. Behind the Scenery is brought to you by the interpretation team at Grand Canyon National Park. We gratefully acknowledge the native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities that make their home here today.