BLM Retreats from Bison Conservation

Faced with Bureau of Land Management resistance based on opposition from local ranchers, American Prairie Reserve revised its request to convert 18 BLM grazing allotments from cattle to year-long bison grazing. All 18 allotments, totaling over 450 square miles, are attached to several APR properties.

APR currently runs about 800 bison year-round on two of its properties. On one of these, the bison access BLM allotments, as approved by BLM in 2005. Impacts of this year-round grazing have been studied since 2014.

APR proposed to convert most of its public-land allotments to bison to accommodate current growth of its bison herd and to eventually facilitate its long-term goal of having a natural large and free-ranging metapopulation of bison on a large wildlife reserve that will be available to the public. As part of the proposal, APR would remove 300 miles of interior fence once used in rotating domestic cattle among pastures. Fence removal would benefit other wildlife, especially pronghorn antelope.

As a “compromise” APR will continue year-long bison grazing on 19 square miles of public land, attached to one of its properties, as already approved in 2005. The only expansion of bison grazing will allow APR to graze bison seasonally on about 75 square miles of public land associated with 3 other of its properties.

Also, a small test of the vegetation impacts from free-ranging bison, begun in 2014 by APR, will continue. At some undesignated time in the future, results of this test will be used to reconsider APR’s original proposal. We are unaware of any BLM analysis of the 5 years’ data already accumulated by APR or of any BLM review of the effects of ongoing year-round bison grazing on federal lands in other ecosystems. Further, there seems to be no agreement on what standards will someday be used to judge the success or failure of this test.

The usual standards used by range managers for judging vegetation condition relate to a goal of maximizing annual herd productivity for economic profit. The Livestock industry has long imposed this standard on everyone else, no matter what other management objectives there may be. This is not the goal of APR and such standards will not be appropriate for judging the APR program.

APR’s goal is akin to naturalness. Natural populations may include a large standing crop of usually older animals, with a low and varying annual recruitment of young. Rather than imposed rotation grazing, bison will exercise their evolved adaptations for using a large and diverse landscape in response to the seasons, the vagaries of weather and perhaps to natural or prescribed burning of the vegetation. The expected vegetation will be a mosaic of species, density and production that results from spatial and temporal variation in bison grazing. Much land will be in prairie dog towns. This mosaic provides for a diversity of other wildlife and for health and resiliency of the entire biotic community. What standards will someday be used to assess this goal?

Moreover, a true test of year-long bison grazing should be conducted on at least 100 square miles of diverse habitat. At APR, that diverse landscape should include the south-facing, topographically diverse habitat of the Missouri breaks on the Charles M. Russell Wildlife Refuge. If we are to evaluate the effects of wild bison, we must provide them with access to use a full measure of habitat diversity.

This BLM/APR “compromise” will not advance bison conservation. It duplicates values and tests of seasonal or year-long bison grazing on several federal areas elsewhere.

APR’s long-term goal is to establish a large reserve for a diversity of wildlife that would benefit from wild, free-ranging bison as a keystone prairie species. However, attempts to restore public bison to the abundant public land in this area have been thwarted for over 100 years by the livestock industry.

Mostly, the BLM/APR “compromise” kicks the can of bison conservation, and of restoring public, wild bison to Montana, down the road again.