James Horsley, Yellowstone's Wild Bison on the Brink of Extinction

Yellowstone’s Wild Bison: On the Brink of Extinction James Horsley Yellowstone’s Wild Bison: On the Brink of Extinction First volume of petition i Figure 1. DRAWINGS BY SQUINT EYE (Tichkematse), Cheyenne, a prisoner artist. * See opposite page for continuation of caption. ii Yellowstone’s Wild Bison: On the Brink of Extinction James Horsley PEASANT PRESS | FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA * Two attitudes toward bison appear to be depicted—one of a person running from the animal in fear and another sustained by it. Raised in a culture based on buffalo hunting, Tichkematse was among a group of southern Plains warriors who were held as prisoners of war by the United States government from 1875 to 1878. After his release, he was employed by the Smithsonian, where he was trained in the preparation of bird and mammal specimens for study and display. Drawings, including front cover, furnished by the Anthropology Department, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. iii Copyright ©2018 by James A. Horsley Published by Peasant Press, Fargo, North Dakota February 2018 All Rights Reserved. ISBN: 978-0-9985285-1-9 First edition Printed in the United States of America iv To the glory of God, to my wife Karen and to the memory of Sitting Bull “I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no more Buffalo or game, will send my children to hunt and live on prairie mice.” — Sitting Bull, Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, 1879 (I am Looking to the North for My Life, Joseph Manzione) v vi Preface This is the first volume of a two-volume petition submitted to the Department of the Interior under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act to list wild bison that inhabit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as threatened or endangered. The second volume is titled Before the Secretary of the Interior: A Petition to Protect Yellowstone’s Wild Bison from Extinction. It was originally submitted January 12, 2017 to the Department of the Interior, but was returned by its evaluators, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), due to technical reasons and therefore was not considered a submission. One of the new requirements was that states contiguous to the range of wild bison be notified of a petitioner’s intent to submit the petition one month in advance to give them the opportunity to be involved, and the other that copies of all referenced documents be submitted concurrently with the submission of the petition. The first volume, Yellowstone’s Wild Bison: On the Brink of Extinction, was written after the non-acceptance of the petition submitted in early 2017. It focuses more narrowly on the two herds inhabiting the park as distinct subspecies and on factors warranting their listing. The second volume contains more extensive discussions on background and management. With the technical reasons for the petition’s non-acceptance addressed, the petition, now two volumes, was re-submitted February xxxx, 2018 to the Department of the Interior for its evaluation. All told, this is the third petition submitted by this Petitioner to protect Yellowstone’s wild bison. Chronologically, the first petition was a 10-page hand- written document submitted January 5, 1999. A 90-day finding on that petition in 2007 by the Fish and Wildlife Service (made eight-years after its submission) determined Yellowstone bison are a subspecies—technically termed a distinct population segment (DPS)—thereby qualifying the herd for listing. However, the FWS found that this subspecies did not warrant listing because it claimed wild bison were sufficiently abundant and for this reason neither threatened nor endangered. vii A second petition, submitted March 2, 2015, was also denied, again on the issue of abundance. In the petition returned by the FWS in early 2017, I made a request for an emergency listing of Yellowstone’s bison, which were in the process of being culled. Following its return, I made a written request for an emergency listing directly to the FWS February 13, 2017 (see Appendix A). My letter was not answered. Subsequently, 1,300 bison were lethally removed from the herd that winter. I was about to re-submit the 2017 petition, now that I had met the new requirements, when it dawned on me that its focus was wrong. Yes, the total wild bison population in Yellowstone could be argued as abundant, in fact, at times increasing, but the status of the total herds was not the immediate and real problem. Rather, it was the status of the subpopulations. Yellowstone has two distinct wild bison groups—the central herd and the northern herd. My original analysis, which comprises the second volume, was on the herds as one combined herd. Following the petition’s return, my thinking began to change. As mentioned, one of the reasons for the return of the first submission in early 2017 was due to a new rule that copies of all referenced citations were required. Since I had included extensive quotations, I believed that was sufficient. In subsequent communications with the FWS on why my petition had been denied, I received the following email from Ron Vandervort, biologist, Fish and Wildlife Service: Concerning the question regarding providing excerpts instead of full references, because you have provided quotations excerpted from the sources, and given specific citations, including page numbers, that is an acceptable approach, and allowed for in the regulation. Our intent was that this provision be used in special circumstances (please see explanation below in a comment and response from the Petition Regulation), but in fact you are correct that, as stated in the actual regulation text, excerpts or quotations are acceptable. However, please note that when evaluating your request, we will not augment your petition in terms of looking up more information or obtaining references you cite to substantiate claims, but only consider whether the excerpts you provide substantiate your claims (Ron Vandervort, personal communication, March 7, 2017). That the FWS would not “augment” the petition without being supplied with reference copies of works cited began to bother me. Possibly my petition in and of itself was defective in some way and, indeed, needed augmenting. Possibly I should expand on the species concepts. Possibly I should look more closely at the two herds. As I began to analyze these issues more closely, I drew a graph of the history of the two herds’ populations and realized that in 2008 the population lines comprising the northern and central herds had crossed, meaning at that point the northern herd was gaining numbers annually and the central herd losing numbers. I saw that while the total herd population was stable, the central herd was crashing. viii This was alarming. I had argued in the prior petitions that culling only the migratory eventually would be harmful to the survival of the park’s bison. Now I saw distinctly why, and that it was happening now, not in the future. Somehow I had not paid attention to the disproportionate state of the two populations. Possibly I should investigate more deeply the information issued by Yellowstone National Park and the IBMP that has served to cover up the crash of the park’s native herd and its significance. I started reading texts on probability and Bayes’ theorem, such as Hossein Pishro Nik’s Introduction to Probability, Statistics and Random Processes and Thomas Hobbs and Mevin B. Hooten’s Bayesian Models: A Statistical Primer for Ecologists, because many of the ecological simulation studies that guide biologists’ management of the park involved predictive mathematical models. I became convinced that in Yellowstone, science and mathematics— especially probabilistic simulation models—were being used to veil the truth. Now the question became how to protect the declining herd in the face of these obstacles. I realized at that point my task was two-fold—first, to expose the errors being made by park biologists in interpreting scientific studies and in implementing their findings, and secondly, to prove that not only were the wild bison a distinct population segment in totality, but in addition, composed of two distinct population segments, compounding the task of having them listed. But in fact, two distinct population segments are there. The central herd is comprised of descendants of a herd of wood bison that has never been extirpated and has continued to inhabit the land to which its ancestors migrated millennia ago. On the other hand, the northern herd was introduced into the park in 1902 from captive plains bison that had been taken from the landscape in a wild state. The two herds have remained distinct, separate herds geographically, behaviorally and genetically for over a hundred years. The central herd is on the brink of extinction, endangered, due to disproportionate large-scale culling by a government coalition called the Interagency Bison Management Plan. The herd’s migratory behavior brings them to Gardiner Basin, site of the Stephens Creek capture facility, where they are trapped and sent to slaughter, while the northern herd is threatened. Given time, that herd may also become extinct, since a preponderance now lacks an essential trait for survival in nature—migratory behavior—most likely eradicated by large-scale culling of its migratory members during the winter of 1996-1997, reducing the herd by half, the migratory half. Ironically, it was this event over 20 years ago that was the impetus for the formation of the Interagency Bison Management Plan in 2000, established in part to avoid such slaughters. Ironically, it is this non-migratory behavior that is saving the northern herd, for the time being, because it keeps them out of Gardiner Basin and the Stephens Creek capture facility.

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