"Our herd has helped start hundreds of others," says Ron Walker, Custer's resource program manager. "We've auctioned animals to breeders since 1966. Nowadays we get an average of $1,300 a head. Maybe that's not your pure vision of buffalo ranging free. But this isn't nostalgia. It's an enterprise, a major tourist attraction.
" Our rangelands are all native grassesÑbig and little bluestem for the warm season, western wheatgrass and green needle for the cool seasonÑand all in good to excellent condition. People can see typical large-herd behavior, such as bulls fighting and calves nursing, and learn what these animals are really like."
Nowhere do people get closer to buffalo than in Yellowstone National Park, where some 4,000 buffalo range at will over 2.2 million acres of forest, mountains, and eerie volcanic terrain.
Intimacy poses hazards: "THESE ANIMAES MAY APPEAR TAME BUT ARE WILD, UNPREDICTABLE, AND DANGEROUS,,, say warning signs, adding that an average buffalo can sprint at 30 miles an hour, three times faster than an average tourist can run. Since 1983 more than 50 tourists have ignored the warnings and been goredÑtwo fatallyÑwhen they violated a buffalo's personal space.
"This herd is a window on a vanished world," says research biologist Mary Meagher, who has been studying the park's buffalo for 33 years. "Bison have occupied the Yellowstone region since the end of the Pleistocene. Their fundamental behavior hasn't changed. They take the world head-on. They are animated snowplows, able to reach forage by moving snow aside with their heads. They learn very quickly where the best grazing is. They'll pick up and move if they don't like things."
Since 1966 Yellowstone has had a hands-off management policy, allowing the herd to range freely so researchers can observe natural migratory patterns. At first, long, savage winters kept population in check as weaker animalsÑyoung and oldÑfound deep snows too much for them. That changed a few years ago after the park was opened in winter for thousands of snowmobile tourists. Although they trail blue smoke and a noise like battalions of chain saws, and on occasion harass wild animals to exhaustion, the machines have made life easier for the buffalo by providing packed- down snow trails, which allow them to migrate to better sources of food.
"Opening the park to winter visitors has removed the natural fence of snow depth, " says Dr. Meagher. "As a result, winter kills have declined, and the population has been inflated by at least 1,500 animals. We have screwed up the system royally."
Overpopulation has created serious problems. Despite the popular image of herds traveling en masse, buffalo often travel in smaller groups. In recent years some of them have invaded private lands north and west of park boundaries, casually breaking or leaping over cattle fences to fill up on choice pasture grass.
This provokes outrage among cattlemen, who fear the buffalo will spread a dreaded disease called brucellosis, which causes spontaneous abortion in domestic livestock. Humans who handle meat infected with the Brucella abortus bacterium can fall victim to a debilitating disease called undulant fever, often difficult to diagnose.
The organism is believed to have arrived in cattle brought from Europe and has been found in Yellowstone's buffalo for more than 75 years and in its elk herds nearly as long. Federal and state governments have been trying to eradicate the disease for almost a century, banning the shipment of live animals that may carry it and requiring cattle ranchers to quarantine or slaughter infected herds.
" The only way to tell for sure if an animal is infected is by taking tissue samples from a carcass," says Margaret Meyer, who has studied the disease for years at the University of California at Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. "There are those who seriously believe that the Yellowstone herd should be destroyed to eradicate the diseaseÑeven though there has never been a proven case of free-ranging bison infecting cattle."
In the winter of 1988-89 fear of infection led the state of Montana to authorize hunters and wardens to kill some 600 buffalo outlaws.
"It was a nightmare," says Edward Francis, manager of a ranch owned by the Church Universal and Triumphant just north of the park. "Buffalo don't act like game animals; they just stand there to be shot. Television showed the whole thing, and animal rights groups took the state end the parkto court. Now we're waiting for all the agencies to come up with a management plan."
Since Yellowstone's buffalo cannot be shipped alive, the plan may result in deliberate reduction of the herd.
