My name is Danielle Buttke.
I am a wildlife veterinarian and
public health service officer
for the National Park Service.
Bison are ecosystem engineers that have
been present throughout this country
for, you know, in their current form.
For really at least 11,000 years,
and their primary predators
are wolves and really humans.
In our current day and age,
we don't have significant
predation from the wolves.
Unfortunately, 'cause they're not present
throughout many of the places
where bison exist today.
So, it's one of the reasons why the
work that we're doing today is so
critically important to manage
these herds so that they don't have
negative impacts on the ecosystem
if they become overpopulated.
The bison have kind of been on and off
the Kaibab Plateau since the 1900s.
They were introduced in 1906, when we
had Grand Canyon Wildlife Preserve
that was established by Theodore
Roosevelt, and Charles Buffalo Jones in
charge of that as the wildlife manager.
So, they were originally introduced
on the Kaibab Plateau,
and then they were managed for a
number of years down at House Rock
Valley by Arizona Game and Fish.
And then they didn't really start spending
year round on the North Rim until 2010,
I believe. They didn't return to House Rock
They were going down there every year,
and they stopped migrating down there,
and that could be loss of those, loss
of knowledge from those females who were
older and had that knowledge with that are
But they stopped going down there.
Yeah, they're impacting the
landscape and it's been kind of recent.
It's been the last ten years that those
impacts have really become apparent.
I mean, the grass is mowed down
to absolutely nothing.
So, there's some impacts that are apparent
There's springs that the locals
visited here 20, 30 years ago that
used to have a native orchids,
and you go down there now
and it's kind of a mud pit.
So, I think it's pretty
obvious that the landscapes are
being a little bit overburdened,
and it's hard to quantify that.
So, we have a graduate student,
Dana Musto,
and she's with Colorado State University.
She's working with Kate Schoenecker,
who is a USGS ecologist,
and they're doing a study on
grazing impacts of bison in the
meadows of Grand Canyon National
Park in the Kaibab National Forest,
and they have a one acre grazing
exclosures where they're monitoring
changes to the soil, changes to the
Vegetation, vegetation bio mass.
They're taking a lot of
different metrics out there,
and hopefully that will help
us kind of quantify that change
'cause it's visually apparent,
but some numbers will be really helpful too
I think it's really important
that throughout this process of
contemplating how to manage bison here
at Grand Canyon National Park, that
tribes have been involved, really from
the earliest stage, and on many levels.
Out of the three programs that we have
here at Grand Canyon National Park
that are directed at Bison management,
two of those are tribal programs.
The first one of those is the
Live Capture Program.
In which we're working in partnership
with the InterTribal Buffalo Council,
to capture bison and transport
them to tribes that are actively
managing bison herds.
We also have a program with the
state that's the Lethal Removal
Program where we will be culling a
small number of bison this year, in
2021, and then a third program that
we have is a partnership between
Grand Canyon National Park and the
11 tribes culturally associated with
the Grand Canyon, in which we'll be
signing an agreement for tribes to
come into the park and participate
in those lethal culling operations
directly, and take the meat,
animal parts, hides,
and other resources back to be
provided to tribal communities.
Live capture has always been our
primary method for reduction.
That is the biggest bang for our buck.
If you will, you can capture
a lot of animals at once.
It's really great to send
them to these bison tribes.
These tribes that have a spiritual and
important cultural connections to bison.
They have their own herds or
they're starting their own herds.
We're augmenting those herds.
It's a really feel good story.
Lethal culling, the goal there
is really less about reduction.
We're not trying to shoot hundreds of bison
Yes, it's part of the reduction process,
but we're really trying to do is
make the park less of a refuge.
So the bison will range more widely,
and therefore may be more available
for hunters on the Kaibab Plateau.
Also, maybe concentrate their impacts less
in one place. We do
expect that there will be some
recovery of habitat and things
when there's less bison.
We bait bison into a corral.
This process takes a couple months,
getting them accustomed to vehicles
driving in and out of the area.
We've used alfalfa pellets. We've used
hay. During drought seasons,
water is the main way that we
bait them into the corral.
So, the baiting process is just six weeks,
6 to 8 weeks of getting them used
to us being there and delivering
food and goodies for 'um.
After that, we rig up a pulley
system to shut the gates on a group
while they're inside the corral,
and we've had various sized
groups each year. Our corral could
probably hold groups up to 100,
but we haven't gotten it to capacity yet.
The herd size really depends on
the season, and we found this
year, that's the first year,
of the last three,
that's not a drought year. And the herds
are smaller. There are groups of 20 to
30. Once we get bison in the corral,
we have groups coming out from Arizona
Game and Fish and the Forest Service
and from various divisions within the
Park Service. There's usually about
30 people on staff at the corral and,
a lot of those staff are doing things
like swinging gates and separating bison
into smaller groups for processing;
and by processing I just mean
running them through the squeeze
chute and taking biological samples.
Once we go through that process,
some will be radio collared and
released back into the park, and
some will be shipped to tribes via
the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
Any larger animals that aren't interacting
well with the smaller ones, typically
get released with a collar. Bisons,
have, they're a matriarchal society;
but there are patriarchs too.
So, we like to collar those animals.
They have a lot of knowledge of water
sources, and they have a lot of knowledge
just like geospatial cognitive map.
We are collecting a lot of biological
samples from these bison as we also
perform health checks and make sure that
they are healthy enough to handle the
transportation and introduction to a
new herd; as well as make sure that they
don't have any diseases that they could
potentially spread to other animals.
When people think about disease
in bison or buffalo,
they often think of brucellosis,
which is a really economically
important disease of cattle.
What most people don't know about brucellosis
is that it's actually a disease of cattle,
that was introduced to the United
States by European cattle.
And it wasn't until after this
herd here at the Grand Canyon was
established that brucellosis passed
from cattle to the Yellowstone
bison or buffalo population.
And that's where a lot of people's
current understanding and thoughts
of brucellosis come from.
We know this herd is free,
and so that's not a disease
were concerned about,
and it's one of the reasons why it's so
critically important that we are able to
move these animals and establish new herds
People often ask
what are some of the challenges
to bison conservation today?
And really, it's a lot of the challenges that all
wildlife see. And that are things such as
loss of habitat, changes from
climate change, drought,
increasing wildfire, etc.
And more interactions with
humans and domestic animals.
And so it's critically important
that we are able to establish new
herds, so we have multiple places
where these animals can survive and
continue to perform the important
ecosystem roles that they do.