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Wildlife
Born Free 
An unusual deal restores a marquee species to private land.
By Susan Cosier

Bison once blanketed the country, from Alaska to Mexico. Today a wild, genetically pure herd roams free in Yellowstone National Park, its members subject to slaughter when they wander off of the property to find food or bear calves and then don’t return to the park by May 15. But thanks to a new agreement between a private landowner and the state of Montana, 87 of them are now living on Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch, located just north of Yellowstone.

The bison are the subject of a decade-long study investigating whether they’ll contract brucellosis—a disease that causes spontaneous abortions in cattle. If they don’t, the state may use them to build free-roaming herds that pose no threat to local ranchers’ cattle. Halfway through the study, the state ran out of funds and had nowhere to release the bison. So in a unique accord—one lambasted by many environmentalists—Turner Enterprises will keep the animals for five years. The company will receive no cash payments but will instead get to keep 75 percent of the offspring born, a projected 188 animals, which it can sell or breed.

“Flying D Ranch had all the infrastructure to contain the bison and had the facilities so that we can continue the testing,” says Dave Risley, wildlife division administrator for the state. “All the other options that we had available at the time were fraught with problems.”

“We thought it was a viable solution worthy of consideration to what’s been an intractable problem so far,” says Russ Miller, general manager of Turner Enterprises, one of several groups that submitted proposals for taking care of the bison.

Yet a coalition of conservation groups argues that the agreement unlawfully authorizes a public resource to be converted into a private entity. “I think the concern is that it’s going to set the stage for who knows what future actions by the state if they start allowing for privatization of wildlife when it’s convenient,” says Summer Nelson, a staff attorney at the Montana office of the Western Watersheds Project, one of four groups that filed a suit against the state. “Then they have that precedent to rely on.”

At the same time there is considerable support for the deal among other conservationists. “Putting 87 on Turner’s ranch for five years and having him keep some of the offspring doesn’t seem like such a big deal to us,” says Mark Pearson, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition’s national parks program director, “because that’s a key step along the path of getting to a better outcome for the entire herd.”

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