Ron Dungan

The Arizona Republic

PHOENIX — Moving a herd of bison isn’t easy. Their big shoulders, quick feet and bad tempers make them difficult to capture, hard to reason with and prone to the occasional stampede. They look slow and docile but have been known to gore tourists and ram cars.

That is part of the challenge facing federal and state agencies in northwestern Arizona, where a herd of bison on the northern side of Grand Canyon National Park has become a problem. The bison, which are probably not native to the canyon and have been crossbred with cattle, trample local water sources and vegetation and can also damage archaeological sites.

Most people agree there are too many bison in the park. But nobody can agree on how to solve the problem — trapping and moving them, culling the herd or a combination of both. One solution — to allow Arizona hunters to help cull the bison within the park — has alarmed some observers.

The Arizona herd represents an unusual chapter in the history of bison. Biologists estimate that 30 million to 60 million of the animals, also known as buffalo, once roamed North America, until their numbers were whittled down by hunters to a handful by the 1880s. But early conservationists stepped in to save them from extinction, and in the early 1900s, a man named Charles Jesse Jones, a hunter, rancher, expert roper and former buffalo skinner who had seen the bison’s demise firsthand, brought a herd of the animals to northern Arizona.

Poll: Most in Arizona support Grand Canyon buffer

The bison is an iconic symbol of the Western frontier and the American conservation movement. The species’ presence in the park, and reactions to it, illustrate how public perception of nature and management of Western lands have changed in the last century. The bison issue is “a microcosm of a lot of issues regarding natural resources and public lands,” said Tom Sisk, a professor of environmental science and policy at Northern Arizona University.

Now, as agencies in Arizona try to find a solution, the herd keeps growing.

‘BUFFALO’ JONES

Charles Jesse Jones grew up on an Illinois farm and moved to Kansas while still a young man, according to biographer Colonel Henry Inman, author of Buffalo Jones’s Forty Years of Adventure. The book goes into great detail on a few buffalo hunts but offers few details of Jones’ early life. It’s not even clear exactly when Jones started hunting buffalo, but the book implies he arrived when the slaughter was well underway.

Eventually, the tide of public opinion turned against the slaughter, and Jones sought to make amends, riding out on the plains in search of buffalo calves to “atone” for his past, he told one interviewer.

He built a herd, and in the early 1900s, he moved it by train to southern Utah, then drove the bison to the Kaibab Plateau, a grassy, forested expanse north of the Grand Canyon. President Theodore Roosevelt set aside a portion of the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve as a wildlife refuge, where hunting was illegal. The National Park Service would not be created for another decade, and American ideas about wildlife and conservation were evolving. Nobody questioned whether the animals belonged at the Grand Canyon or whether they should be crossbred with cattle.

The herd soon moved from the Kaibab Plateau to the high desert of House Rock Valley, just north of Grand Canyon National Park.

It’s unclear whether Jones ever successfully crossed buffalo with cattle, but the House Rock bison herd has what is considered a high amount of cattle genes. They are undetectable to the average person, however. The animals look like bison — dark, shaggy, brooding.

THE BUFFALO ROAM

A 1926 survey of the American Bison Society listed the number of bison in the Arizona herd, which the state had begun to manage, at 80. Arizona soon began a lottery for an annual buffalo hunt, which was eventually carried out by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

In 1950, Game and Fish entered into an agreement with local ranchers, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. In it, the agency agreed “to keep the buffalo confined to their designated range,” a couple of grazing allotments in House Rock Valley.

The department kept the herd to 90 to 100 animals with regular culls in which the animals were corralled and permit holders shot them. The “corral shoots” ended in 1972, “when public pressures demanded that the department provide a more sporting-like atmosphere in more natural surroundings,” David E. Brown writes in Bringing Back the Game.

Eventually, hunting pressure made the animals wary. Experienced buffalo handlers retired, and fences fell into disrepair, and as the herd looked for safe havens, the bison became a free-ranging herd.

“We think that’s probably where the herd started to leave House Rock,” said Carl Lutch, wildlife program manager for the state Game and Fish Department.

PARK BECOMES REFUGE

By 2000, the bison were returning less frequently to House Rock Valley. Sometime in the last decade, they began to stay within the park year-round. Occasionally, they leave, but they don’t stay away long. Mike Hannemann, of the U.S. Forest Service, said the herd is using the park as a refuge. When the animals get shot at, they go back into the park, where hunting is illegal. As fewer bison are taken by hunters, their numbers grow.

Nobody knows how many bison are in the park, but estimates range from 400 to 600. “Nobody’s quite sure,” said Jan Balsom, the park’s acting chief for science and resource management. “They’re not easy to find, necessarily.”

Researchers say the animals congregate near water sources, which “are very limited up there ... that’s one of the main impacts. ... They turn those lakes and ponds into mud pits. They trample a lot of the native vegetation,” said Sisk, the NAU professor.

“Without very active managing, that herd is going to grow, and it’s going to grow quickly, exponentially,” Sisk said.

Park Service maintenance backlog hits record high

Management options include moving the herd, culling it with humane kills, splitting it or any combination of these. It may be possible to condition the animals to the idea that House Rock Valley, not the park, is the refuge, Hannemann said.

Each option raises its own set of questions. Where do you move the herd? Who does the culling? What do you do with the carcasses? As discussions dragged on, U.S. Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain, both Arizona Republicans, introduced a bill calling for the Arizona Game and Fish Department to work with the park service to come up with a culling plan.

Critics say the bill could lead to hunting in the park, which would set a “horrible precedent,” said Kevin Dahl of the National Parks Conservation Association.

“It’s a great concern to us,” Dahl said.

The Park Service has some experience with organized culls in which marksmen or skilled volunteers work closely with park management to reduce wildlife numbers. The shooters do not spend their time looking for wildlife, as a hunter might, and the meat may go to the shooter, to Indian tribes, to food banks or to scavengers in the field.

“You need to ask yourself, what worked, and how do you get back to what worked?” said Roger Clark of the Grand Canyon Trust, which works a grazing allotment on the North Rim.

“If your objective is to bring the herd back down, you’ve got to do it as swiftly and organized as possible,” he said. “The objective is not to show that hunters can kill bison. The objective is to reduce damage by bison in the park. They don’t belong there.

“The question is, who does the shooting? And this is where the politics comes into it,” he said.

AT A CROSSROAD

The bison, wild but perhaps not native, not cattle yet not pure bison, confound modern ideas about preservation, nature and resource management. Big, furry and charismatic, their story of near-extinction and recovery is one of the nation’s original attempts at conservation, a feel-good story that resonates with Americans to this day. The bison is on the logo of the Park Service and the Department of the Interior, and both agencies have been instrumental in bringing them from the brink of extinction.

“They’re a part of our American history,” said Balsom, the park official. “And then there’s the uniqueness and fragility of the North Rim ecosystem.”

The Park Service received a number of comments on the herd during a National Environmental Policy Act review process, ranging from “we love them to we hate them and everything in between,” Balsom said. “That’s part of our challenge, you know. Where do we go?”

“It’s all over the board,” Hannemann said. “There are people that like to see bison, there are people that like to hunt bison, there are people that don’t think they’re native, and there are people that think we should just leave the bison alone.”