MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, Wyo. — More than 1,100 bison, a record-breaking number, were removed by hunters from the Yellowstone herd after this year’s harsh winter forced a mass migration out of Yellowstone National Park (YNP).
This number is a sharp increase from 2022’s culling numbers, when the mild winter led to minimal migration outside YNP. Bison will typically move into Gardiner Basin, where hunting is permitted, to find food when higher elevations are covered in deep snow.
According to the Yellowstone Public Affairs Office (YPAO), the minimal migration during the previous three winters caused Yellowstone’s bison population to reach almost 6,000 in 2022, the largest number of bison in the park’s history.
Culling bison once they step out of the park boundaries is permitted as a way to maintain a healthy bison population and ecological balance within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It’s also a strategy to prevent bison from infecting cattle with brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to abort their calves and forces ranchers to quarantine cattle and suffer substantial revenue losses. About 60 percent of adult female bison in YNP test positive for exposure to the Brucella bacteria.
YPAO says the population this year will likely be reduced by 25 percent based on current projections of harvest levels, large migration and numbers of bison taken into the bison conservation transfer program. This is the maximum percentage of the population that Yellowstone bison biologists have recommended be reduced in a single season.
This year’s hunt was primarily conducted by members of eight Indigenous tribes, including the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Niitsitapi (Blackfeet), Hinono’eino (Northern Arapaho) and Apsáalooke (Crow), among others.
Bison inside the park are managed by the National Park System. Once bison leave park boundaries, they become managed by the Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP).
In the Jackson area, which includes all lands within Lincoln and Sublette counties and Teton County west of the Continental Divide, modifications to the Wyoming Game and Fish proposed hunting regulations include a reduction in the wild bison quota from 125 to 50 bison.
