As grizzly bears have come back from the brink of extinction and slowly started to spread throughout Greater Yellowstone, landowners here have figured out that it’s possible to live with these majestic symbols of the wild.
Both wildlife and ranchers call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem home. In grizzly country like southwest Montana’s Centennial Valley, and up the Tom Miner Basin just north of Yellowstone National Park, some ranchers are calling on different techniques to keep their businesses thriving while living with the great bear.
A technique like range riding, for example, is an old technique in other parts of the world, but it’s new to the United States. Instead of focusing on killing predators, range riders increase human presence on the landscape, and keep cattle bunched more tightly together, making them less vulnerable to predators. Traditional cattle management encourages cows to scatter out across the range, as until recently this was thought to be the best way to use the range. Keeping cows closer together is a new technique built on old behaviors mainly modeled by wild bison. A tighter-packed gang of cows is less vulnerable to predation than are single cows strewn across a large area. Or at least that’s the idea behind some new experiments in the Tom Miner.
Range riding, bunching cattle, electric fence and fladry, carcass removal and other tools are helping ranchers. These take-charge tools minimize conflicts in predator country, creating more viable and sustainable ranch operations. And so far it appears that the tools are working. Participating ranchers are seeing fewer depredations when they consistently use these techniques.
We’re one of many groups in the ecosystem that support ranchers in keeping cows safe and bears alive. “We want to keep bears alive, and ending conflicts – whether that’s with people, or with cows – is a good investment for both animals and people in Greater Yellowstone,” says GYC Executive Director Caroline Byrd. A record 61 bears were killed last year because of conflicts with people and livestock. While many of these bear deaths were due to bears getting into poorly stored food and garbage, and many others were caused by accidental run-ins with hunters in the backcountry, bears were also euthanized after killing cows and sheep. In some parts of the ecosystem, livestock conflict is the single most common cause of grizzly bear deaths.
There’s no quick fix for this conflict in predator country. Bears and wolves are predators. Ranchers are in the business of raising prey. Conflicts will happen, and not necessarily because the humans involved are negligent. But some landowners are finding that these tools to nip future conflicts in the bud can help sustain their cattle operations.
-- Beth Kampschror, Communications Coordinator