Grand Canyon wants to evict some bison

Bison are a rare sight for visitors and a handful of hunters just north of Grand Canyon National Park, but a growing blight for park managers. Even as their numbers swell, the bison are increasingly out of rifle range and on the hit list of biologists and archaeologists, who propose to force at least some of them to mosey along. The grazers seem to know they're safe inside the park, where hunting is prohibited, so their numbers have grown from 100 in the 1990s to 350 or more today. The herd is chewing grasses to the nubs, hurting upland lakes and trampling ancient American Indian dwellings, park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga said. "Just a bump can knock over a (dwelling) wall really easily," he said. "They're all really fragile." So, on Wednesday, the National Park Service announced that it will cooperate with the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Arizona Game and Fish Department on a plan to manage bison — ideally pushing many of them out of the park and into the Kaibab National Forest. The plan will require an environmental study, and, starting Friday, the agencies will spend two months gathering ideas from the public. Nothing specific is proposed, but ideas include occasionally hazing animals out of the park or fencing some boundary zones. Hunting is not allowed in the park, and is not under consideration. But outside the park, where the state and U.S. Forest Service have co-operated on a hunt for years, the goal is to maintain that opportunity. Arizona charges residents $1,095 for a lottery-drawn bison tag, and 20 hunters bought them for this year's spring hunt...more