The Majestic Taylor Fork is a high and scenic mountain valley of public lands draped with sagebrush-grasslands that provide headwater stream flows to the Upper Gallatin River Canyon. The U.S Forest Service currently leases two small cattle allotments on approximately 16,000 acres of public wildlands in the area to provide fodder for some 450 domestic cows for about three months in the summer.

This use comes at the expense of native fish and wildlife over a much broader landscape, which includes more than 1 50,000 acres of habitat in the Taylor Fork, Porcupine, Buffalo Horn, Sage Creek and Tepee Creek watersheds. Wildlife migrations - in particular wild bison - are adversely impacted on a total of more than 300,000 acres of public lands (306,560 estimated) northwest of Yellowstone National Park.

Grizzly bears, wolves, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, moose, elk, mule deer and native cutthroat trout are also significantly impacted by the Forest Service grazing leases. These lands are nearly all publicly owned by the Gallatin National Forest. About 9,000 acres of critical elk winter range are owned by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the form of the Gallatin Wildlife Management Area. Thus, a small amount of cattle grazing on public lands disrupts wild bison migrations, recovery and conservation opportunities in Montana over a vast landscape of wild and remote public lands in the Greater Yellowstone Region.

We are working to change that.

Similar conflicts with federally subsidized government allotments have been resolved through voluntary buyouts and permanent retirements, including the Blackrock/Spread Creek allotment in northwestern Wyoming, which was bought out at $78 per animal unit month, or AUM. Applying this amount to the Taylor Fork situation would require only $106,587 to permanently retire both allotments.

You can help. Please make a call to the Hebgen Ranger District in West Yellowstone at (406)823-6961 and let District Ranger William Queen know you want the Taylor Fork managed for wildlife. Ask him and other officials to work with us to permanently retire the Cache/Eldridge and Wapiti allotments so that wild bison and other wildlife can resume their natural role in this wonderful and wild landscape.

Glenn Hockett is Montana director of WWP. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.