Animal Overpopulations Put Many Parks in a Bind : Wildlife: While some species are rare, others are overrunning preserves, straying onto rangeland.

America’s National Parks are crowded, jammed, overflowing. Never mind people; this is with animals.

Bison, pigs, goats, elk, ponies, deer--countless thousands of deer--are thriving in parks across the land and breeding, oh, how they are breeding. This is not a tale of nature’s joyful bounty, however. Too many park animals, or wild animals roaming outside the parks, can mean the spread of diseases, ruination of habitat and inevitable conflict with humans, punctuated by the smell of gunpowder and bloodstains on the winter snow.

Wildlife “management,” animal population control by any of various means, is already a social and moral flash point between hunters and animal-rights activists. It takes on even heavier emotional lading and symbolism when the creatures in the sights live in national parks.

Painfully, the National Park Service, protector of American wildlife, is facing up to a crisis of mission.

Already this year, park rangers have been ordered to shoot bison outside Yellowstone. Some of the service’s Washington policy-makers believe this kind of strong-handed wildlife management inevitably will become part of park service credo.

The director of the National Park Service says it is no longer enough to adhere to old and deeply felt traditions and let nature run its course in the great parks.

“We’re going to have to move to a solution,” parks director James Ridenour said. He chooses his words carefully, as would a lawyer before a jury. This is a national policy very much in formation. Not only is the public keenly concerned about management of its parks and the future of wildlife, but park rangers across the country wonder as well: How is headquarters going to get out of this mess?

“We can allow nature to take its course as far as is practical,” Ridenour said. “But when it goes out of balance, we need to help move it back toward a more natural ecosystem. . . . This is not a popular position to take, but this is not a contest for popularity. We need to do what’s right for the park, the public and the animals.”

At parks, monuments, battlefields and other facilities managed by the park service, animal overpopulation and animals wandering across borders are frequently the No. 1 problem.

At Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania, at Fire Island seashore in New York and in at least 20 other park facilities in the Northeast, Midwest and South, park officials say that they have too many white-tailed deer, sometimes way too many. Here in Yellowstone and to the south, in Grand Teton National Park and parks in the Dakotas, bison are increasing in number and sometimes wander off park property onto the range where buffalo are no longer welcome to roam.

At other parks, the problems are localized but just as thorny: Mountain goats where they don’t belong at Olympic National Park in Washington, prolific exotic deer at Pt. Reyes seashore north of San Francisco, ponies on Cape Hatteras and Cumberland Island off Georgia. Feral pigs are a problem in the Great Smokies, and so are goats, pigs and mongoose at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

“From a biological perspective, it’s time to reassess our basic policies,” said John Dennis, a biologist and chief of the science branch of the park service’s Wildlife and Vegetation Division.

“In my opinion, the modern landscape is making it impossible to manage according to our desired policy of allowing natural processes to operate unimpeded.”

Inevitably, he added, the park service will have to rely more on human intervention to control park wildlife and less on nature.

“The problem is bigger than one would be led to believe,” said Lonnie Williamson, a hunting enthusiast and vice president of the independent Washington-based Wildlife Management Institute.

“Man has stuck his finger into every corner of this country. It’s no longer enough to say, ‘Let nature take its course.’ We need a park service policy to manage wildlife. We need to get rid of the ancient mentality that if we lock it up it will be all right.”

This has been years in coming. A park service assessment named animal overpopulation as the top natural resource issue more than two years ago.

Killing or trapping and relocation of animals have been occurring with regularity in various parks since the 1960s, including the much-publicized burro airlift out of Grand Canyon National Park in 1980 and annual elk hunts in Grand Teton. More than 670 bison have been killed in the last five years when they wandered outside Yellowstone’s boundaries.

In the past, these have been viewed as isolated, occasional events, not really part of the park service’s basic mission.

This winter, though, threatens to transform a problem into a policy.

That is because the park service and Yellowstone Park Supt. Bob Barbee have said it is no longer responsible to permit bison herds to expand inside the park and then shrug and consider them someone else’s problem when they cross Yellowstone’s borders.

Cattlemen fear the free-ranging bison as an economic threat. The wild animals can spread brucellosis, a disease that affects reproduction in livestock.

In past years the state of Montana, on the northern and western borders of the park, has taken charge of killing wayward bison. This is supposed to protect Montana’s certification as having brucellosis-free livestock. But the state’s image has been taking a beating as a result of the kill, and this year, Montana persuaded Barbee and the park service to share in the dirty work.

Under a cooperative agreement, park rangers and Montana state wardens are supposed to kill bison cows that wander out of the park. The meat is to be given to the needy. Hunters, chosen by lot, will be allowed to kill the bulls and keep the meat. Calves will be captured, neutered and sold at auction.

The trouble is that the park service has always viewed itself, and sold itself to the public, as the agency that protects wildlife. After all, the badge of the ranger is emblazoned with a bison. Shooting animals, shooting bison, just does not register with the image of the ranger.

Then, too, the bison has replaced the bear these days as the object of the public’s affection at the park.

“Nobody here likes the idea of blowing away our symbol, but we’re going to have to make some hard calls and they’re not going to go down easily,” Barbee said.

So far, hunters have taken 11 bulls. The planned deployment of park rangers has been challenged in U.S. District Court by the Fund for Animals. Wayward bison remain near the boundaries of the park.

The problem is geography. There is no real evidence that the bison are too numerous inside the park. They now number about 2,500, up from only 10 breeding cows at the turn of the century. But two of the park’s three bison herds have followed their natural instinct to wander and have “learned” of enticing winter range outside the park boundaries.

Conservation groups would like to avoid the killing by eventually finding expanded range for the bison, perhaps by leasing private land from cattlemen. They also argue that the brucellosis risk to cattle is overrated. They note that elk also carry the disease and no one is suggesting slaughtering elk that wander onto livestock range.

Beyond its short-range agreement to assist in the destruction of wandering bison, Yellowstone is in the first year of a more comprehensive, two- or three-year study of the animals and how to manage them. Can they be cured of brucellosis and given more freedom to wander? Can they be restrained from venturing outside the park? What does the encroachment of increasing numbers of vacation houses into the Yellowstone ecosystem mean to bison? How many bison are enough? Too many?

“I’m not going to be a Pollyanna. How you accomplish this without dead bison is one of the great challenges here,” Barbee said.

Steve Frye is a district ranger at the park and one of those who could be called upon to take up arms against the animals he is entrusted to protect. “I don’t think yet I fully know, that any of us fully knows, of the ramifications of us shooting these cows,” he said.

At park service headquarters in Washington, spokesman George Berklacy thinks he can foresee some mighty unpleasant ramifications with the public. All four television networks have asked to be given advance notice before the rangers join in the shooting. The dinner-time pictures: A gun, the friendly hat of the ranger, a bison falling dead.

“This,” he said, worriedly, “is going to give us the worst image we’ve had in our 75-year history.”

If for some reason the bison do not bring about a moment of truth for the park service, there are other parks and other animals where crisis brews.

Perhaps it will flare next with the deer in Gettysburg National Military Park.

To some degree, every national park facility east of the Mississippi is reporting too many deer. Some species suffer as a result of suburbanization, but not deer. They thrive.

At the 7,500-acre Gettysburg, site of the greatest Civil War battle, a three-year study by Penn State University determined there are nearly 20 times too many deer trying to live in the park--1,400 deer where there should be 75.

Farmers lease about a third of the park’s area for corn and other crops, which maintain the Civil War-era authenticity of the battlefield scene. They say that the deer now make efforts to grow crops there futile. Clumps of trees, used during the war days for firewood, are not regenerating because deer devour all the new shoots. Concern about Lyme disease, spread by deer ticks, is heightening.

Just this autumn, after all the study and a round of soul-searching about the purposes of the park, Gettysburg’s managers decreed the deer to be an “official problem” threatening the historical atmosphere of the battlefield.

That was the easy part.

What do you do next when you have too many deer? When hunting is not part of the purposes of the park? When fences would spoil the historical feeling of the battlefield? When predators no longer exist in significant numbers? When there seems to be no place along the Eastern Seaboard to transplant surplus deer even if transferring them were feasible? What then?

“There’s no manual for this,” said Robert E. Davidson, management assistant for the park. “We’re trying to establish a protocol. My guess is that we’re a year away from a decision.”

John Dennis, the park service biologist, sees limited options: Shoot some of the deer, relocate them, sterilize many of them, fence the park, do nothing and let the population crash on its own, alter the habitat so it is not so attractive to deer or increase the number of predators.

In this instance, animal-rights organizations believe that chemical fertility control offers long-range hope.

For the short run, the deer should be left alone, even if it prevents the raising of crops at Gettysburg and changes the historical setting, says Wayne Pacelle, national director of the Fund for Animals.

“We would value the lives of animals over farming. That’s harsh, but straight. Cultivation of crops at a park is frivolous,” he said.

Hunters such as the Wildlife Management Institute’s Lonnie Williamson think the answers are simple and reflect the traditional predatory-prey relationship between humans and game animals.

“You’ll notice that game animals do not end up on the endangered-species list,” he said. “The park service knows how to manage people, how to manage concessionaires, but they’re not managing wildlife well. . . . When animals expand beyond the area that they are confined to, the area that can support them, they have to bring the curtain down.”

This argument is really just part of a profound conflict pulling at the park service, begging the question: What are parks for? Are they part of America’s recreation industry? Are they repositories of natural biological systems?

Part of the answer will have to come from Americans themselves. “And it’s not just thinking what you’ve got to do this weekend for fun. It’s a lot like going to church--and thinking of the here-beyond,” said Christine Schonewald-Cox, U.C. Davis research scientist for the park service.

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.