Wyoming’s 11,344 bison records are the most of any state in this atlas, and they belong overwhelmingly to one ecosystem: Yellowstone National Park alone accounts for 10,198, Grand Teton National Park adds 869, and between them Park and Teton counties hold nearly every record in the state.
The last continuously wild herds
Yellowstone is the only place in the lower 48 states where bison have lived continuously wild since before the nineteenth-century slaughter, and its herds still migrate with the seasons between high summer plateaus and lower winter range. South of the park, the Grand Teton herd ranges the open flats of Jackson Hole, and scattered records reach the surrounding wild country, from the North Absaroka Wilderness to the Teton and Jedediah Smith wildernesses.
Heavyweights with a quick first step
Reports crest from May through September, peaking in July when the rut puts bellowing, sparring bulls in among the cow herds, but bison never vanish from the record: they stay active all winter, often walking plowed roads to save energy, which is why January still holds hundreds of reports. They are also genuinely dangerous. Yellowstone’s bison have injured more visitors than any other animal in the park, almost always when someone crowds a deceptively fast half-ton animal for a photograph, and distance is not a courtesy but the whole game.
Status in Wyoming
The overlay treats the bison as native to its mapped Wyoming range, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state. The IUCN lists the species globally as Near Threatened.
