State limits Interior Alaska hunt after dozens of bison drown in frozen pond

State wildlife manager said that they are drastically reducing the number of hunting permits for an Interior Alaska bison herd after discovering that dozens of the animals died in a pond this spring.

“We don’t 100% know what happened, but it is very highly likely that they fell through the ice,” said Jason Caikoski, management coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks.

In a notice Tuesday, officials said that 56 individuals who drew permits to hunt bison from the Delta herd will not get the chance to harvest one this year. Just 79 permit holders will be eligible this season, and only bulls may be taken.

Managers counted 336 adult bison in the herd, with another 101 yearlings calved this year. That’s far below the number of animals wildlife officials expected.

“We thought there’d be about 80 more than we counted,” Caikoski said.

This spring, GPS collars on some of the bison stopped working. The signal came back about a month later.

“We went to that collar and found a large number of bison with it that were right on the shore of a pond,” Caikoski said. “Parts of them in water, parts on land. They were highly decomposed.”

The small, nameless pond in a black spruce forest is near Donnelly Dome, about 15 miles south of Delta Junction, Caikoski said. Fish and Game staff looked at satellite imagery in the days around when the GPS collars stopped transmitting and observed rotten ice that could have been breaking up.

“It appeared that they got out on thin ice in the spring close to breakup, and fell in,” Caikoski said.

After the pond melted, dozens of carcasses blew toward the shore. Wildlife managers confirmed the number of bison to be “in the high 30s,” but Caikoski said the advanced state of decomposition made it difficult to get an exact number.

“These were ... rotted meat kind of melted down into the soil, visible bones, I’m sure tons of scavengers had been on them. Because we didn’t find this group until well after breakup, it was well into summer,” he said.

More bison from the herd may have drowned, he said, their remains still at the bottom of the pond, unenumerated.

Permits to hunt bison in Alaska are extremely hard to get. According to Fish and Game, about 15,000 people apply to hunt bison from the Delta herd annually. This year, the number of permits issued for that group, prior to the emergency reduction, totaled 135. Alaska residents are only eligible for the hunt once in a decade. Out-of-state hunters are only eligible once a lifetime.

Though wood bison were native to Alaska before they were wiped out in the 19th century, the Delta and other Interior herds are descended from Montana Plains bison relocated to Alaska in 1928 and first opened to hunting in the 1950s, according to Fish and Game.

It’s not unheard of for large mammals in Alaska to fall through ice and drown, freeze to death, or both. In 2011, scientists found 32 musk oxen encased in ice after likely drowning during a freakish winter thaw along the northern Seward Peninsula. In 2016, two moose were discovered frozen in a river bend near a Bible camp outside of Unalakleet, their antlers locked together. The hypothesis at the time was that the bulls were fighting when they crashed through the thin early-winter ice.

Fish and Game plans to ask the Alaska Board of Game to transfer this year’s canceled bison permits to a future hunting season, likely in 2026 after the Delta herd has had time to further recover.