I am well aware of this fact. The difference is that nothing is stopping the bison from leaving the area. They can and do. Sure, they get killed, but they do leave.
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It was quite a lot of work getting the list on unfenced population, it took me hours of sifting through Google search results. To the average person wanting to know where they can see wild bison, the iNat maps are currently useless (but have the potential to be helpful).
Natural barriers arenāt really the same as fences, though I understand your point about the definition being too broad.
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Not to be facetious, but can you please explain to me how a managed but self-sustaining herd of bison in a massive fenced parcel of land is different from a managed, self-sustaining herd of bison on an island where they were introduced?
While I understand the intent behind casual-grading these bison herds, I would argue that to many, many people, the thousands of bison that youāre grading as captive on a personal value judgement -are- wild, even if they are living within a constrained area. Tourists visiting game reserves in Africa are there to see wild animals, and generally accept the fact that they are fenced in. Likewise, visitors to sanctuaries in parts of New Zealand, like Zealandia, tend to accept that areas are fenced to protect wildlife from introduced predators. Sure, this is without question a grey area, but Iād argue that many more people would call a bison in a massive fenced prairie restoration area, or a hartebeest in a game reserve (and so on) a āwildā animal, as opposed to a cactus on a Manhattan porch or a betta in a tank in Munich.
In which lies what I (personally) feel most at odds with your actionsāyouāre not only making a value judgment (which in itself is perfectly valid), youāre purposefully going out of your way to change the accepted (in a sense) occurrence of this animal on iNaturalist, acting as official judge and jury to mark down animals that many many others are happy to regard as wild, to no immense detriment (to say nothing of the time, expertise, and effort that has gone into maintaining many of these populations in as natural a manner as possible, in as natural an environment as possible, in our unavoidably altered and artificial world). You claim that youāre going out of your way to help others better recognize where wild bison are, but youāre only really helping them recognize your own personal view of where wild bison are, the literal exact opposite intention-wise of your claimed goal.
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The average person would consider animals free ranging, not being fed, not receiving medical care, not getting shelter etc to be wild.
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Iām really not sure thatās true. I think reason so many people consider them to be is because the parks themselves like to claim they are wild, I think if they āadmittedā that they were fenced then it would be a different story.
So, what would be the minimum fence size for a bison population to be wild? Some reserves have bison on thousands of acres, others on just a few. And obviously thereās quite the range between there. Is a few hundred acres sufficient? When is the line drawn?
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Again, if that is the case, why is every other animal within those fences that canāt evade them not captive? Why just the bison?
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Because intention is/was for bison and all other animals are not stopped by it at all (without destroying it).
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Besides bison, pronghorn, elk, and mule deer are all contained within the fence at Wind Cave NP (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303249417_Evaluating_Diet_Composition_of_Pronghorn_in_Wind_Cave_National_Park_South_Dakota). There are enough fences criss-crossing the American West that I wouldnāt be surprised if you could draw quite a few populations of pronghorn and other megafauna as being āfenced in.ā
Edited to add: Incidentally, most of the time the fenced-in reserves are designed as barbed-wire fences enclosing an area with cattle grates at road crossings. Cattle grates are designed to inhibit hoofed mammal movement, but they arenāt perfectāsometimes animals can jump across or delicately walk on the bars. While browsing literature I found evidence of bison crossing cattle grates in Yellowstone, so even reserves weāre calling fenced-in are still somewhat permeable, and animals could get out. Citation: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3782030.pdf?casa_token=Gyonfb6HzRcAAAAA:ukSC43BcwU5j4Hgw-qITyeko_I3KrA-XM0yKtRHoiU2Yu7cl4vh8zcJHBtwR-NvnCtR9zbmybhEIuXQpC5bzv3GBfpRpelBl1gfm3PjStgmyeLcBSjg
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If theyāre not built to keep those in they shouldnāt count, but we need to find it out, I guess in many places they were.
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Hello? scroll back up and you will see
@tiwane is iNat staff, and has joined this conversation already
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Besides bison, pronghorn, elk, and mule deer are all contained within the fence at Wind Cave NP
Wind Caveās fences are actually designed to keep elk out. The elk that stay there are doing so by their own free will.
Yes, any captive animal could escape their enclosure, just as any prisoner can potentially escape from a penitentiary institution or animals sometimes escape their zoo enclosures. And one might argue that for that moment they are briefly wild.
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Sorry for not clarifying. I had seen that one staff member had weighted in, but was really hoping that the staff might finally clarify the siteās provided definition as this has come up repeatedly and in different contexts.
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Many threads about captive versus wild. And about separating Needs ID from that captive / wild. But for now we need to try and reach a workable consensus.
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Wind Caveās fences are actually designed to keep elk out. The elk that stay there are doing so by their own free will.
Thanks for that link! That adds a really interesting wrinkleāthe gates are closed during hunting season. Does that mean that the elk within the park are captive during that period, but wild when the gates are open? Could other species get through those open gates?
My point by bringing up details of fencing design, etc., is not to get down into the weeds but rather to show that thereās a lot of nuance and disagreement in how people draw the lineāas raymie said, how big of an enclosure does it have to be to be considered wild? What if itās fenced only part of the year? What if humans intended water bodies to act as barriers?
As I described above, in gray areas like this, Iām generally in favor of including data and letting people filter it out themselves. Raymieās done all this research into which ones are fenced and which ones arenātāperhaps they could share that information for those interested in finding wild, unfenced bison through a journal or blog post? Iām personally really interested in bison from an ecological standpoint, so Iād be interested in seeing iNat records of conservation herds on areas large enough to have a significant ecological impact on the landscape (e.g. to compare iNat observations of other prairie species with bison on large free-range areas). I think most of the people on this thread agree farmed bison are pretty clearly not wild, but the gray area seems to mostly be in these conservation herds on large areas of public lands.
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Fair enough, but it shouldnāt be hard to find other species that the fence would impact, if they ever ran across it. The point is that just because a fence exists on the landscape doesnāt mean that an organism is actually constrained by it.
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ā¦the gates are closed during hunting season. Does that mean that the elk within the park are captive during that period, but wild when the gates are open?
My opinion would be that those that stayed are captive during hunting season, as it seems they are unable to leave (unless theyāve constructed the one-way fences you sometimes see out here designed to get animals off of highways, but prevent them from getting back into the highway area).
The average person would consider animals free ranging, not being fed, not receiving medical care, not getting shelter etc to be wild.
I agree that an average person would and am somewhat in agreement with it myself, though thereās a whole spectrum of management practices of even the NPS herds that most people are simply not aware of. I have come around to the idea that open range animals (cattle, horses, sheep, etc) are essentially wild because they can generally go where they want, when they want. And I kind of get the arguments that a small enough herd on a large enough tract of land is almost open range. Though, in truth, many of these public herds are really at capacity and require regular culling, so itās kind of open rangeā¦ without the āopenā part. So I can understand what I believe @raymieās position is, which I would summarize as this:
With fenced animals (with a fence built specifically to contain them) you can draw a shape on a map and say you are effectively certain that the animals are within that boundary. With open range animals you can only say that thereās a high probability that the animals are in any specified area because you would not expect them to stray too far from areas that should meet their needs. Like The Truman Show, but without the cameras to truly ensure that theyāre still there.
Many threads about captive versus wild. And about separating Needs ID from that captive / wild. But for now we need to try and reach a workable consensus.
My point by bringing up details of fencing design, etc., is not to get down into the weeds but rather to show that thereās a lot of nuance and disagreement in how people draw the line
Agreed. There is a lot of nuance here and the platform creators seemed to decide that things which are not clearcut should be decided through votes. I still wish that the āwildā question wasnāt a binary choice, as it loses much of that nuance and I am regularly surprised at how nasty/offended people can get when you disagree with their assessment of their observation. In my mind, the debate itself is actually more interesting than the designation. Thereās more to be learned if we allow identifiers to provide reasons for their vote instead of chastising them for how or why they voted, which has largely been my personal experience on this issue.
What I will say is that if you go backpacking in, say, Badlands NP itās not entirely unreasonable to worry about having an on-foot confrontation with a bison. That certainly feels wild.
But if you pitched your tent on the other side of the fence I would argue that you have zero reason to worry about that happening. So Iām pretty comfortable with a fence being a large factor in my decision, but Iām also quite sure that even the fence separation wouldnāt be enough to put some people fully at ease. 
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No the intention is to stop bison and cattle interacting.
It is equally valid to say this is done by limiting the movement of bison as to say it is done by limiting the movement of the cattle.
Itās only a ābison fenceā if your desire is to say the bison are captive.
If anything the goal is given that the land is federally owned in most cases is to stop the cattle getting onto the land to avoid the liability of cattle catching something from the bison.
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(1) If the system changed so that marking observation Captive/Cultivated didnāt send them to iNat purgatory with defective observations that lack locations, photos, etc., this would be an interesting and fairly important question but trivial as far as iNaturalist functionality goes. Everyone who has commented on this topic should go to this link and vote! https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-captive-cultivated-not-automatically-no-id-needed/112/25
(2) I canāt see a difference in the status of Wind Cave bison fenced by a physical fence and wild Yellowstone bison fenced by the invisible fence of being shot if they leave.
(3) If @raymie votes a population ācaptiveā and you disagree, you can vote it wild and call all your friends to do the same. This would seriously annoy @raymie and be much less efficient than resolving this issue for everyone, but the option is there.
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It would annoy me a little, but I literally told everyone to do that above.
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