Twenty-three bison rounded up at Wind Cave National Park have been translocated to a Nature Conservancy-managed preserve in Mexico. The project will establish a satellite herd on grasslands in Chihuahua that were part of the species’ historic range.

Thirteen bison fresh from Wind Cave National Park will soon be released in Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Destined to become one of the preserve's main attractions, the charismatic animals restore an important element of biodiversity and historical character to a national park that was established to protect one of America’s last remaining large tracts of tallgrass prairie.

It's fall. There's a crispness in the air, trees are painting the landscape with their colorful leaves, elk are in the rut. And in some national parks, hunters are being dispatched to tamp down those elk populations. Is that the right way to approach wildlife management in the National Park System?

One of the oddest sounds you might encounter in a national park at this time of year is the high-pitched squeal of elk. Better known as "bugling," this sound is as magical as that of a wolf howl hanging in the air.

Seven years ago, governments around the world pledged to achieve a "significant reduction" in the ongoing loss of biodiversity by 2010. Unfortunately, the latest IUCN report says that goal will not be met, and that the wildlife crisis is greater than the world's economic crisis.

The Park Service co-sponsored this year’s International Congress of Speleology (ICS), which has been going on all week in Kerrville, Texas. Many of the 1,300 participants signed up for field trips that included guided tours of developed and wild caves within NPS units.

It's hard to see black-footed ferrets during the day, as they're largely nocturnal creatures. Travel to Wind Cave National Park this summer, however, and you just might be able to glimpse one of these rare critters, as rangers are leading nighttime hikes to go in search of ferrets.

A western version of the Hatfields vs. the McCoys played a role in establishment of this site, which was the first cave in the world to be designated as a national park. It was also among the first NPS areas to use fire as a natural tool to maintain the landscape—but not inside the cave!

The first white man to see Wind Cave was a cowboy who found the entrance when a puff of air from the cave blew off his hat. Scientists have measured gusts in excess of 70 mph coming out of the cave’s mouth. Wind Cave is a barometric cave. It blows in or out depending on the atmospheric pressure. In other words, it breathes.

If you were planning a Black Hills trip and couldn’t visit all of the area's parks, would you skip Wind Cave? That would be a mistake, even if caves don’t interest you. There's plenty to see and do above ground at Wind Cave.

Don't expect a final decision this year on how the booming elk populations at Theodore Roosevelt or Wind Cave National Parks will be brought under control. National Park Service officials say they don't expect to have the National Environmental Policy Act process completed before year's end for either park.

South Dakota’s Fossil Cycad National Monument was supposed to protect a geologic treasure when it was established in 1922, but its marvelous surface deposits of fossilized plants had already been stripped from the site. A bill signed into law on August 1, 1956, abolished the park, which has served ever since as a cautionary tale. If you don’t protect park resources, they won’t be there for future generations.

On a clear day, you often can see for miles and miles. But as a report from the National Parks Conservation Association points out, clear days are harder and harder to find in our national parks under the Bush administration's relatively laissez-faire approach to coal-fired power plants.

Nestled in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Wind Cave National Park preserves not only its namesake cave, but one of the last remnants of the mixed-grass prairie that once covered the majority of the Northern Plains.