Yellowstone Bison Flips Tourist 8 Feet as Photographer Captures the Whole Thing

A bull bison charged an older man walking with his grandson at a Yellowstone campground on Friday evening and threw him roughly eight feet into the air. The man landed on his side with serious injuries, and the animal stood over him afterward instead of running off.

The attack happened at Bridge Bay Campground, south of Fishing Bridge, and was caught on video by Mike MacLeod, a professional photographer from Bozeman, Montana, who was camping in the area. As Cowboy State Daily reported, MacLeod said his wife spotted the bull entering the campground, and he grabbed his camera to film what looked like a worked-up animal. Other outlets have since reported that the man suffered a broken hip and remained in serious condition over the weekend. The National Park Service has not released information or the victim's identity.

What makes this one different from most Yellowstone wildlife stories is that MacLeod says nobody did anything wrong. He told Cowboy State Daily the bison entered the campground already agitated and was charging people, vehicles, and even a tree before it fixed on the man and his grandson. "I was just trying to get some dramatic footage of that bison having a fit," MacLeod said. "It's changed my idea of what to expect from these guys at this time of year, because I would not have predicted that happening." When the man hit the ground and the bull stood over him, MacLeod put the camera down. "I had to get the bison's attention," he said. "I was really afraid he was going to gore the guy on the ground, so I stopped videotaping and ran at the bison, yelled loud, and was trying to be as big and intimidating as possible." Other bystanders followed his lead and drove the animal off.

This happened during the bison rut, the breeding season that runs roughly July through September, when bull aggression spikes. That season also lines up with peak tourism, which is exactly when the most people are out in the open trying to photograph the biggest, most iconic animal in the park. Bison have injured more people in Yellowstone than any other animal, and they can run three times faster than a person, close to 35 miles per hour, from what looks like a dead stop. This was also the park's second bison injury of the year. The first came on June 26, when a 12-year-old was hurt near Mud Volcano.

Most bison injuries are self-inflicted. A study of 25 injuries between 2000 and 2015 found the average distance from the animal before injury was about 3.4 meters, that 80 percent of victims actively approached the bison, and that nearly half the injuries happened while someone was photographing it. The rise of phone cameras and selfies pulled people closer than they ever got with older gear, and researchers flagged that as a real driver of the problem. So the standard advice, and the law in the park, is simple: stay at least 25 yards from bison, use a long lens or binoculars, and back off the moment an animal changes its behavior because of you.

The Bridge Bay case scrambles that tidy lesson. If MacLeod's read is right, the people around this bison were doing the responsible thing. He said visitors were warning each other and keeping their distance, and he called them respectful. The bull picked its target anyway, from a crowd where most people were closer to it than the man it hit. That does not mean the 25-yard rule is pointless. It means the rule is a floor, not a guarantee, and during the rut a floor may not be enough. If you are heading into the park this summer with a camera, plan your shots around escape routes, keep a vehicle or a solid tree between you and any bull, and treat "legal distance" and "safe distance" as two different numbers. MacLeod got his dramatic footage. He also had to drop the camera and run at a two-thousand-pound animal to keep it from goring a man on the ground. You can see the dramatic footage at Cowboy State Daily. 

Lead image by Jack Dykinga - This image was released by the Agricultural Research Service, the research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture, with the ID K5680-1 (next)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=343547.