Wolves, Brucellosis, & Elk

Wolves have blown elk off western Wyoming’s elk feedgrounds on numerous occasions – it’s something that we’ve come to expect with Wyoming’s protected wolf population. Jim and I learned about the 19 elk that had been killed in one night by a wolf pack on an elk feedground in the northern portion of the county before we left for a getaway with the bliss of little internet or cell phone access for three days.

We were stunned to return home yesterday to learn that the surplus kill on the McNeel feedground had made international news. People seemed to be going bonkers in all directions, including these views:

· kill all the wolves because they are killing all the elk;

· the domesticated elk no longer have wild instincts and stand around on feedlots, so it’s no wonder they were killed;

· it must have been hunters (poachers) because wolves don’t surplus kill.

I view most of the comments as oversimplified nonsense, put forth with little understanding of complexities of the situation.

Elk Feedgrounds
Elk are held at artificially high numbers in western Wyoming through a series of 22 state-managed elk feedgrounds in Sublette, Lincoln and Teton counties. The feedgrounds are located on private, state or federal land, and a total of about 13,000 elk are provided supplemental feed in the form of hay each winter. Elk feedgrounds are generally closed to human access – with the exception of the elk feeder, who is a contract employee in charge of feeding hay with a team of horses or with a tractor.

There are only a couple of elk feedgrounds that can be seen from a state highway – these state-managed elk feedgrounds are not like the National Elk Refuge where you can pay to ride among the elk in a horse-drawn sleigh. The elk are not domesticated animals that have lost their wild senses, and they can be easily spooked off the feedgrounds by disturbance.

Brucellosis
Elk and bison that inhabit the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem serve as a wild reservoir of brucellosis – a highly contagious bacterial disease that can be transmitted to humans, and cattle. In humans, it causes undulate fever, and in cattle, it causes contagious abortions. There has been a national program to eradicate brucellosis from livestock since the early 1930s. It’s why milk is pasteurized, and why federal officials long maintained a test-and-slaughter program for our nation’s cattle herds. The brucella organism is also classified as an agent of bio-terrorism.

Brucellosis is a stealth disease that can hide in an animal’s reproductive tract for years without detection. All cattle producers in this region vaccinate (and boost) against brucellosis, but with an efficacy rate of 70%, the vaccine only provides partial protection. We’ve watched our neighbors here in Sublette and Teton counties go through quarantine and whole-herd slaughter because of brucellosis transmission from wintering elk to their cattle. The thought of watching your entire herd sent to slaughter is too horrific for most ranchers to contemplate.

Closing feedgrounds
Most of the elk feedgrounds were established in the 1940s and 1950s to deal with starving elk in bad winter conditions, and to keep them away from stored hay used by ranchers to provide winter feed for cattle on private land.

To close the feedgrounds would be to face the damage caused by dispersing elk that will seek food elsewhere, as they are involved in collisions with vehicles on roadways, move to cattle feedlines and damage stored hay, transmitting disease to cattle, and the anticipated elk population reduction that will follow. So the Wyoming Game & Fish Department has focused on starting feeding later in the winter, ending feeding as early as possible, and conducting habitat improvements to provide better forage conditions for elk off the feedgrounds. The agency is attempting to minimize its feeding program. If it were as simple an issue as closing the feedgrounds, it would have been done years ago. Maintenance of the feedgrounds perpetuates the disease among elk, but spreading diseased elk across the landscape isn’t a good option either. Meanwhile, research for more effective methods to reduce the risks posed by brucellosis continues.

Wolves & Elk
Most western Wyoming elk herds are near population objectives, but some wolf advocates do not believe that wolves impact big game herds. Which is ironic, since the justification for the wolf reintroduction program was based on the need to control the park’s overabundant elk population, which it has. Yellowstone park’s northern range elk herd numbered 17,000 elk in 1995, the year wolves were released in the park. This elk herd shrunk by 2015 to just 1,130 elk inside the park, and 3,714 elk north of the park. At the same time, the grizzly bear population in the region has expanded. Predators have indeed impacted this elk population, just as they do other populations. In localized areas, the problem can be severe.

Surplus killing
Surplus killing involves a predator killing more animals than it can consume and, in contrast to those who say this is a “rare” event, it is exhibited by a variety of predators large and small around the world. From a fox in a chicken coop, to a wolf pack hitting an elk herd, it’s normal predatory behavior. Not everyday, but not rare.

A similar kill to the McNeel case took place on a Big Piney-area feedground in 2003, and there were numerous cases in the last 10 years in which wolves harassed the elk to the extent that the elk “quit” certain feedgrounds altogether. The 19 dead elk on the McNeel feedground included two adult cow elk and 17 calves – that is, yearling elk, not newborn calves. (When wolves killed beef cattle on a private ranch not far from McNeel earlier in the month, some assumed that the five calves were small animals, but they were 500-pound calves by this time of year.)

Surplus kills occur on both wild and domestic herds. A pack of wolves left a pasture of 120 Rambouillet rams dead in Montana in 2009. We’ve had surplus kills by wolves on our place too. And by a black bear, and by a mountain lion.

Control
Wolves in the Northern Rockies reached biological recovery goals more than a decade ago, but are still under federal protection in Wyoming. Even if the state were in charge now, it’s questionable whether any action would be taken against the wolves on the McNeel feedground. But at least state officials would have options if wolves were under state jurisdiction. Right now, there aren’t any.

Those who believe the Wyoming Game & Fish will manage the species to extinction give credence to fear-mongers who thrive on controversy. They point to the fact that Wyoming would allow wolves to be killed in two-thirds of the state as proof that state officials hate this predator. In reality, the wolf population occurs in the western third of the state in an area larger than that designated as necessary in the original wolf recovery plan – and that’s where wolf harvest will be regulated and controlled. That Wyoming doesn’t want wolf population expansion to the remainder of the state is no surprise, and was never on the table as needed for wolf recovery.

Some wolf advocates do not want any wolves killed for any reason. I understand that, but they aren’t the people who experience negative impacts from wolf activity.

I don’t seek eradication of the wolf, even though wolves sometimes kill our family’s livestock. But I would like to live in an ecosystem where this species is actually managed, and I won’t have to feel jeopardized by an action I may take when involved in a conflict with the species.

The January Hills...

and their denizens. Federico Calbolli sent me this video of a hunting fisher in Canada.  It is a great hunting scene-- watch how she overcomes the hare -pure speed and focused audacity!

Here is the video, and text:

They are splendid but slightly scary creatures. Long ago I lived in western Mass, in a drafty 1700’s farmhouse on a ridge overlooking Quabbin reservoir, in a place  that shows on maps as the January Hills-- a perfect name, though nobody ever used it in my presence. (Think of Ray Bradbury's October country, the idea as well as the book). There we sometimes saw one, usually crossing the dirt road below, often in a single bound if they were in a hurry.They are fearless and brook no trespass; a Maine  bowhunter I know fired an arrow idly at one and it came halfway up the tree to his stand, baring its teeth and hissing like a cat. Look at the way that thing just sucked up that hare. At the beginning, I wouldn’t have given it a chance. She  did it with almost frightening ease.

They are also one of the few carnivores who regularly prey on porcupines; they get under them somehow and attack through the belly. We had  a ead tree in the woods side of our yard that for some reason was a magnet for mating porcupines very early in the spring. As at the time one of us had an exceptionally dumb bird dog, a German shorthair, who constantly tried to kill porcupines in revenge for  the pain that the last one had caused him (try holding down a large pointer sedated only with a pill, with a broomstick in his jaws to give us access to his mouth and his jaws tied tight with a rag- and removing, often, over a hundred quills with needle nosed pliers, and you will guess how we felt about porcupines).

But then then the fisher found them. In a week they were all gone.We picked up three hollow carcasses, neatly emptied. We never saw a porcupine in that tree again.

That area is between Shutesbury and Franklin, where the road north dead-ends in a forgotten town so as not to drop off into the Swift river, and the tiny dirt-road towns on the east side of the hills were high enough to avoid drowning when Boston secured secure water by drowning seven (I think) towns in the valley.

It’s a beautiful place, full of wildlife. Seventy-five miles from Boston you can see many deer, occasional moose, a solitary mountain lion, the wolf-like coyotes that I don’t think are a new phenomenon. You can see them killing deer on the ice in Quabbin in the winter. Bald eagles nest there, and all small predators and game animals — it’s a great place for goshawks.

But there is something sort of creepy about it: it is full of old abandoned ghost settlements, deep in the woods. There are open stone wells that are as hazardous to you as to your dog when you are out grouse hunting. There are at least two inhabited houses dating back as far as the 1600’s, with that black Puritan architecture, and tiny leaded windows. This was one of the battlefields of King Phillip’s War, and there are even signs of that. Libby and I took directions to a stone underground structure about 5 miles up one of these dirt tracks. It was big enough for both of us to fit comfortably, and we peeked out through roots of a giant white pine.

"This too has been one of the world's dark places.." (Writer? Bonus points for narrator and setting).

H P Lovecraft wrote about these brooks and hills, and peopled them with monsters. He also used his knowledge of the drowning of the towns to write his story “The Color Out of Space”. I think the only place more Lovecraftian is Providence at sunset. It used to be my home, and sometimes I miss it just a bit, though I was iving off clean roadkill and sometimes poached deer, shooting grouse with a 16 gauge Browning and a 20 bore LC, and running a successful wood business. I was also the acting editor of English Literary Renaissance, where Arthur, my boss, asked me to cold-call Phillip Larkin and ask him for a contribution to our Marvell issue, as they had both been librarians at Hull. Since I was so young and dumb I did not know I should be scared of him, and he was very nice, and contributed one. I also got one from my friend -to- be Gerry Cox, but it was 40 years before we actually met...

Update: here is a fine block print by the master of the medium, Francis Lee Jacques, for Victor Cahalane's Mammals of North America .  Forgot I had it, which was not as weird as the incident of my copy of Birds of Tibet. Remind me...

When Man Becomes Prey

Cat Urbigkit's newest, When Man Becomes Prey, is extremely relevant to the matter of the home- invader coyote below.* I rather thoughtlessly quipped "Ask Val Geist" because I have been corresponding with him on such matters for years, and the old zoologist's theories about too- bold urban predators are bedrock.

But Cat is a pastoralist and writer whose life and work are inextricably interwoven with-- I won't say "urban", but modern predators. She deals more with coyotes (and bears and wolves and lions) than anyone I know, and she is dedicated to finding "win- win" solutions to problems most people don't know exist. She has now written the first text on how people in our civilization can co- exist with big predators.

I hadn't realized that her book was not getting the attention that it should; perhaps it is too biological or realistic for the kind of pop Greenies who think that wolves are spiritual, and too accepting of the predator's role for traditional "shoot, shovel, and shut up" varmint killers. The more loss for them, especially the first; Prey is THE text on the dangers of taking too naive a view of these wonderful but not entirely benign "new" and ancient neighbors. Even the most  pro- predator advocate must realize that, if enough people are attacked by any carnivore, it will lose its protection.

This sounds as calm as Cat is when she discusses the potential problems on the wild/ human "interface", so let me reprint what I wrote to her a while back when she asked me for a blurb:

"Jeez, you write a revolutionarily sane book that goes against all trends in the world outside of Africa, takes brisk notice of the stupidity of rules made by sentimentalists in cities who think that all animals can be reasoned with (you don't HAVE to get gory to elicit the horror as that poor woman gets eaten for half an hour because she thought Timothy Treadwell was a reliable guide to grizzlies), remind people that not only will coyotes eat your dog but, just as happily, your kids (and show why the first publicly eaten kid will be in California, where runners should just sacrifice a woman a year to the Cat Goddess); and why even if that happens the residents of Boulder will give their dogs and children to lions rather than allow hunting or GUNS to be used in their peaceful city (and I have read details of the kid who got et, and it wasn't pretty)...

"And all this all without blinking, in a serious tone that still can be devastatingly if blackly funny when you come up with predictions of what will happen if idiots stumble on making the  same mistakes ("... and the idiot's twice- burned finger/ goes wabbling back to the fire..."**)

"You expect me to sum it up in three sentences???"

So I took one more.

"Cat Urbigkit is a scholar and a rancher and above all a writer, a woman who has lived with her flocks in the wildest ranges we have left, watching and admiring, and sometimes without rancor killing the great predators who share her home. In When Man Becomes Prey, she documents the increasing conflict as animals big enough to eat your pets, your children, and even you, come to live in close contact with people who do not believe that anything beautiful can be dangerous. In this lucid, sane book she brings her years of experience and study together to suggest the unthinkable: that if we live in intimate contact with big predators we must regain our ability to scare them, the heritage of a primate who only survived by knowing that when predators think you are harmless, you will become food. That hunting may both preserve predators and make the wilderness safer for humans may be counterintuitive, but it is as true now as it was in the Pleistocene."

Eventually, our big predators, through both learning and the elimination of aggressive individuals, may behave more like the ones in Europe. Ours MAY be less aggressive than those in Africa; if so it may be, as Valerius Geist suggested, due to the ubiquity of firearms on our frontier (Africans and Siberians generally were far less well- armed than our pioneers and frontiersmen).

But we aren't there yet, not when runners are eaten by lions, students by wolves, and Canadian folksingers by coyotes. If you like predators, enjoy the wild, and believe that we must find ways to live with more of it around, read this book. It is also a treasury of good up- to- date natural history backed by real- life experience, and full of first- rate photos, most by Cat. Buy it!

* People have been asking how it got in. A door was slightly ajar-- but what non- acclimated coyote would test doors like a burglar?

** Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings"

Poorest of People Caught in Anti-Hunting Crossfire

In March 2011, a coalition of animal welfare groups opposed to the hunting of African lions petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for protection of this lion subspecies under the Endangered Species Act. FWS responded this week by proposing to list African lions as “threatened” – not the “endangered” status sought by the groups. Still, the groups claim success. It is evident that the sought-after listing is more about stopping the hunting of African lions and less about lion conservation after all.

Unfortunately those who stand to be most impacted by the listing aren’t rich American hunters seeking a trophy, but the some of the poorest people on the planet who live with Africa’s 30,000-40,000 lions on a daily basis. Since this is a proposal for animal conservation, the human equation is largely ignored – with the exception that the proposal notes the continued increase in Africa’s human population further endangers these iconic cats.

Three major factors largely ignored in the discussion are:

• African people have to eat to survive;

• African people rely on their close association with their livestock and wild animals to feed their families;

• African lions kill not only thousands of livestock, but hundreds of African people, each and every year.

Instead, headlines in American media report of the "Last-Ditch Effort to Save Remaining African Lions" and the need for action "Protecting the African Lion From Trophy Hunters."

Here’s a list of the groups authoring the petition for endangered status:

• International Fund for Animal Welfare,

• Humane Society of the United States

• Humane Society International,

• Born Free Foundation/Born Free USA

• Defenders of Wildlife, and the

• Fund for Animals.

These are not organizations devoted to spending a large portion of their revenues on the ground in Africa to alleviate conflicts between humans and lions. A major motivation for the proposal is the desire to stop trophy hunting of African lions, which the FWS proposal will not do. But what the FWS proposal may do is further jeopardize the already dire future of the poorest residents of Africa.

Single-species protection efforts rarely (if ever) address the core issues of large carnivore conservation – human wellbeing, and in the case of Africa, alleviation of poverty. “The impact of conservation policies on human wellbeing is critical to the integration of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation,” according to a 2012 paper in Biological Conservation. “Conservation and provision of livelihoods should therefore go hand-in-hand.”

Elephants in India kill people every day. African lions kill more than 100 people each year in southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique alone. People killed in these human-wildlife conflicts are generally from “the weaker socioeconomic sections of society” – the rural poor.

Conservation policies often have the heaviest impacts on the poorest of people, and when there are human-wildlife conflicts such as loss of one cow, it aggravates a family’s existing poverty. Studies have shown that crop-raiding by wild animals in Africa frequently results in a reduction of the overall food supply available to a family. That often means that mothers will eat less to provide nourishment for their children, resulting in her diminished health. Family members become anemic, and people die from lack of sufficient nutrition. If a family member is attacked and killed by a wild animal, and that person is an adult wage-earner, this further threatens the entire family’s livelihood, well being, and potential survival.

In Africa, if an adult male is lucky enough to have an outside job that generates income in a subsistence-based economy, that male wage-earner will spend his days at a paying job, and stand guard over his crops or livestock at night. That means that daytime guarding is conducted by children who are therefore not attending school to better their futures. Many of these daytime guards are killed by predators that hunt during daylight hours: African lions.

To some, the impact of human-wildlife conflicts may seem small on a national or global scale, but “but they give rise to exponentially high costs for the affected individuals and families, many of whom are amongst the least privileged people in the world,” according to the Biological Conservation paper.

The listing of a species as threatened or endangered often leads to the setting aside of more lands to protect that species. When more land is set aside for wildlife conservation, traditional human use such as hunting and livestock grazing are forbidden or restricted. Subsistence livestock producers, or people who depend on bushmeat for nutrition, thus lose use of traditional resources and land. This global trend has resulted in a new class of people aptly termed Conservation Refugees. Google it.

The reliance on bushmeat in Africa includes everything from rats to elephants, and from subsistence use, to providing meat for the urban marketplace. A paper in a 2006 issue of Conservation Biology (“Hunting for Consensus: Reconciling Bushmeat Harvest, Conservation and Development Policy in West and Central Africa”) notes: “Where bushmeat markets are booming, poor rural communities are often mining their wildlife resources to subsidize the protein consumption costs of urban families. The failure of development to provide growing urban populations with secure livelihoods and sustainable sources of animal protein are resulting in overharvesting of wildlife in rural areas and decreased livelihood security of poor rural families who are dependent on a dwindling wildlife resource. Bushmeat harvest is more a survival strategy than a development strategy. The places where species are threatened pinpoint places where development policies have failed, and the future of the rural poor is likely to be threatened as well.”

Those advocating for switching subsistence economies toward ecotourism at least acknowledge the need for human economic viability, but have failed to find an alternative that actually works. Ecotourism is often touted as alternative, but few people impacted by wildlife conflicts receive benefit from such schemes. In one recent study in Africa, only 17% of families were associated with ecotourism, but 65% lost livestock to lions. Other programs offer compensation for certain (proven) losses, but the time and effort required to seek such compensation – especially in poor countries where fraud is rampant – is often too much for the rural poor. Poor and illiterate people lacking social capital are not likely to seek compensation for their losses to wild animals.

We all want African lions to thrive well in the long term. But unless we actually begin to address the core issues involved in human-wildlife conflicts, we’ll adopt policies much as this one, meant to harm rich American hunters traveling to do something many find distasteful (hunting lions as trophies), but the resulting impact may be the death of more of Africa’s poorest people. Until we adopt a new approach, the cost of conservation will continue to be disproportionately high for rural people to bear. For a moral people, the loss of human life should be at least as important as wildlife conservation.

Survivors

Two tough animals.

Rena's Contributions

It’s been nearly two months since Rena tangled with wolves while protecting our sheep herd in the foothills of the southern Wind River Mountains. She has recovered nicely – no major muscle loss, but some stiffness in her hind end remains, and we suspect that won’t change. The sheep herd has moved home for the winter, and Rena is happily back on guardian duty, but tires easily. We’re hopeful for a quiet winter.

The essay I posted here on Q about the weekend of the wolf attacks on our herd has been widely read, and I’m pleased to say that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe was one of those readers. Ashe quoted some of the essay at a carnivore conservation conference at Yale this week, and showed the crowd a photo of wounded Rena. His point in doing so was to urge those present “to think about the people who must share the landscape with these species. We need their support, their understanding and their forbearance if we want to see large carnivores roaming free.

“We must seek solutions that work for them, as well as for the species we manage. To do otherwise will perpetuate the conflict and make it harder for carnivores to gain acceptance.

“Compassion and empathy. That’s the key.” Amen to that, Mr. Ashe. Thanks for spreading the word.

Rena’s responsibilities have increased now that she’s healed up and her sheep are home. Her 9-year old mother, Luv’s Girl, gave birth to four pups in early October, so she’s on maternity leave. Luv’s Girl will race out to join Rena in reacting to a perceived threat, but she isn’t actively patrolling since she’s too busy tending to her pups. We’re night penning the sheep to give the dogs a break, but Rena stays double-busy checking the herd, and then checking her mother with the new puppies in their natal den. We’ll keep one of the pups to raise in our herd, and send the others out to other livestock producers who need working dogs. I think we can say with confidence that this lineage is wolf- and bear-tested.

"Homotherium is perhaps my favorite felid..."

... says Nathaniel below. I agreed, then laughed at the oddity of a blog where readers could make that statement with a straight face, though there are a couple of others on the blogroll...

Here is my favorite image of Homotherium serum, a frightening predator, in life bigger than an African lion and possibly cursorial like a hyena, by Mauricio Anton for The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives. The paperweight is a young mammoth's tooth found by Joe Hutto in Florida; young mammoths were the major prey of a species of Homotherium at one European site.

And a mother and cubs of another color morph:

Attitudes to Predators

I just got an email from Al Cambronne, who has a new blog Deerland here, and book coming out at Lyons by the same name. He wrote an interesting post on how public attitudes toward three predators-- muskies, wolves, and (Bald) eagles differ as exemplified in his home state of Wisconsin.

I found the discussion stimulating enough that I replied at blog length (edited after more reflection):

Analogies between muskies, wolves, and eagles are... BIOLOGICALLY difficult, because as you surmise culturally different. Muskies have always been prizes, but pike which are similar in every way not always so-- persecuted in European trout and salmon water for one example.

I would say that both wolf and eagle are romanticized and revered by the same element of urban society. Some tribes do hold them sacred, which doesn't mean they don't kill them, sometimes cruelly. Wolves are serious stock predators, which doesn't mean we shouldn't let or encourage their return, but not by doing so on the backs and economy of rural residents. So-called reparations for lost stock, at least in NM, are held to such an absolute standard of proof as to be absurd-- evidence of wolf tracks and eaten carcasses is NOT enough even if wolves were seen chasing stock.

I think the urbanites who so want them might find a way to help pay, perhaps as subsidies to predator- harassed ranchers who must share their land. (That they might then demand a say in ranching practices might open up a bigger can of worms-- they know nothing whatsoever about pastoral life, and some ranchers know only a little more about wildlife, but some places both sides are polarized past compromise-- government's fault, another issue).I think confirmed stock killers should be removed, permanently-- good evolutionary biology too. The surprisingly widespread wolves of Europe rarely bother humans. Ranchers should learn the use of stock protection dogs like my Wyoming friends the Urbigkits. Urbanites should not romanticize individual wolves at the cost of harming humans who must live with them, but take it as a necessary compromise-- you get to hear wolves, problem wolves die, and the rancher is not driven off his land.

I think we should learn to live with a good amount of wolf- game predation-- another divisive issue, but the wild is the wild, and co-evolved species must find their way. Prey populations seem to be wobbling into an interesting balance in big wild areas like Yellowstone. We have a hard time seeing that wild populations are often not stable, but run to boom and bust, and that this is natural. Read Where the Wild Things Were. We have little concept of how important apex predators are-- which does not mean we cannot kill a few!

Eagles? Very controversial and even more complicated, but important to only a few. Legally both wind power companies and Indians can kill eagles, practically speaking almost at will. The first do it as a side effect but kill a lot. Some of the second do it even more crassly for money than the wind blades do, for powwow costumes which are no more religious than a prom dress, though their slaughter is defended by the likes of Leslie Silko as religious last I heard.

Complication number one: there are a LOT of Golden eagles-- five figures worth in the continental US. NOT analogous to wolves! Number two: eagles are still sometimes a significant livestock predator. I know of no recent persecution, but until last year (?-- not sure of the most recent decision), problem eagles were legally trapped and removed. Falconers used this population; in fact, trapped legally. Their take was reduced to SIX a year-- remember, recent studies indicate this is a common bird with thousands of breeding pairs!-- and may be ended for good. This does not sit well with eaglers, dedicated and fanatical even among falconers, who may bond with a bird for decades, while wind blades harvest ten and twenty times the annual number allowed to them, and natives-- I am emphatically NOT talking about the reverent Pueblos, who have a real attitude of respect-- shoot eagles for profit, brag about it, and are released by white judges.

I am, as a once- zoologist, inclined to manage populations biologically. If a harvest of sorts is the price to pay for having wolves back, fine with me. I would crack down on consumptive use of eagles by Indians, as opposed to sacrificial, and FIGHT for it-- no other religion is allowed to decimate a species. And I would allow the same biologically reasonable take on Goldens as applies to any other master falconer's raptor. (Balds are a less active predator, not as good for falconry, and protected for better or worse by the US civil "religion", though I know a guy in Canada who flew a male on whitetail jacks).

I have no trouble with the idea of shooting a wolf-- well, not a huge interest, but I have killed coyotes: Betsy Huntington is buried with the pelt of one. Hunted predators bother us less. Suburban coyotes are behaving in a scary manner in southern California and even Albuquerque, and "lions" can become even scarier when surrounded by gentle vegans (read the cougar book The Beast in the Garden) Specific population numbers are rather irrelevant, and stable is a different number for each species and region; there are always going to be low numbers of apex predators, and there soon could be a decent number of wolves; micromanaging by moving them in and out may actually be hindering them. Shooting persistent outlaws will like it or not "teach them manners"-- they are intelligent-- and keep them from eating our dogs & eventually our kids. And please spare me ideas of their harmlessness; the benign wolf of North America is a historical example of what scientists would call an "artifact", based on rapid settlement and and a historically unusual plethora of guns. Run the figures for Siberia or India-- or go to Native accounts, or Medieval ones (Lane?)...

Can't neglect fish: big muskies (also pike; the large predatory catfish like blue and flathead; alligator gar; even carp in non- wilderness waters). The huge ones are old breeders-- catch, photo & release! It is fine, contra "Throw Back the Little Ones*", to keep small fish & eat them...

*Donald Fagen has a new album out!

Haggard

I want a Cooper's hawk but this one is a breeding adult, too old and too valuable to the population to keep, not to mention illegal. She trapped into my flight loft today and I will release her to make more tomorrow. She weighs nearly a pound, huge for a western Coop, and is a pure Velociraptor. Wonderful word, "haggard"...

She was not pleased

Gos in action

From Paul Domski: a few of the amazing photo sequence that photographer Mark Wiliams shot of his Gos. (As always click to enlarge). Mark's site is here.

More Idiots-- and a Brave Dog

They always exceed your direst fears. The Lady with the Black Dogs sent me this link to a story about how Tesco, the huge British supermarket chain that buys most of New Zealand's lamb, will no longer allow shepherds to use herding dogs. You couldn't make it up:

"The supermarket chain has told its major supplier of lamb to stop using dogs, which it claims cause stress to the animals.

It means shepherds at the farm may need to use methods such as beating the ground with sticks and waving their arms to control the flock."

Oh, THAT should keep them calm.

"Outraged staff at Silver Fern Farms in Fairton, New Zealand may now have to get rid of up to 60 dogs to comply with the orders, meaning several of the animals will be destroyed.

Shepherd Mick Pethram told the Telegraph newspaper: 'New Zealand sheep are used to dogs, they know dogs.

'There's more stress in a human herding and manhandling them, waving their arms and beating sticks. Dogs are part of a sheep's life. This is absolute baloney.'

He continued: 'We'll be desperately trying to sell them, but most of us will end up putting down three or four each.

'These are good dogs. Taking away our dogs is like taking a hammer away from a builder; we can't do our job without them.' "

The worst thing is that these can't even be vegetarian animal rights-ists-- just people so utterly out of touch with the world that they think they can rewrite its rules.

On a vaguely related topic, here is a video of a flock guardian dog somewhere in the east-- Bulgaria?-- successfully taking down a wolf that attacks his flock. Great peasant celebration afterwards too.

Working girls

On Tuesday, we started shipping our lambs to another desert allotment here in western Wyoming, to combine our lambs with that of a friend's, into one large herd. By the time the sale takes place in 10 days, there will be over 2,000 lambs in this bunch. Right now, there are four livestock guardian dogs taking care of the herd, and when we dropped off some of our lambs, I was very pleasantly surprised to see two female guardians we had raised. The big dog is Vega, a 1 1/2 year old Ovcharka (my Rant's sister). The other tall range dog is a short-haired female Akbash. Sweet, beautiful and fierce - good dogs.

That evening, Jim had to walk down the river to retrieve two cows and calves that had crossed over to the other side and had grazed their way down river. As he walked behind them through the thick willows along the riverbank, he found another bear-killed ewe. This ewe had been drug across the New Fork River and deposited in a covey underneath the willows. The carcass was eaten clean.

We honestly believe that the only way anyone will be able to find this bear that's doing so much damage is with scent hounds. But it's illegal to use the dogs on bears in Wyoming - even for our federal animal damage control specialists. Drives me crazy just thinking about it. The only tool I can see working, and it's off limits.

The art of setting a snare

First, you tie some sheep legs to a large tree, using heavy cable, burying the spring to the snare at the base of the tree. Then you gingerly set thin steel strips and wire mesh in the snare so the animal will feel some support as it puts its foot into the snare.




Next, add some deadfall and sagebrush, piling everything against the sides of the tree to direct the animal's travel into the danger zone. Top it off with some screened dirt to hide the set, and you're ready for a bear.

The ongoing saga

Things are really busy on the ranch, with this being the time of year we should be finished with haying, and starting our fall sorting and shipping. The predation issues we've been dealing with have taken far too much time and effort, really screwing up our haying schedule, with the result being the rather difficult decision to leave one meadow as standing forage rather than harvesting. Less nutrition, but bigger fires to put out.

Last Sunday, we moved the sheep herd back into a pasture downriver (our lambing ground), taking them away from the pasture with predation problems and getting us set to begin sorting and shipping on Monday. The sheep trailed easily, with burros and dogs. Right after Jim got the herd settled into the meadow, he walked down to the river’s edge and found bear shit. Oh shit.

Monday morning, I headed into the pasture to start the day by feeding the dogs. I found the dead ewe before I found the dogs and the rest of the herd. Our federal trapper arrived in two quick hours, confirming the ewe had been killed by a bear. Because he’s a federal guy, and bears are trophy game animals under state law, he had to call the state bear guys to see what they wanted to do. They authorized our trapper to try to trap and kill it. He decided he wanted to set leg snares, using the ewe carcass. We agreed to move the sheep out of the pasture, which we had completed before Rod got back with all his bear supplies. But in agreeing to move the sheep, which would eliminate a food source for the bear, that meant we had to tear down and move our shipping pen and chute. Jim and I spent the rest of the day doing that, and installing the setup in a pen out near the highway.

Since we lost of full day of work to these items, we never started shipping until Tuesday. We did stick around to watch Rod set the snares, which I’ve never seen done before. It’s part art, part science, part gut feeling. Our trapper is betting this is an older bear, and we don’t actually hold much hope he’ll be able to get the bear. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department will only allow three nights of trapping or snaring before he has to stop. The feeding pattern of this bear so far indicates that’s simply not enough time. It’s usually a week between kills. Sad that we know what is usual for a bear depredation.

Nothing good

Our predation issues are still not resolved. First we had two big lambs killed and entirely consumed, in one event. Then things were quiet for a full week.

Last Friday morning’s early sheep check led me to a just-killed 90-pound lamb - nothing much eaten but the liver. Once again the scene was so fresh it must have just occurred - blood everywhere, upset dogs. Rant took Luv’s Girl to the ground for coming near the kill, which he was guarding but wouldn’t touch. Things were very tense.

On Saturday, I found another completely consumed lamb along the river - just blood and the pealed-back pelt. I called in all the kills to our Wildlife Services guys, who were responding to major wolf problems at the time. One outfit had 37 sheep and one yearling steer killed and one injured guard dog. A pack of six wolves were killed in order to stop the depredations. The next day, a pack of five wolves were killed after killing three guard dogs and 45 sheep. Our problems were much smaller in comparison, but we were also working really hard to try to minimize losses as well. The sheep were spooky and things were in a general state of unrest.

Sunday morning, an adult ewe - a big, beautiful Rambouillet - was killed. Only her udder was eaten. We could see where the ewe had been attacked, tried to flee, and was eventually taken down. A single bite to her throat was her blessed ending.

The last two nights, federal trappers have set wolf traps in attempt to catch the guilty predator. They have been unable to determine whether it’s a bear or a wolf - it’s one or the other.

I hate traps, but because this predator issue has continued to drag on without resolution, agreed to the trapping effort. In order to do that, the dogs had to be contained so they didn’t get hurt. We have a hay stack pen located right next to the highway in that pasture, so we started locking the sheep herd in the pen at night, with the dogs inside with them. It’s a scary situation, because if a predator gets in the pen, the sheep can’t escape. None of these decisions are easy, and they all have pitfalls.

This is me sitting in the pen, giving everyone good night kisses. Yes, I'm a sheephugger too.

With two nights of trapping, nothing has been caught. This predator is either not appearing for some reason, or won’t come to a bait. Nothing has been killed for a few days, but we’re nervous about the days ahead. Two guard dogs, three guard burros, and a pasture of horned cattle that don’t like canids hasn’t been enough to protect our herd out here in the sagebrush, hundreds of miles from Yellowstone, even when our presence is added to the mix.

Quiet night

Everything was quiet in the pasture this morning, with no signs of further predation during the night. The animals were all calm, and the guardians all seemed content.

Although some may see the fact that two lambs were killed as some fault of the guardian animals, Jim and I disagree with that view. We shudder to imagine what the carnage would have been had the guardians not been there.

We could have had a surplus killing event, as a fellow sheep producer in the county experienced a week ago. She had 11 ewes killed, with the wolves eating just a little on each one, and mauling the guard dog. Another sheepman had a wolf pack come into his herd during the first week of August, killing 13 lambs and 2 ewes, and two guard dogs. I hear of these events and always remember it could easily be our ranch and our animals. While it’s two guard dogs belonging to someone else, it could just as easily be my Rant and Rena, beautiful dogs you all have enjoyed here on this blog. The last we tried to tally it up, eight guard dog pups I raised for other sheep producers have been killed by wolves. I’m not asking anymore, because I don’t want to know.

Predation

I swear any time I change my schedule, something goes really wrong. I drove my son Cass to Laramie yesterday to move him into a dorm for his freshman year at the University of Wyoming. It was a fun but stressful day as I tried not to think about the fact that my son just moved out of my house. I missed him terribly before I even completed the five-hour drive home. Jim fed the dogs for me since I was gone, and I didn’t see my animals all day.

This morning when I entered through the pasture gate, honking my horn to alert the dogs, the dogs did not appear. They usually come bounding out, meeting me alongside the ditch where I feed them every day. Not today. Instead, I could see about 20 ravens swirling and flying along the hillside, not in any one spot. Anytime I see a big group of ravens, I start getting nervous because it usually means a carcass is present.

I couldn’t see any cattle at all, but I could see the sheep along the bank of the river where they were watering. I drove toward the river in a hurry, and as I approached the willows, the two guard dogs came racing out, huffing and agitated. Obviously something was wrong. They didn’t want their food, and didn’t want me to enter the willows where they had just emerged. Rant kept getting in my way, crying and throwing the weight of his body against my thighs. I shoved him away and went through. I saw spatters of blood, part of a sheep rumen, and handful-sized tuffs of bloody wool. I searched and searched, with Rant barking and being aggressive next to me, keeping the sheep and burros away from the area, fussing about me being there.

About 100 yards away, I found a similar kill site – a rumen, tuffs of wool, and a lot of fresh blood. No head, no spine, no ribcage. Two lambs had been killed – I'm guessing each weighed 40-60 pounds. When I breathed in, I could smell blood in the air, but not the smell of a decaying carcass.

And where were the cattle? I realized I was in a willow thicket without a firearm, so went back to the truck and to look for the cattle. I started driving through the pasture, and the cattle (cows and calves) came stampeding out into the open, running for the truck. What the heck? They were glad to see me, but there were about 10 head missing. I realized I needed some help, so I called USDA Wildlife Services. I got lucky, as one of the specialists I know was only about an hour away, and he would stop in to look over the situation as he went by from addressing a wolf predation issue in the northern portion of the county. This was really lucky for me, as Wildlife Services specialists are short-staffed here in western Wyoming, trying to address six different wolf depredation problems at once. We are being over-run with wolf problems in this area, and we thank heavens when Wildlife Services can provide assistance to stop the killing.

By the time the specialist arrived, I had found where the stampeding cattle took out a span of barb-wire fence, including five wooden posts. Something had got those cattle to run through the fence and into the river. I found the missing cattle on an island on the river, and got them put back with the rest of their herd.

With so little to go on, the verdict from the specialist was this predator event was caused by either a bear or a wolf/wolves - something big enough to scare the cattle, and consume two entire lamb carcasses, bones and all. My assumption is that the lambs went to water early and were killed there. When the main herd went to water, accompanied by the dogs and burros, the killing was already history.

Wildlife Services will fly the pasture tomorrow, and search for predators from the air. Here’s hoping for a quiet night.

Who Were the Cannibals?

More and more it has been suggested that we interacted little if at all with our close cousins the Neanderthals. Though there is still some controversy it mostly seems that we did not interbreed, finding each other too strange.

Some have wondered, more in literature than in science, if the appearance of our hairier relaatives made tehm the prototype for trolls and wild men-- "Grendel".

Now it seems we may have been their monster rather than they ours. A new study in the Journal of Anthropological sciences has found evidence of Neanderthal bones butchered like those of deer, and even Neanderthal teeth used as ornaments by our species.

"...Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

"Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said."

Of course the conflict may have gone both ways-- Neanderthals were physically stronger than Cro- Magnons. But it doesn't look like we were friends, at least in Europe.

Eagle predation on bears

Adolph Murie described golden eagles harassing bears in Alaska as they swooped and dive-bombed the bruins. This type of action has been viewed by naturalists on numerous occasions, with the consensus being that the eagles were either playing or curious, or simply hanging out waiting for the bears to take down prey that could be scavenged.

But a few recent observations have provided an entirely new view of the relationship between golden eagles and bears. In April 2004, a Norwegian research team was watching a female brown bear with three cubs as they moved and foraged on an open slope. One of the cubs was smaller and slower than the other two, and repeatedly fell behind enough that mama had to turn back to retrieve the straggler.

Once again the smallest bear cub fell behind, and as the researchers watched, a golden eagle glided out of the clouds and grabbed the cub with both feet, lifting it into the air, as it struggled and cried. The mother bear’s rushing charge was too late to save the cub. The eagle flew over the research team as they watched through binoculars with the captured cub “struggling, its feet and head waving from side to side as it vocalized loudly. The eagle, carrying the cub, gained altitude and was lost from view when it flew into the clouds …” The team could hear the cub crying for several more minutes, suggesting the eagle landed with the cub. The team could not find the cub carcass.

This incident raises the question of how often eagles predate bears. The researchers posed the question to the international bear community and learned of just a few other occasions. Several observed incidents in Slovakia in 2005 involved an eagle harassing bears (either small bears or sows with cubs) enough the bruins ran for the cover of trees, dodging and evading as they retreated. In addition, a brown bear cub recovered from the Italian Alps in 2003 was determined to have been killed by an eagle.

In the 1950s, a Canadian naturalist described an incident involving a large eagle carrying a black bear cub overhead, before dropping it onto a rocky lakeshore, where it landed with a thump. The eagle watched it from above before retrieving the carcass and carrying it to a nest. In 2002, fragments of a yearling brown bear skull were found in an eagle nest in Poland.

The authors of a recent article on eagle predation on bears conclude: “Predation on bear cubs by eagles might be more common than it appears from these few observations because the opportunities for direct observations by humans are very limited.” Even if it only happens every now and then, it’s fascinating subject matter.

The article is in the new issue of the journal Ursus, but can be read in its entirety at BioOne.

Cat's Yellowstone Wolves, and others

Our own Cat Urbigkit has just published a book on the Yellowstone wolves and their reintroduction (so to speak as you will see.)

She brings a unique perspective as she is both a sheepherder and a naturalist- observer, one who can appreciate big carnivores but doesn't want them killing her sheep or her livelihood.

Her history is also unique. Before she was a shepherd she and her husband joined an unlikely coalition of stockmen and environmentalists who sued to protest the introduction of the Canadian wolf subspecies, arguing that there was a small and harmless population of the nearly extinct native subspecies already existing in the Yellowstone ecosystem. I admit that this was the most difficult argument for me to accept going in, but her careful documentation has made me a believer. Probably they nearly disappeared when the horrific poison 1080 was in use, and were gradually building their numbers. These wolves were smaller and probably would have been more fearful of humans, which emeritus large- mammal biologist Valerius Geist argues is probably a good thing. Again, more below.

Cat next documents the long drawn out legal battles, culminating in the "re" introduction of the big Canadian subspecies, and going on to document how they finally arrived in her sagebrush plains, in one case approaching her 12 year old son as he herded sheep.

There is a LOT more here, documented without editorial comment-- of the wedge the issue has driven between the government and stockmen (even worse down here in NM due to a program where the wolves are constantly handled, moved around and habituated); on the environmentalist side, the decision to sacrifice a unique subspecies without studying it to see if it was recoverable without intervention; on the utter uselessness of the compensation program, which demands an impossible standard of proof; even dark humor. When a hunter shoots a pre- intro wolf (?) he thinks is a coyote, he is held in legal limbo for more than a month. As the Jackson Hole Guide editorialized. "How is it that the Fish and Wildlife service-- our federal wildlife experts--can expect Kysar to have known he had shot a wolf when they have already spent six weeks in their laboratories trying to figure it out, and still don't know what it is they're dealing with?"

There are other issues in play than endangered species or embattled ranchers. As Cat reports, elk were eating the park, and there was no politically acceptable way to reduce their numbers. As we are increasingly coming to know, big predators seem to control the whole ecosystem-- see William Stolzenburg's Where the Wild Things Were.

And there is one more issue, only hinted at in Cat's book: the increasing probability that wolves that become too habituated will also become dangerous. Dr. Valerius Geist, now retired, is the dean of North American big mammal studies, and author of too many books to cite, though I am particularly partial to the magisterial Deer of the World. He and I have been corresponding for years on this, the Pleistocene, and many other matters. He was one of the scientists called on to testify in the notorious Kenton Carnegie case in northern Ontario, where a young intern was killed and partially eaten by dump- habituated wolves (there was a ludicrous attempt to blame the killing on black bears, but anyone who has looked at the entire testimony of both on- the- spot observers and the scientists would be convinced, as was the jury, that wolves were responsible).

Val is both a serious biologist and a serious backwoodsman, a rare combination in his youth and one that is getting rarer today. He used to believe that wolves were as harmless as their modern image suggests, until some scary encounters with habituated wolves in his own Vancouver backwoods, papers on habituated California coyotes' behavior before attacking children, and the Carnegie case made him study the history and literature of other countries' experiences with wolves. What he found suggested our "harmless" wolves are a historical phenomenon based on a unique phenomenon: our common use of guns. Wolves killed people in the Soviet Union until after WW II, kill people today in India, and are considered dangerous by Canada's northern "First Nations". (Val has convinced uber- wolf maven David Mech of the truth of this as well!)

Wolves are magnificent, efficient, sometimes deadly predators, not "spiritual healers". To keep wolves near humans benign (to the humans at least), they should best be hunted. Would a similar phenomenon be behind the rise in cougar attacks in (over?) civilized places like Boulder and California?

In several papers and articles Val seeks to mediate between our desire for a robust, healthy wilderness, the reasonable expectation of our ranchers to make a living, and safety. He proposes large wilderness areas surrounded by mixed land where big predators are allowed but hunted, in turn ringed by farms and suburbs where they cannot be tolerated. It seems that we already are well on the way to this in the US (perhaps more than in his Canada) with parks surrounded by National forests. It will still need both some tweaking and a lot more efforts to understand, coming from predator advocates and stockmen alike. Let's try to get this one right and maybe we can start to talk about "re- wilding". Cat's book is an excellent place to start-- for both sides.

I should add one more opinion here to forestall otherwise inevitable arguments: I am for public land ranching in places like the National Forests not just because I respect ranchers (though I do-- as primate researcher Robert Sapolski grudgingly but good- humoredly admits, people who spend their whole life on the "range" are likely to know a lot more about local specifics than specialist biologists) but also because of a phenomenon that is screwing up biodiversity worse than any rancher ever did. Every time a "public land" ranch goes on the block down here the "deeded" sections-- the private anchoring portions that are the best and have all the water-- are cut up into subdivisions of from five to fifty acres, fenced and developed.

And the wildlife goes away. It DIES.

I have gone on long enough. Read Cat!

Oh and- I have many of Val's papers, and the (grisly) Carnegie report, as PDFs -- haven't figured how to link but I can send as email.