The politics of wildlife

We left the shore of Lake Hebgen, Montana, and drove up a dirt road toward a compound of buildings at the edge of a forest. A large log cabin, several outlying cabins and teepees and numerous vehicles occupied the clearing with a view of the lake.

We were there to spend a day with the Buffalo Field Campaign, a grassroots group of activists working to protect America’s last wild buffalo. We’d discovered the group years ago in Yellowstone and have supported them ever since.  The scent of soup wafted from the kitchen and a dog snoozed on a broken-down couch as introductions were made and we were given a tour of the premises.

Sleeping lofts were built into the rafters of the rooms to accommodate the volunteers who live here year round. A gear room held rows of heavy winter boots and jackets and other equipment needed for winter forays on skis. In the media cabin with its computers and phones, an art instructor from Manhattan worked on the graphics for the newsletter and a piece of paper taped to the wall noted recent media contacts: a German film crew, Nat Geo, a local TV station. We met Mike Mease, BFC’s affable co-founder, who told us about recent operations.

Unknown to most tourists who visit Yellowstone and snap photos of buffalo jams on the roads is the fact that the Yellowstone herd consists of the last remaining wild buffalo in the United States, a genetic remnant of the great herds that once darkened the plains and were all but extinct by the beginning of the 20^th century. Also unknown to most is that in the winter, when the tourists are gone and buffalo migrate to their traditional grazing grounds outside park boundaries, they are slaughtered by the hundreds.

And in the spring, at the peak of calving season, the wandering herds are hazed back into the park by helicopter, ATV and riders on horseback, across busy road

s and through forests thick with fallen trees, in operations financed by citizens’ tax dollars. The reason, as with most issues in the U.S., is economic: the powerful cattle interests in Montana view bison as competition for grass, even though cattle and bison don’t even occupy land at the same time. Unable to survive the brutal winters, cattle are trucked out in the cold months and returned to the area in June, when buffalo have returned to graze within park boundaries.

The official excuse is brucellosis, a disease infecting much of the local wildlife, which causes cattle to abort their calves. The disease originated in cattle and there has never been a case of its transmission by buffalo. Elk frequently are infected, but they are free to wander, being a valuable hunting commodity.

Little more than a scare tactic, brucellosis was enough for ranchers to convince Montana to place the regulation of wild buffalo under the Department of Livestock, rather than wildlife. DOL continues the hazing, capture and killing, working by mutual agreement in concert with the National Park Service to contain these naturally migrating animals within the confines of the national park.

BFC volunteers – there have been over 5,000 since the group began in 1997 – monitor the buffalo year-round, videotaping hazing operations, informing the public and even coaxing errant animals back to the safety of the park, strapping on skis in the pre-dawn darkness of winter, when temperatures can plummet to -50. Their passion and dedication have drawn support from Patagonia and celebrities like Bob Barker, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, who have donated clothing, vehicles and computer equipment.

With dark clouds gathering overhead, five of us, including a newly-arrived volunteer from Santa Cruz, CA, went out on patrol, our driver adroitly steering the Subaru around deep ruts of Forest Service roads. We encountered a small herd of buffalo cows and calves who’d wandered back outside park boundaries and probably faced hazing the next day. The DOL had been free to round up buffalo on private land despite homeowners’ wishes, until the governor issued a directive this spring that prohibited such activity without permission.  (For more information, click here.)

We took a stack of BFC newsletters and spent the rest of our Yellowstone stay distributing them to fellow campers and visitors, doing our small part toward telling the tale of the buffalo.

Other iconic wildlife face an uncertain future. The grizzly population is up, and the Wyoming governor has prevailed on legislators to delist the bear from protected status.  Wolves were delisted by the federal government in 2011. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming all encourage the hunting of once-protected wolves who stray beyond park boundaries. Often they are the collared wolves that have been providing biologists insight into the ways of their clan. Hunt limits have increased.

 Indeed the glory days of the wolves, reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, are past, their population down 50% since the days when we first witnessed the famed Druid pack of Lamar Valley. Hunting, disease and decreasing prey are all at fault and ranchers play a highly vocal role.  Public lands that belong to us all provide cheap livestock feed for those who raise domestic animals. Economics takes priority over the creatures that call the wild lands home. We feel fortunate to be viewing these animals while we can.

Last of the Yellowstone photos:
https://plus.google.com/photos/115498465022511925235/albums/6024533520930525105

  

Moments in Yellowstone

-- A newborn pronghorn antelope struggles to its feet to stand briefly at its mother’s side before crumpling back into the grey sage, hidden from sight. Seeming to ignore her offspring, the mother moves away to distract potential predators, but returns at full gallop when a raven swoops by to investigate the calf.

-- Dark clouds over the mountains portend coming rain as we stand on a hill above the sweeping Lamar Valley, hundreds of buffalo and their calves dotting a valley turned golden with dandelions, an American version of the Serengeti. The dark adults rest with legs folded under them, their humps appearing as giant boulders, while the calves lie on their sides, sturdy red legs stretched out in the afternoon sun. I inhale their warm, sweet, animal scent.

--Middle-of-the-night tremors shake our campground in seismically active Norris, setting unseen wolves in nearby forests to howling.

-- Joining 40 other spectators, I stand in stinging hail in Swan Valley, futilely attempting to capture photos of a mother grizzly and two cubs in high sage through a fogged lens. I give up when the hail increases to olive size, shredding two photographers’ umbrellas and driving all but the most dedicated to the shelter of their vehicles.

--A mountain bluebird nest occupies a hole in the tree across from our campsite, the parents popping in and out to feed chirping nestlings and the cerulean blue male keeping watch. A little squirrel who blunders onto a neighboring tree trunk is swiftly chased off the tree and far down the road by a flash of brilliant blue.

--Black bears graze like cattle in lush spring grass, tearing up giant clumps with obvious relish. A young bear near Phantom Lake draws the usual squadron of onlookers, who chatter excitedly at his proximity to the road. A barrage of shutters clicks each time a bear’s head is raised, since much of the time, like resting bison, they’re indistinguishable from boulders, heads lowered and spending up to 20 hours a day eating.

We’ve seen a number of black bears at fairly close range -- a sow with three cubs, solitary blacks and a gorgeous cinnamon – and one large grizzly boar who moved much too close to the road, causing the rookie ranger’s voice to crack with anxiety as he ordered us all into our cars.

Black bears are forest dwellers, tiny cubs scampering up tree trunks with ease, while the long claws of grizzlies are made for digging, not gripping bark, and these bears tend to appear in open spaces, usually at a distance.

--We spot two just-born elk calves our last day, one born into the resident herd at Mammoth, where elk lounge on lawns outside the historic military residences. We saw the Mammoth mother moments before she went off into the sage to give birth. The new calf entered the world while we were watching a great horned owl mother feed her two remaining nestlings and coax them from their nest, the third sibling watching intently from a nearby tree.

--As we prepared to move on, the new elk mother appeared with her long-legged calf, sporting Bambi spots for camouflage and blinking huge brown eyes in the bright spring sun. Meanwhile in Swan Valley, a grizzly sow fed her cubs the remains of a stillborn elk calf. And In Lamar, a young wolf learned to hunt by capturing a newly-born pronghorn.

The snow melts, buffalo shed their winter wool and wildflowers emerge from the mud in this season of beginnings and endings. The young that survive grow stronger. 

Photos:

https://plus.google.com/photos/103909884233134954214/albums/6023354059463841969

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Teton Spring 2014

Snow! The Tetons were December-white in May as we approached Jackson Hole, while warm temperatures and residents in shorts said July – for once, the perfect weather for the Wild West parade and Beer Fest.  Under persistent high-altitude sunlight, we watch the snow retreating further up the mountains each day, feeding muddy, swollen rivers that ignore their banks, creating lakes where scrawny sage grows.

And in this extraordinary springscape, the first wildlife appeared as soon as we hit the county line: two scrawny young bighorn sheep, showing the deprivations of winter. Then, a moose on the Gros Ventre river near our campground, following by welcome news of newborn-calves and a rebounding population. Pronghorn antelope and elk mingle on the meadows with our beloved bison, who marked our first day in camp by meandering through as we drank our morning coffee. The behemoths are molting the heavy winter coats that allow them to survive the brutal cold of winter, rubbing on trees (and the edge of the neighboring picnic table) to lose the woolly tatters. A lone bull visited at cocktail time, but the bulk of the herd roams the open spaces of Antelope Flats, redheaded calves keeping up with the herd as they cross roads at will.

A massive array of vehicles near Jackson Lake marked our first bear sighting on day 3: the famous Grizzly 399 and her yearling cubs. A third cub had been lost over the winter, but this much-photographed sow is a highly experienced mother at age 18, and the remaining cubs looked healthy and strong. Unfortunately for us, they remained mostly in the brush, offering only the occasional tantalizing glimpse, but no photo opps for my amateur camera.

Jackson is an affluent town with residents like Dick Cheney and Harrison Ford, but its public face is young, friendly and super-fit. It’s an incongruous island of tree-huggers who shop organic in a state whose residents disdain climate change and hunt the wolves visitors travel thousands of miles to see. We break up our own wildlife hunts with visits to the history museum and Pearl Street Market for grass-fed local rib-eyes and the Snake River Brew pub for happy hour ales and a two-foot loaf of Zonker Porter bread. What other store carries Perigord truffles and bear spray belts?

Europeans and, recently Asians, flock to this area to enjoy the incomparable scenery and wildlife. We’ve had some fun neighbors at the campground, arriving in psychedelically-painted campers from a New Zealand-based rental company catering to young travelers. The first couple were Aussies who worked at wildlife rescue centers and we stayed up past midnight learning about the secret life of wombats and Tasmanian devils. Last night it was two young Brits from Bristol, who brought us cookies in thanks for a pot of boiling water to make tea after their stove failed.

Our best bear sighting happened yesterday, when we parked at a grouping of cars – the best way to know a bear is near – to see Grizzly 399 and her cubs at Pilgrim Creek. Amid an excited babble of Italian and German, and the enormous lenses and tripods of the Americans, we watched the cubs play in a snow bank and all three bears take to the water, where they wrestled and grunted in obvious enjoyment. The show lasted over an hour, with rangers directing traffic and attempting – not always successfully – to keep visitors at a safe distance. (Visitor safety is a challenge: In another scenario today, two Frenchmen standing five feet from a bull moose at the Snake River said they were unafraid because the animal “had a kind face.”)

The day’s local newspaper brought news that the Wyoming governor wants to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list, a move that could threaten not only 399 and her daughter 160 – who has her own cub this year – but the booming local tourist industry based on viewing wildlife. 

This morning brought pups at play, when we viewed a coyote den under an historic cabin on Mormon Row. One by one, the 9 pups emerged blinking into the sunlight; then the mother burst from the den to go off and hunt, leaving me with a headless photo and the pups to tumble and explore in the warm morning sun.

On the way home we passed the pronghorn we call “Scar,” a mature male who’d obviously encountered predators or perhaps stronger rivals, and emerged not unscathed, but alive and still strong. A survivor grazing this morning in a meadow of wildflowers.
Pictures here:  https://plus.google.com/photos/103909884233134954214/albums/6018920186183846833