IN THIS ISSUE...

• Range Rescue

• War with Wolves

• Wildlife Damage

• World According To Hooter

EDITORIALS

• TRAILS
• GAP

Landowners are incredibly good stewards, feeding these animals continually. Yet in many instances they get no credit for doing so. On a dry year, especially, the wildlife spend almost all their grazing time on irrigated private lands where feed is greener. They also come to prefer alfalfa (or grain fields) to native grasses on public land.

Most of the damage is done by wild ruminants, but Canadian geese are also a problem for some ranchers and farmers in certain areas, such as the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Large flocks of geese can decimate a grain field and are also detrimental to the grass seed industry.

“The biggest issues across the West however are antelope, deer and elk. On average an antelope or a deer will eat 5 pounds of forage apiece per day and an elk 16 pounds. If you multiply that by how many animals are in an alfalfa field during a summer, the consumption is astronomical. Antelope also bed in it and mash down as much as they eat,” says Wilber. Deer and elk are more apt to come in at night and feed, then slip away at dawn to go find shade in a wooded area or out in the sagebrush during the day. In winter, deer and elk come into haystacks and tear down/trample and waste as much they actually eat, unless they can be fenced out.

“Wildlife also cause damage to riparian areas, irrigation systems and ditches, and fences. Elk are particularly damaging, tearing down long stretches of fence. The cattle producer or farmer raising alfalfa or other crops for sale pays a very high price for sustaining the public’s wildlife and gets very little compensation. Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Washington have compensation programs that vary from minimal cash payments to awarding a hunting tag to a landowner who has suffered damage,” Wilber says.

“Of the 4 states, Nevada probably has the most user-friendly program, allowing the landowner hunting tags, based on an evaluation by game department employees. They have a formula for awarding tags, based upon the number of animals you are feeding per day. The good thing about that, for the landowners, is that they can sell those tags to anybody who is willing to buy the tag.” In this way, the rancher can be compensated for some of the loss.
“This seems like a fair way to do it, and I have proposed this in Oregon, but they won’t look at it. Idaho won’t either. But Idaho does have a fund for wildlife damage and will reimburse landowners for proven depredation. The Fish and Game department has to assess the damage,” says Wilber.

In Oregon there’s a landowner preference tag program. “This is a small effort to reward the landowner for deemed pasturing of the state’s big game animals. The formula is based on how many acres you have, regarding how many tags you can get. It starts out at 40 acres per tag in the Willamette Valley, up to 160 acres per tag for land east of the Cascades. There have been efforts by the Oregon hunters association to increase this base to 640 acres per tag (wanting less tags given out to landowners) but the cattlemen’s association, Farm Bureau and other agricultural groups have aggressively opposed the hunters’ proposal. One reason is that there is a substantial real estate value associated with the ability to receive landowner preference tags. The hunters doesn’t like the landowner preference program even though it’s been around since 1983. They don’t want the competition for tags, and don’t give any credit to the landowners’ contributions to feeding the wildlife.” In many western regions more of the feed for wildlife is being supplied by private land than by state and federal land.

“The landowner is providing feed and habitat for these animals 24/7. By contrast, if you have a cattle permit on BLM or FS you might be out there for 90 to 150 days. The rest of the time (and even while your cattle are out there) feral horses and wildlife are using the land you’ve leased from the federal government and are trying to make a living on,” says Wilber.
With the landowner preference tag in Oregon, you can only hunt on the property that’s owned or leased. In theory that sounds logical, but big game animals don’t pay any attention to boundaries and may not be on your place when you try to hunt them. They may eat all night in your field and be somewhere else during the day.

The tags should be valid for any animal in that hunting unit. This is usually the case in landowner permits in Idaho, since the animals may not be on your place during hunting season. They’ve eaten in your fields all summer, but in the fall when it’s legal to hunt them, they’re on the uplands, especially if you’ve brought your cattle home from summer range and the cattle are in the fields and pastures. Elk tend to move out when you bring cattle in.
“This is the fallacy in requiring you to hunt only on your own property. You provide all the forage and habitat for the animals but then when it comes time to hunt them they’re long gone,” says Wilber. Sometimes, in some states, they allow a depredation hunt during summer if wildlife are causing a lot of problems. “The game commission and Oregon hunters association feel that’s the best way to take care of it, but this may have drawbacks. These hunts are open to anyone who applies for a permit, and most landowners don’t want people on their property that they don’t know.” This opens it up to people who might not respect your property--leaving gates open, shooting a cow by accident (or sometimes on purpose), etc.

Some areas are completely overrun by wildlife, however, and there needs to be a practical way to address this problem. “Here in Oregon, along highway 20 between Burns and Bend, there’s a place called Hampton where there used to be a gas station and restaurant. About 15 years ago it was nothing but sagebrush out there. Now there are 17 pivots and most of them are 11 to 13 tower pivots in that flat area.” This has created an oasis for wildlife in that high desert country.

“One day last year my wife and I were driving to Bend, and we estimated—on just one field—there were at least 1000 antelope. Nearby were about 250 head of elk. That farmland is providing an incredible amount of forage to wildlife, and lost income, because those farmers are raising that hay to sell.” This is a big attraction for wildlife because it’s the best feed for miles around.

“A friend of mine in Nevada says that when elk and deer get into alfalfa it’s like humans when they get hooked on cocaine. They have to have it. You can’t keep them out,” says Wilber. Most people wouldn’t mind feeding wildlife if they could be compensated for at least part of the feed they eat.

One way to calculate how much they eat is to take the amount per individual per day, times the cost of alfalfa per ton. “It’s not unusual here to have 200 to 300 elk in an alfalfa field for 5 months, eating 16 pounds per elk per day. You can easily figure your loss, multiplying by the amount of value per ton when it would have been sold. For deer and antelope, just take the 5 pounds per day times how many head, and do the same thing,” explains Wilber.

The advent of sprinkler irrigation as opposed to flood irrigation has made it possible to grow alfalfa on land that never grew alfalfa before. Water is also being supplied to some areas that were just sagebrush earlier. The high desert country grows beautiful alfalfa if it has water. Some of these areas now supply hay to a lot of dairies.

“We have this situation in eastern Oregon and Washington, and much of Nevada where there are miles of alfalfa fields. This has dramatically changed the concentration of big game animals.” With very little help from state game departments, there are only a few legal ways to try to deter these animals and reduce crop losses. Part of the problem is that the public doesn’t understand the tremendous private input into maintaining public wildlife.

“We need better education of the public and hunters about the contribution farmers and rancher are making—and that it’s costing us a bunch of money to feed these animals. We are at fault for not educating the public about this,” says Wilber. At this point in time our contribution is not public knowledge or is taken for granted, and we are viewed as the bad guys if we try to keep these animals out of our fields and pastures. Most ranchers and farmers like to see wildlife. We just don’t want the huge numbers that can put us out of business.

About the only way we can deter them is to use noisemakers, air cannons, firecrackers that go off at intervals, etc. But these methods only work for a short time; the animals become accustomed to them and are no longer scared away. A group of elk may be grazing within a hundred yards of the noisemaker. Guard dogs might work, but most ranchers don’t have the financial ability to buy good guard dogs, nor the time to train ranch dogs for this job.

The only other option is to build fences 10 feet high, which would be extremely expensive. Many ranchers put tall fence around their stackyards but can’t afford the iles of fencing that would be required around a field. Most game commissions will provide fencing material to keep animals out of your haystacks, but you must put it up.

“In Oregon and most other western states, game departments are very dependent on the revenue from selling tags and licenses. Here in Oregon they are very hesitant to offend the hunters groups, and seem more beholden to those groups than to the people who are providing the habitat for the game animals,” says Wilber.

In many instances, if the game department helps you in some way to try to minimize depredation, you may be required to allow access to your property to the general hunting public. You no longer have control over your private land. Most landowners are hesitant to do that. “You don’t know what kind of people are going to come on your place. There are some folks who don’t like cattle, for instance.”

Putting up with the damage by wildlife, however, becomes a serious issue. “For instance, on our own property we had a quarter mile of fence that 2 hired men rebuilt; it had been demolished by elk during the summer. Less than a week later you could hardly tell that the fence had been rebuilt. It was all torn up again. There were so many elk that when they were leaving the field in the morning just after daylight, it reminded me of when I was a kid and we had open range and the wild horses were being rounded up. That big herd of elk made so much dust it reminded me of those horse gatherings. You are helpless in those situations to defend your crops,” he says.

“Landowner groups, cattle and farm groups, need to make an effort to put a new face on this and put pressure on game commissions and legislators, to take better care of the landowners. I’m intrigued by the program in Nevada because their game department and legislature embrace the concept of compensation for damages. They do it very logically.

There’s a game department employee assigned to each section of the state and they hire people in summer to help them. If you call them, they go out with the landowner and count the number of animals. This is more practical than how they do it in Oregon by just assigning tags per certain amount of acreage. This merely assumes you have animals on that land. There are some pieces of ground that even a rabbit couldn’t live on, and other pieces that have tremendous numbers of animals coming in to graze.”

The number of tags given out in Nevada are determined by a formula which takes into account the number of animals on adjacent uplands, because those animals are spending time on the private ground. They may not actually be on the property when the person comes out to count them. “We often have elk on our place but they leave just before daylight. The only time we generally see them is when we are baling hay at night. When they leave the field they go into the uplands to rest in the sagebrush all day and chew their cud, just like a bunch of cattle,” says Wilber.

There are no simple solutions. “There’s a lot of politics involved, and a lot of money involved in game departments’ selling of tags and licenses. This dictates how this is managed, from the state’s perspective,” he says. In many states the game department doesn’t want to admit how much the ranchers and farmers are actually feeding these animals. They are reluctant to give credit for this, even though in many instances we are feeding their animals more months of the year than they are.

Some hunters are also reluctant to give credit to landowners. “They are resentful that we own property. They don’t think about the fact that we worked hard to pay for it,” says Wilber. There is sometimes a certain amount of jealousy and they don’t respect our property when they are hunting on it. Wilber feels the only solution for these issues is an extensive effort to educate the public about the fantastic job ranchers and farmers are doing as stewards of the public’s wildlife.