I have been asking all the wildlife biologists I’ve met how many vertebrate wildlife species are found on national forest lands. No one knows the answer. I can’t find the information on the web, either. You’d think it’d be one of those factoids on the Forest Service home page.
It’s safe to say that Forest Service manages tens of thousands of different animal species. Millions probably if you counted invertebrates. Most of these critters manage themselves and don’t make any trouble for anyone. Some of them are a serious pain in the ass.
Probably the most endangered animal in North America is the black-footed ferret, which feeds exclusively on prairie dogs in the Great Plains—almost all of which has been converted to agriculture. At one point there were only 18 black footed ferrets in existence, all of them living in captivity.
The USFW’s ferret recovery plan calls for the establishment of 10 or more separate, self-sustaining wild populations. Within a year from now, there was supposed to be 1,500 ferrets living in the wild, with no fewer than 30 breeding adults in each population. These objectives are nowhere close to being met.
One of the best sites for black-footed ferret reintroduction is the Thunder Basin Grassland in the northeastern corner of Wyoming, managed by the Medicine Bow-Routt NF. It is (or was) one of the last spots that had at least 20,000 acres of contiguous habitat occupied by prairie dogs. But in 2001, sylvatic plague, an introduced disease, wiped out as much as three quarters of the prairie dog population. Then local county commissioners and ranchers made a big stink over the EIS—basically they wanted more flexibility in the plan to poison prairie dogs.
(That’s a prairie dog, on the Buffalo Gap NG in South Dakota.)
I am going to talk about this more later, but there is something a little different about the Great Plains. Killing prairie dogs is a bizarre cultural imperative that I have not gotten a satisfactory explanation for.
Anyway, the Forest Service is out of money for the black-footed ferret thing and it’s unclear if there’s even enough prairie dogs to for a reintroduction to work. So, as far as I can tell, the black-footed ferret will have to survive in captivity for a while longer.
There is something very frustrating about this. Of course, the plague is to blame, sort of. But in a more basic sense, society is not making enough room for other critters.
Lucky for the Forest Service, they don’t manage bison (although the grasslands are excellent habitat). But Yellowstone National Park manages a herd of almost 4,000 of these majestic beasts. Or did. In hard winters like 2007-2008 the bison migrate out of the park, onto adjacent Forest Service lands, where they are summarily executed by the Montana Department of Livestock. Ranchers, you see, are afraid that bison carry brucellosis, an introduced disease that causes domestic cattle to lose their fetuses. Last year more than 1,500 bison, more than a quarter of the Yellowstone herd, were slaughtered.
Elk also carry brucellosis but are not banned from cattle country like the bison. But they’re elk, you see. Not bison.
Ah, to be a big game animal and so enjoy the total solicitude of wildlife management agencies.
100 years ago there were only 500,000 white tailed deer in the United States. Today there’s 20 million. There were 40,000 elk, now there’s 1,000,000.
There used to be 50 million bison in the United States. Today there are less than 10,000 wild bison. Or at least there used to be. After last winter it’s more like 8,500.
Moose were almost non-existent in the western United States when Lewis and Clark traveled across the continent, but populations their populations are growing rapidly.
I took this photo meaning to say something about environmental impacts. You notice in the background there that this forest has been thinned. The black dot in the lower left is a moose (zoomed in below). Environmentalists challenged the project in part because they feared impacts to the blue river trout stream downhill. I know of no evidence that this thinning show is having any negative impacts to the trout stream… I have never heard anyone mention the potential impacts to streams from moose, who never roamed this far south until recently. Just a thought.
You can see dramatic differences between forest vegetation where deer and elk have been excluded, for instance on some research plots I visited on the Lolo National Forest (thought I’d taken some pictures but I can’t seem to find them).
“In some areas I see more impacts from wildlife than from cattle,” an employee on the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, told me. “None of these states, they’re all hamstrung. They don’t have the courage, you see (to reduce deer and elk herds), because the funds from the wildlife management are a big thing for them.”
If bison and black-footed ferrets were big game animals, they’d be coming out our ears.
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