Cacti and Stone
Guest post by Clemson Montana Summer Program student Elizabeth Way
“There’s not black and white, just ever-increasing shades of gray.”
-Randy Matchett
Wildlife
biologists often use the world as their laboratory. Randy, a wildlife biologist
with UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge, joked that he’d spent about 260 of his 240
work days in the field over the previous year. Yet for all the immersion that science requires,
it is still very much a hands-off field.
History has proven that human presence often skews data, and although some
species, such as sage grouse, are more tolerant of handling, others are not. In wildlife studies, those that do not resist
the urge to handle the landscape may be rewarded with a good story, but also
deadly zoonotic diseases such as tetanus, Lyme disease, tularemia, or even
sylvatic plague. Touch perception is
very nearly limited to flora, rather than fauna, and my many scrapes, scratches
and bruises earned on this expedition reveal my novice in this respect.
For
animal veterinary scientists interested in the cattle industry, it is a very
different story. Domesticated livestock,
from cradle to grave, are trained with humans to expedite production. From calving to fistulation, vaccination to pit
tagging, supplementing to wintering - the cattle ranching industry is extremely
hands-on. It requires a sense of urgency,
unrelenting energy, and extreme determination - often for many generations – in
order to survive and create legacy on the thin margins of this industry in such
an extreme, unforgiving clime.
Somewhere
in the middle of the private - public lands interface an uncomfortable
compromise has emerged: the “all hands,
all lands” concept. Ironically, it turns
out that much coordination and interface is required to maintain and
simultaneously minimize the presence of people, organizations, and government
entities from each other as well as the landscape - a tall order for a working
conservation landscape like Montana.
CACTI
Regardless
of background, concentration of study or labor, the cacti spines that found
their way into the soles of our shoes, caused us to stop and reflect on our
vulnerability on the Great Plains. They
had sprung up in rocky, arid soils, struggling to root themselves against turbulent
winds and deflowering from voracious, non-native grazers. Their ability to guard their moisture with
spines and to adaptively strategize with grazers for seed dispersal makes them
one of the most successful plant types on the prairie. I observed that most of the vegetation in this
biome wasn’t what you’d call “friendly to the touch,” and speculated that most of the fauna would be likely
to follow suit; wilderness stayed wild by being left to follow it’s own best
interests. Many researchers also seemed
to have taken this cue. The American
Prairie Reserve (APR), for example, had purchased private land and removed
fencing to allow reintroduced bison herds the freedom of movement. Like the Wild Idea Buffalo Co., these
scientists strategize to sustainably manage the landscape holistically.
Not
every agency has the autonomy APR does, however. The Nature Conservancy, for example, tried to
build relationships between private ranchersand
conservationists through minimal, DIY intervention on leased land. They drew a hard line at sod-busting though;
they could not abide land owners destroying native prairie land for the sake of
profiteering. The Matador Ranch, a family business in
operation for the better part of a century, runs approximately 900 head of
cattle in concert with wildlife-friendly practices for elk, deer, sage grouse
and a host of other species. As
neighboring rancher Jim Robinson explained, “We don’t really know for sure. Like
the wildlife around here, they all just flow together. We don’t bother them. It’s not an issue.”
STONE
Walking
around the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, we observed the Indian
Lake Medicine Rock. As I ran my hands
over the petroglyphs, I thought about the messages from generations past. I thought about how much the climate had
changed, about how intensely the landscape had been used in recent generations.
I took note that a millennia of buffalo hadn’t been able to remove the images,
in spite of their renown for intense rubbing. It was the lichen, surreptitiously growing
across the face of the rock, stretching itself into the crevices, that would
impact and perhaps destroy the displaced glacial remain one day. All of our speakers had posited themselves as
the little guy fighting the big guy, for the intended survival of the
land. The Ranchers Stewardship Alliance
(RSA) suggested that outside economic forces would destroy the ability of
Americans to feed their own growing populations. Native researchers with the Fort Belknap Reservation
had to compete with more seasoned grant-writers and fewer human resources. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) suggested
that they were caught in the middle between wildlife protective agencies and
private ranchers, trying to avoid far-reaching regulation that could lead to destructive
cropland conversion. Yet each stakeholder
was finding a way to survive, to manage, to fight a perceived threat. And for all of our destructive tendencies,
humans are a vastly creative species. We
heard over and over again that rangeland and wildlife management was more often
art than science. “We’re caught in this
paradigm shift that’s happened in less than a generation,” a private rancher
explained to me. “We’ve got to somehow
change, if we’re to survive.”
