CHAPTER 10
A WILD SOLUTION
On a sweltering June afternoon, I walked off the jet bridge at the airport in Las Vegas on the hunt for a solution for wild horses that did not involve helicopters or slaughter or sticking them with PZP—something that could limit the herds without poisoning the legend. A huge mural running along the wall of the terminal showed a desert tableau of red cliffs and distant lavender mountains. On a rise stood three wild horses, their ears up, their eyes fixed on the horizon, as if scanning for predators. Just below, methodical retirees, as pale and pudgy as bread dough, plunked quarters into banks of slot machines. Some of those quarters, too, likely had images of wild horses on them. Nevada’s official state quarter, released in 2006, has three mustangs galloping across a mountainscape. As I drove out of the airport onto I-15, more wild horses galloped past in the form of public sculpture along the highway.
The legend of the wild horse was not dead yet, I thought.
Urbanites in Nevada love wild horses. The state is a microcosm of the country. Residents of Las Vegas and Reno—people who for the most part grew up somewhere else and moved here recently—see mustangs as a symbol of freedom and a proud and unique mascot for the state. Residents of the state’s rural counties hate the horses. They overwhelmingly see them—and the people in Las Vegas, for that matter—as pests, and they would sooner put a pack rat on the state quarter.
I drove north through downtown into a landscape that aptly traced the stark polarity of this divide. On the north end of Las Vegas, as I crept through stop-and-go traffic, an armada of billboards and fast-food logos sailed above swells of suburban stucco. Then the city suddenly ended. One block was dense humanity, the next nothing but creosote and Joshua trees spilling out into the distance. The traffic was gone. I was hemmed in only by rough, dark, roadless mountains and a timeless desert.
I was on my way north to a lonely ridge on the border between California and Nevada, where I hoped to find an answer to the wild horse question. The place was called Montgomery Pass. From what I could tell, it offered a promising solution—or at least the seed of one. It wasn’t PZP. It wasn’t selling to slaughter buyers. It seemed to have the potential to make both horse advocates and the BLM happy. It would cost almost nothing, and the means to make it happen was already there. Best of all, it would preserve the legend that prompted us to save wild horses in the first place. Despite all this, no one seemed to be paying any attention to it. In fact, if anything, it was something the country was actively working to undermine.
The solution is mountain lions.
Just saying that, I know, has cost me the attention of nearly everyone who has ever been involved in wild horse management, either on the citizen side or the government. To anyone who has been around awhile, it sounds laughably naive. For decades, the BLM has said the wild horse has “no natural predators.” The big National Academy of Sciences report that came out in 2013 concluded that “the potential for predators to affect free-ranging horse populations is limited by the absence of abundance of such predators as mountain lions and wolves” in Herd Management Areas. It is something newcomers to the issue almost invariably suggest, and it has become a reliable indication of ignorance of the issue. The idea has been proposed to the BLM by citizens and dismissed outright so many times that even mentioning it causes an almost reflexive eye roll. If a panel of top scientists has dismissed it, why give it more thought?
WILD HORSES NEAR ELKO, NEVADA.
But the same people who have long dismissed using predators to control horses as impossible have never made an attempt to understand it. They have likely been too busy rounding up and storing horses. If they took the time to look into the idea of mountain lions, they would soon see that research on the ground contradicts the conventional wisdom.
The road out of Las Vegas took me into the heart of Wild Horse Country, past repeated signs warning that the next gas was 50 miles, 80 miles, 110 miles away. The thermometer in the car reached 109 degrees. I drove for hours, getting deeper into the nothing. Here and there, a few boarded-up bordellos sat in the wind in empty valleys where it’s a wonder anyone ever found the staff, let alone customers. I crossed a few mountain ranges where small towns once had sprung up around silver mines. Time and the desert had reduced them to stone foundations in the sage. As I passed one, a gang of three coyote pups darted across the road, jumping and grinning, as if they had won. Maybe no other place in the United States has so often shrugged off the attempts of civilization and remained its wild self.
Near dusk, I drove around the north shoulder of Boundary Peak, on the California border. The sun was low, and though it was June, thick robes of snow still hung on steep shoulders of the summit, glowing pink in the fading light. As I came around its side, I dropped into a broad bowl of sage and grass with high hills hemming in all sides. This was Montgomery Pass. The road was lonely. There was no traffic—a single ribbon of asphalt that cut through a valley with no houses, no ranches, no trees, no nothing. Wild Horse Country. I slowed my car and scanned the brush. I was searching for a dirt track cutting off to the south toward a cluster of sandstone cliffs. I had been told that if I found it, I would find a scientist I was looking for named Dr. John Turner.
Turner had been studying wild horses and their interactions with mountain lions in the region for thirty years. He knew more than anyone about whether predators could really be part of the solution for wild horses. When I called him at his office in Ohio, he had invited me to visit his summer field camp and see for myself.
Just before it got too dark to see the side of the road, I spotted a ramshackle 1970s trailer off in the sage. I swung off the paved road and bumped my little rental car gingerly up a two-track path, scraping more times than I’d like to admit. At the base of the cliffs, a man came out from behind the trailer wearing dirty blue surgical scrubs and a sun-bleached old dress shirt that was unbuttoned and flapping in the evening breeze. He had a wild beard, a faded bandanna, and a single gold ring in his ear. The whole getup made him look a bit like a pirate who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Maybe I had the wrong place, I thought.
“We were getting worried that you wouldn’t find it,” the man said.
I had found Dr. John Turner.
The name may sound familiar. John Turner was the longtime friend and colleague of Jay Kirkpatrick, the Johnny Appleseed of PZP. He spends the cold months in a lab trying to refine the fertility drugs and the warm months trying to understand the natural relationship of predator and prey in the hills that could make fertility drugs less necessary.
The John Turner I encountered in hospital scrubs and a faded bandanna was John Turner in field-biology mode. He spends most of the year teaching physiology and sexual reproduction at the University of Toledo’s medical school. There, he wears crisp ties and ironed shirts. But every summer since 1987, he has ditched the tie, said good-bye to the med school, and headed west to study horses, camping out under the stars near Montgomery Pass.
Over the years, he adopted a number of practical desert-rat habits. The lightweight cotton scrubs and old, threadbare shirts were ideal, he found, for warding off the sun and the biting insects that are a constant presence in Wild Horse Country. They also keep him cool. The bandanna was good for sopping up sweat and keeping his hair from going too feral between showers. The gold hoop earring he wore year-round. “Keeps me from becoming an administrator,” he said with a grin.
Not becoming an administrator kept his summers free to come back to Montgomery Pass, something high on his priority list. “This is a special place,” he said as he welcomed me into his small camp, where we settled into lawn chairs.
We looked out from a parapet of sandstone cliffs into a broad, empty valley. Nighthawks floated like kites in the last lavender of dusk. Beyond the valley, low mountains cloaked in juniper and piñon looked like dark swells rising from the sea. Beyond them was the jagged tooth of Boundary Peak, its ridges and couloirs clear in their details, though it was nea
rly twenty miles away. A high cloud stood like a banner ten thousand feet over the summit, catching the fiery light of sunset long after we were in shadow.
“It’s so massive,” Turner said as he looked at the sweep of desert and mountains. “It’s so separated from the human effort.” He is not a horse person, but a person who treasures wildness.
As we sat, Turner told me a little about how he ended up spending a good part of his life in the valley. It started in a bar in Idaho in 1971, where Turner and Kirkpatrick had stopped to get a cold drink after a backpacking trip. As they drank their beers, they heard a group of ranchers at the bar complaining about the numbers of wild horses, about how they weren’t allowed to gather them anymore, and about what they should do. It was a fascinating puzzle for two reproductive biologists out of Cornell.
“We didn’t start work on it until about 1973, but it got us thinking about the issue,” he told me. In the years afterward, Turner and Kirkpatrick worked together on the long string of failures in Montana before discovering PZP and testing it on Assateague Island.
“It was an interesting time,” he said. “No one had really ever thought of trying to use fertility control on wildlife.”
When Turner first came to Montgomery Pass in the 1980s, he thought it would be to continue the fertility-control research that he and Kirkpatrick had been doing for a decade. He had been presenting at a wildlife conference in Australia when a veterinarian (who oddly enough lived near Montgomery Pass) pulled him aside. The veterinarian’s family led pack trips into the mountains of Montgomery Pass to watch wild horses. There were about 190 horses in the region, and the BLM was fixing to round up much of the herd, leaving only about seventy-five animals. The veterinarian wanted to know whether there was any way to avoid it.
“Could you see if you can use fertility control in our area?” the veterinarian asked.
Turner was eager to find a new place to test fertility control, and he said he would take a look. He came to Montgomery Pass in the summer of 1985. His plan was to begin by just studying the population dynamics of the herd. He had to learn how the horses lived and how fast the population was growing before he could design a program to try to slow their reproduction.
He got to know the place by going out into the hills with some of the area’s longtime buckaroos, who had worked the region for decades and even done a bit of mustanging before the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed.
On one of his first nights there, he and his guide, a particularly leathery old fellow, threw their sleeping bags down under the stars near a spring in the hills above the pass. It was a remote place, hours up a rough Jeep road. “There’s a lot of mountain lions in these hills,” the old buckaroo said as they bedded down. Before a slightly startled Turner could respond, the buckaroo added, “There’s some people who’ll say you have to be afraid of them, but they’re real shy. You’d have to sleep naked wrapped in bacon to have any trouble.”
The buckaroo grinned and looked sideways to see the city-slicker scientist’s face. Then he continued on a more serious note. “Don’t worry. We hardly ever even see a lion. Once in a while, you’ll find a mustang colt that looks like it was a lion kill, but that’s about it.”
Turner nestled into his sleeping bag and looked out at the dark trees and stars, not yet realizing that the cowboy had just mentioned something that would occupy him for decades. Over the next few years, he returned each summer to study the population so he could design a management regime. But he soon stumbled on something he had not seen before. There was no population growth. The wild population in the region was actually holding steady. And it appeared that mountain lions were keeping the population in check.
“The BLM was saying there was overpopulation and there was actually underpopulation, because the mountain lions were just going crazy. This was something totally new,” he told me. “The old timers around here knew cats were hunting horses, but no one in the scientific community really realized it was happening, or that it could happen.”
The morning after I arrived, Turner took me out to the place that had long maintained a steady herd with no interference at all. We started in a level expanse aptly called Adobe Flats. It was broad valley penned in on all sides by empty mountains. The rose-colored soil was dry and powdery, but you could easily imagine that, when wet, it would turn to a slick clay that could eventually dry as hard as adobe brick. Tufts of sage dotted the flats and feathery rice grass grew in sheltered nooks.
We stopped the car along a small dirt road and got out. In front of us was a stone corral, built by hand. It was about fifty feet across and perfectly round, with thick, strong walls high enough that a tall man could just peek over them. Compared to the standard wood-slat corral, this was a fortress. No ranch hand would bother building something so time-consuming for cattle. It was an old mustangers’ trap—not a relic of the dog-food era, when mustangers would truck animals off to slaughter, but one from the days when the divide between man and wild was not so wide, and residents of the Great Basin depended on the bounty of the land for what went under their saddle. Just like the gathering traps of today, the corral had no corners where horses could pile up and be trampled. In the middle was a snubbing post used to saddle break horses.
“Look at this,” Turner said, motioning to me as he walked through the sage. He stopped at a swift creek, maybe a yard across, pulsing through the sage. “There is water here, there is good grass, it’s a perfect place for horses. The old-timers must have known that.”
Two miles to the north, the flat weft of sage warped upward into a dark range of mountains that rose nearly two thousand feet above the valley. The geologic brow was covered with small evergreens and creased with canyons and crags. That was Montgomery Pass. There were no lions in Adobe Flats. The plain offered them nowhere to hide and nowhere to hunt, but the mountains above provided uncounted ambush sites, and often when horses went in, a few didn’t come out.
We got in the car and headed up through the sage toward the hills.
Mountain lions are perhaps the most adaptive big predators the world has ever produced. Among mammals in the Americas, their range and flexibility are probably exceeded only by humans. In part because of this, they have more names than almost any other animal: cougar, panther, painter, mountain lion, wildcat, catamount, puma. In Wild Horse Country, people most familiar with mountain lions usually call them simply lions—a fitting nickname, because mountain lions are found not only in the mountains but also in thorny desert canyons, rain forests, steamy swamps, and snowy subarctic forests. Before the settlement of the United States, they lived in every state from Florida to Maine to California. In recent years, one has even taken up residence in a park in Los Angeles.
They now remain in about fifteen states, but they appear to be expanding back into parts of the East. As is obvious as soon as you spot one licking its paws or switching its tail, they are more closely related to house cats than to lions and tigers. They also are easily America’s most stunning hunter. One study found they consume about ten thousand pounds of prey a year. They are able and willing to kill almost anything: deer, of course, but also elk and moose, coyotes, raccoons, rabbits, birds, even porcupines. The Los Angeles lion stands accused of killing one of the local zoo’s koalas.
They range in weight from 100 to about 180 pounds. Though they are about the same mass as humans, their heart rate is twice as high and their lung capacity is much smaller. They are sprinters, not marathoners, made for a quick lunge. At a dead run, deer can easily outpace them, so they rely on ambush. They crouch, a silent coiled trap of tooth and bone ready to spring. Their haunches are piled with muscle for an explosive forward dash. A lion can jump twenty feet in a single bound.
Once they close the distance, their technique is simple and time-tested: Jump on the back, anchor in with hooklike claws, bite the neck. A lion has daggerlike canines more than an inch long. Behind them is a gap allowing each tooth to sink to the bone. The teeth act as wedges, find
ing the gaps between the top few vertebrae and forcing them apart. The spine is severed and the prey goes limp. The whole operation can last mere seconds.
For me, the most powerful testament to the lion’s stealth is this: In the decades I’ve spent roaming the West, I have probably clocked thousands of days in remote mountains and deserts, on lonely trails at dusk and dawn, often by myself. I live on a steep road on the edge of the Rockies, where a number of mountain lions prowl the neighborhood. A neighbor’s infrared game camera sometimes catches them at night. Over the years, I’ve stumbled upon lynx, bobcats, wolves, ringtails, and all manner of other elusive critters. I have seen the torn and bloody deer limbs that lions have left after kills in the hills. I have stopped in my tracks at the strong scent males use to mark their territory. I’ve even awakened in a remote red-rock canyon after a rainy night to find a cat’s broad tracks pressed into the damp, red sand all around my camp. No doubt lions have seen me. But I have never seen them—not even a shadow disappearing into the brush.
Mountain lions are just as invisible in the world of wild horse management. They are prowling all around and through it, but no one seems to be able to see them. The Bureau of Land Management is in a curious position when it comes to the animals on its land. It controls livestock, but not wildlife. Wildlife is overseen either by states or by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The bureau controls the management of the wild horses, but not the management of the predators stalking them. So, in the management of wild horses, the influence of lions has never been considered. The bureaucratic divide keeps it from happening. In the beginning, the BLM was largely staffed by ranchers, not wildlife biologists, and they have always taken a ranchmen’s approach to management. Study mountain lions? For generations, they had been trying to ensure the only thing they studied in mountain lions was bullet holes. Because of this, when John Turner showed up at Montgomery Pass, almost nothing was known about how mountain lions and wild horses interact.
Wild Horse Country Page 29