Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  “It was just a total disconnect between wildlife and wild horses,” Turner told me, as we drove along the mountains. It isn’t just a bias on the part of the BLM, he said. Wildlife biologists who study wildlife often view feral horses as a corruption to the natural system that is more likely to disrupt an ecosystem than become a part of it. They avoid studying them, too. So the amount of research on the relationship between wild horses and predators is very thin. “People don’t really see them as part of anything,” Turner said.

  Since the 1970s, when the BLM realized that wild horse herds were increasing, it has said the same thing over and over: “The wild horse has no natural predators.”

  “The lack of natural predators is the reason for the growth spurt,” a BLM range conservationist told the Associated Press in 1976, when the bureau was first starting to look at population control. “Only the mountain lion attacks the horses, but it is not believed to kill many.” What he forgot to tell the reporter is that he actually had no data to support his assertion.

  The BLM is still saying basically the same thing today, with the same lack of data. I’ve heard it from at least three BLM wild horse specialists in the field: The wild horse has no natural predators. Sure, occasionally a lion might take down a horse in Colorado or Utah, they say, but most horses are too big, and in the desert, where most of them live, the land is too open for lions to hunt.

  What Turner and his team of researchers found totally upends this thinking. In 1987, Turner hired lion hunters with dogs to go out tracking in the hills of Montgomery Pass at dawn, looking for fresh lion signs. When the dogs hit on a scent, they would race off after a lion, eventually cornering it in a tree. Once a lion is treed, hunters generally finish it off with a large handgun. Instead, Turner shimmied up into the branches close enough to jab the lion in the haunch with a tranquilizer.

  Each lion then got a radio collar. For five years, Turner’s team tracked their movements, plotting where they went and what they killed. A clear pattern emerged that showed the BLM’s basic assumption was wrong: Horses do have natural predators, and mountain lions can have a significant impact on horse populations. True, as the BLM says, horses are generally too big for a mountain lion to take down, and lions stand little chance of catching a horse in the open. But by tracking their collars, Turner discovered a secret strategy that lions had known for eons. Every spring, the horses of Montgomery Pass would move from Adobe Flats up into the hills, in search of green grass, cooler temperatures, and reliable water.

  Water is rare in much of the West, especially in the dusty corners into which the wild horses have been swept. You can forget lakes and rivers, or even ponds and streams. In much of Wild Horse Country, water appears only as springs that bubble up and trickle a few feet before being sucked up by the sand. The hills of Montgomery Pass had seven permanent springs. Though the region comprises more than 100,000 acres, the springs, when combined, would maybe cover only a single acre. Nearly all of the region’s wildlife had to pass through this tiny bottleneck. That is where the lions waited.

  Turner and I drove up as far as we could get onto the pass. On either side, the rolling hills held a jumble of boulders and pines, with feathery grass growing in between.

  “This is good lion country,” said Turner. “The horses don’t like to come up here if they don’t have to. They would rather be out in the open. But to get grass and water, they will come.”

  On average during the study, five lions lived in the hills, both males and females. Turner found that they would crouch along the trails leading into the springs, then pounce. But the lions did not go for just any horse—they waited for the foals. Just as the herd moved up from wintering grounds in the valley in April through June, mares began to have their babies. The foals were smaller, weaker, slower. Examining kills, Turner’s crew found the same pattern over and over: foals killed within a few hundred yards of water. Some years, nearly two-thirds of the young were eaten.

  “You would have some lions eating a foal every other week or so,” Turner said.

  The pattern continued every summer until the fall, when the foals got too big for most lions to tackle and the horse herds retreated to their winter grounds in the valley below. After that, the lions would switch prey, going after deer during the winter and spring. When summer came, they would switch back again.

  In more than five thousand hours of fieldwork, Turner and his team tracked the mountain lion population and the horse population. The horse herd started at about 140 horses and rose to almost 160 horses over five years (a 4 percent annual increase, versus the 15 to 20 percent annual increase typically seen in herds without predators). Then, over the next five years, the population decreased 37 percent, to about a hundred animals. Then it began slowly to climb again. The mountain lion population mirrored the horse population.

  None of this would have been obvious without rigorous research. Mountain lions are so stealthy that even when they bring down a horse, people rarely see any evidence of them unless they are actively searching. In all his years tracking lions, Turner only saw one of the lions he collared after their initial capture. Though his team was carefully watching the springs, they only witnessed one lion attack on a horse.

  “We were totally caught off guard,” he said. “The thinking was that lions might catch a horse once in a while, but that it was unusual. We found the lions really relied on horses. Mothers were teaching their kittens to hunt horses. And it was having a real, lasting impact on the population.”

  That mountain lions hunt horses shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Before Clovis hunters showed up about fifteen thousand years ago, horses were part of North America’s prehistoric Serengeti—that crowd of mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and strange ancient also-rans like giant beavers and car-size armadillos. The continent’s herbivores were hunted by just as varied a troupe of carnivores: 150-pound wolves, saber-toothed cats, two-thousand-pound short-faced bears. In that group of meat-eaters was Puma concolor, the cat of one color, the American mountain lion. Fossils of big cats are notoriously scant, making it hard to reconstruct the lions of ancient times, but DNA analysis suggests mountain lion ancestors came over the Bering Land Bridge about eight million years ago and settled into life in North America right when horse species, large and small, proliferated in the plains and forests of the continent.

  Like species of the horse family before it, the mountain lion family evolved to fill North America’s varied landscapes. On the open grasslands, it formed the genus Miracinonyx, which was long and lean, with a shortened face and sprinters’ legs that made it look very similar to the modern cheetah. They likely hunted horses, just as modern cheetahs hunt zebras on the Serengeti. That cheetahlike lion went extinct with North American horses about ten thousand years ago. The mountain lion that is still with us stuck to forests and canyons where it could rely on ambush. What mountain lions hunted millions of years ago is lost to the fossil record, but it’s not a stretch to assume that, over the last eight million years, they ate a lot of horses. It’s also not a stretch to assume that a predator–prey relationship evolved, so that predation by the mountain lion shaped the horse and the horse shaped the mountain lion. More than a dozen mountain lions have been found preserved, along with horses and hundreds of other beasts, in the La Brea Tar Pits in Southern California. Researchers who analyzed microscopic variations in their teeth theorized that the reason the mountain lion survived extinction, when most prehistoric North American big cats did not, is because it was a generalist. It could switch prey easily and often did. When the horse became extinct, it switched to deer. It is no surprise that when horses returned, so did the lion’s appetite for them.

  You might think that a government agency with a horse population problem would be pounding on researchers’ doors to find out more about how mountain lions control horses. But since John Turner published his first findings in 1992, the BLM has showed almost no interest. It has neither spent its own money researching predators nor encou
raged independent researchers to do so. The agency does not even know how many of the West’s wild horse Herd Management Areas have mountain lions, let alone how many horses lions kill each year.

  To be sure, the BLM has been busy rounding up and storing horses. So it is hardly surprising that it has failed to seek out a hard-to-see management potential of lions. But the BLM also repeatedly ignored evidence when others stumbled across it. In one study after another, researchers tracking wild horses in the Great Basin have come across significant numbers of lion kills. Each time, the impact was significant enough that scientists trying to study other aspects of horses were astounded.

  For nine years, two researchers tracked a herd at the weapons-testing range south of the Fallinis’ Twin Springs Ranch to determine population growth. As with Montgomery Pass, the horses migrated up into rugged, treed country in the summer. The team saw a steady decline in the herd size over the years, driven by deaths of foals. During their studies, they saw three injured foals and two confirmed kills by lions, but mostly foals just tended to disappear. The researchers theorized that lions had the main impact on population growth.1

  The BLM took no interest.

  In 2005, a University of Nevada graduate student started tracking horses in the Virginia Mountains near the California border to document the effects of PZP on horses. She soon noticed that often when she went out into the field, she found the remains of foals near water holes. She eventually trapped a 130-pound female mountain lion, fitted it with a radio collar, and tracked it for ten months. She found that horses made up 77 percent of the lion’s diet. Mule deer made up just 13 percent. The lion also appeared to be actively training her kittens to hunt horses.2

  The BLM did nothing with the findings.

  In 2004, in Montana’s Pryor Mountains, the BLM was just a year into a program to control the horse population with PZP when darting had to be suspended because mountain lions had apparently eaten all of that year’s foals. The bureau eventually resumed darting a few years later, but it did nothing to study how to encourage mountain lions to limit the herd. In fact, just the opposite happened. The state of Montana encouraged lion hunting in the area to protect a nearby bighorn sheep herd it had introduced in the 1970s. Private hunters shot an average of two lions in the area each year. After 2004, when the wild horse population began increasing again, the BLM did nothing to encourage the return of lions. In a 2006 report on environmental factors affecting the herd, the agency flatly stated: “The BLM is not responsible for managing predators through hunting.”

  In 2012, a research team at the University of Nevada at Reno—motivated by the fact that most mountain lion information available in the state was limited to how many lions had been shot—began studying the habits of mountain lions statewide. “Our preliminary results indicate that wild horses are an important source of food for cougars in Nevada, and being taken in proportion to mule deer,” they concluded.3

  In northern Arizona, just a few miles outside of Kingman, on historic Route 66, is a chain of scrubby desert ridges known as the Cerbat Mountains, which rise three thousand feet above the valley floor. For as long as anyone can remember, about seventy horses have grazed the thorny slopes in small family bands. The mustangs are small and stocky, usually less than fifteen hands high. They are genetically the most purely Spanish herd in any wild horse area in America, according to tests done by Texas A&M geneticist Gus Cothran. Over the generations, the population has stayed stable. It expands and contracts, depending on drought and other factors, but there has not been the unchecked growth seen in many herds. The BLM has never done a roundup in the Cerbat.

  The BLM says the steady population is probably kept in check by a healthy mountain lion population, but that is about the extent of the understanding. The BLM has never done any formal counts of the herd. The BLM has never studied the predator–prey dynamics here, nor has anyone else. They can’t explain why the Cerbat herd holds steady when other herds in desert areas have growing populations. In a way, places such as the Cerbat are like the good children ignored while parents are consumed with the bad ones. The BLM is too focused on removing horses to pay attention to places that don’t need removals. But ignoring places like the Cerbat, or the Virginia Mountains, or Montgomery Pass, is a mistake, because these places likely have important lessons for the management of Wild Horse Country.

  And good management is critical. If we can move away from roundups, we can move away from storing horses. If we can move away from storing horses, we can move away from the corrosive effects it has had on the integrity of the BLM and the rule of law. If we can find a way to manage in balance, we can protect the animals, the ranchers, and the legend.

  And understanding how to manage for mountain lions is vital. Small decisions can change the balance and have broad consequences. John Turner has seen it happen in the last few years at Montgomery Pass. For years, when Turner was studying the herd, the best grassland in Adobe Flats in the winter range below the mountains was fenced off, because it was being leased from the BLM to graze cattle. It is flat, open, and fed by permanent streams and springs that nourish a lush, eighteen-hundred-acre emerald carpet of grasses and forbs. Wild horses likely gazed longingly at this forage, but it was out of bounds to them. So as summer came, they headed into the hills.

  In 2006, the rancher with the lease stopped using the Adobe Flats pasture, and the fence fell into disrepair. Horses that had been nibbling on scraggly grass from between sagebrush outside of the fence moved in. Because they now had year-round water and grass, the herds no longer had to go up into the hills in the summer. And because they didn’t go up into the hills, they didn’t face predation by mountain lions. The lion population decreased and the horse population started growing—from 43 in the valley in 2005 to 180 in 2011.

  In 2016, when I arrived at the spot with John Turner, bands of horses dotted the broad lawn of the cattle lease, grazing and swishing their tails. Young studs gamboled and fought, stallions herded their mares with heads down and ears back. Turner lifted his binoculars and scanned. His mouth moved as he counted silently: 353 horses.

  “That’s a huge increase. I can’t blame them for being here. There is everything a horse could want,” he said. “But you can see how one little change can have a big impact.”

  He had tried to talk the BLM into managing the horses in a way that would move them back up to the mountains in the summers, but the response had been tepid. Turner tried asking a rancher in the area to try to move the horses by turning on and off a series of water sources that would encourage horses over time to move from the flats up to the hills. The rancher, he said, did not want wild horses at his troughs. Now, the herds are continuing to grow, and there are only one or two mountain lions left in the hills. The balance Turner had documented for decades has faded away for want of a little barbed wire.

  “They are probably going to start roundups here again,” he said. “I wish they would just try to realize what is going on.”

  Clearly the predation happening at Montgomery Pass is not happening all over Wild Horse Country. If it were, there would be no need for roundups. But why are the interactions between lions and mustangs not more common? One reason is that the same group of stock raisers and government agencies that tried to exterminate the mustang during the dog-food era also did their best to wipe out the mountain lion. Predators were a threat to sheep and cattle. The ranchers wanted them gone in the name of progress, and the Departments of Agriculture and Interior were happy to help. As with horses, the eradication effort started with local bounties offered by ranchers, then grew to state programs. The first efforts started in the 1870s, and the value steadily grew. In 1888, Utah labeled the lion an “obnoxious animal” and set a $5 bounty. In 1915, a Denver newspaper was offering $25 per lion. The state later raised it to $50. By 1920, the Colorado Stock Growers Association publicly announced its goal of hunting mountain lions to extinction.

  Just as the wild horse became the “range robber,” eatin
g grass that should be given to livestock, the mountain lion was seen as a drain on the system, an impediment to progress, or, as the Arizona Territorial Legislature called it, an “undesirable predator.” What was wild was deemed inherently disruptive for stock raising and needed to be purged. Wolves, grizzly bears, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, eagles, even prairie dogs were considered varmints and were slated for destruction.

  Amid this thinking, in 1914 Congress created the quaintly misnamed Bureau of Biological Survey, a federal effort to get rid of predators. The bureau hired trappers and coordinated eradication campaigns. It used poisoned meat and snares, guns, and steel traps. One early critic called it “the most destructive organized agency that has ever menaced so many species of our native fauna.”4

  This may seem like just another abuse of the Great Barbecue, and it was. But here is the shocking thing: We are still doing it. The Bureau of Biological Survey over the generations has often provoked public outcry, but it has never gone away. It has only changed its name, becoming an agency called Predatory Animals and Rodent Control, and then Animal Damage Control. Now, as part of the Department of Agriculture, it is called Wildlife Services. Its mission, though, when it comes to lions, has remained relatively unchanged: It kills them. In 2014, Wildlife Services killed 305.