Laura Snell: Studying the wild horses of northeastern California

Abstract

Research news Laura Snell: Studying the wild horses of northeastern California UCCE Modoc County advisor Laura Snell and USFS rangeland management specialist Jenny Jayo mount a wildlife monitoring camera at Bottle Springs, a water source in Modoc National Forest. Through 2006, the Devil’s Garden horse popula- tion had long been stabilized at a few hundred adults through regular roundups, called gathers, which re- moved horses from the range every year or two. Since then, a combination of legal challenges to federal wild horse management plans and difficulty securing funding stopped large gathers. That allowed the population to balloon, with horses stressing grazing allotments on USFS land and straying onto private and tribal lands. As the horse herds and their impacts on range- lands have grown, it has ratcheted up tensions among ranchers, wild horse advocates, hunters, recreational users and local officials — and the federal land man- agers charged with adjudicating the use of the Devil’s Garden rangelands. “This is the most controversial research I’ve ever been involved in,” said livestock and natu- ral resources advisor Laura Snell, who joined UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) in 2015. “I had Modoc County ranchers coming up to me on my second day of work asking me how to solve the wild horse issue.” In partnership with USFS range management specialists, UCCE Lassen County director David Lile and UC Davis–based UCCE specialist Roger Baldwin, Snell is collecting new photographic data on a key area of dispute in the wild horses debate: the impact horses have on rangeland vegetation and soils, espe- cially around water sources, and on other wildlife. “We can’t just take vegetation data, we need the vi- suals to show people what’s going on,” she said. The study, begun in 2015 and scheduled to con- tinue at least through 2017, uses wildlife cameras placed for two-week periods at 24 remote water http://calag.ucanr.edu • OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2016 175 Will Suckow T his September, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), in partnership with Modoc County and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), conducted the first major roundup of wild horses on Devil’s Garden Plateau since 2006. The state’s largest population of wild horses is found here, on a high-desert expanse of Modoc National Forest surrounded by private ranchland and tribal lands. A survey in February estimated 2,246 horses here, far above the target of 206 to 402 adult wild horses established by the 2013 management plan for the 230,000 acres of designated wild horse territory on the plateau.