Fall is in the air on Alderspring. Yesterday was one of those perfect autumn days on the trail for the Central Idaho Rangelands Network (CIRN) annual range tour, held this year on our Hat Creek range. Jackets were shed as early morning as freezing temps gave way to 70s.
Tour participants included folks from the public agencies on whose land Alderspring grazes. These rangeland specialists from The Bureau of Land Management and the USDA Forest Service participants rode on their own personal horses. The Head of Conservation Initiatives for the Idaho Nature Conservancy rode Pumba, an Alderspring gelding who had been over the trail hundreds of times (they got along even though Pumba is a little high strung and has no patience for human talk). Other attendees included other CIRN ranchers (who supplied even more horses), The Lemhi Regional Land Trust and State Legislature Representative Merrill Beyeler.
I was a little bit concerned about bringing my main range horse, Ginger. I probably should have picked someone else from Alderspring’s 20 head remuda. She is a long-legged and quite fetching buckskin, and like some of those cute cheerleaders from my high school day, knows just how sweet she looks. Those smug thoughts, given a few years to incubate in my 12-year-old mare’s head, occasionally erupt in a torrent of bitchiness when meeting other horses. As we set out, I recalled a few years back where shestarted a kick boxing and bucking match with a little black mare that crossed her–with both of us riders still on board. It could get interesting.
The objective of the tour: to exchange information and present results from our 24/7 range riding project in the remote upper Little Hat Creek country. We had proof in how our beeves did. They literally gleamed with health and put on abundant fat grazing range grasses under our care using the new management technique of shepherding them across the wild landscape. But these folks wanted to see the other half of the equation: what were the ecological gains realized in the landscape through which we grazed the summer?
We rode through our still grassy June grazing area in Bear Basin and jumped a large flock of sage grouse, a species that has been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act. They took off noisily like Apache helicopters, startling our horses.
As we dropped down the steep mountainside into Little Hat Creek, Karen from the BLM rode up next to me on her plain black gelding (definition: enuch in human terms). Karen started rhapsodizing about how he was just prancing along so happily today when he was just a pluggy old-acting horse the day before while punching cattle. I said it was probably because of how smitten he was with Ginger, and was showing off just a little. He trotted in alongside my long legged mare and promptly got himself bitten in the ear.
Too plain a prospect for Ginger, I reckoned. She was hopelessly ensnared in bitchdom. I smacked her in the neck with the end of my reins”¦a well-placed reprimand from above. I used to carry a willow switch to remind her I was up there, but quit carrying it after she got in the habit of quietly lifting it with her teeth from my back pocket every time I got off.
Little Hat Creek itself displayed the greatest ecological gain because the wet areas, or riparian zones, associated with the creek provide enough moisture in our arid climate for plant colonization and rapid growth. These creek side and spring areas support an enormous amount of vegetation diversity and structure just because of the abundant water. The adjacent dry rangelands, on the other hand, have large amounts of soil visible between bunch grasses and bushes due to reduced water availability that is characteristic of the Northern Rockies rain shadow landscape, particularly in the late part of the summer. In contrast, riparian habitat has every inch covered with plant life. And with plants comes an abundance and diversity of animals”¦all the way from little critters like fish and songbirds to the larger ones like beavers and black bears.
Karen produced a photo from her saddlebag. Taken from this point back in 1999, it showed muddy waters, eroded streambanks, and dead willow bushes. Rather than the tall grasses we could see today, the grass in the picture was clipped short by overgrazing and the flat adjacent to the creek was a cowpie-covered golf green. New aspen trees, willows and currant bushes dominated the creek bottom now. You could hear the creek, but couldn’t see it, as it was covered with vegetation.
I got off and let Ginger graze in the tall grass she wouldn’t kick or bite any of the other horses as we talked (They were lower forms of life in her book, after all). She behaved, as she could never pass up some good timothy grass.
Because Alderspring’s cowboys (and girls) lived with the beeves on the range the entire summer, riding herd and keeping them in hand (even at night), our cattle never set foot on 90% of those riparian areas on the Hat Creek range country. Of the 10% they did visit, we allowed them a drink or a short graze and moved them on. This is the first time in over 120 years that many of these areas were not impacted by bovines. Under our total control, our herd was only ¼ mile away grazing dryer uplands in the native prairie grasses of Bear Basin.
The results were astounding for some of the tour attendees, as over 60% of the land in the large state of Idaho is grazed by livestock, and altered (and often compromised) riparian areas are the norm. Everything from grasses to trees expressed obvious release, and waters ran clear. I think that many folks on the ride finally began the grasp the incredible ecological opportunity presented by the effort of intensively herding our beeves: our animal use of the wild landscape can not only complement natural processes out there, but even enhance them.
The full time herding concept is not a new idea, and we certainly can’t take credit for it. It’s been around for some 10,000 years, starting when humans first domesticated animals. Our western culture quit herding only about 100 years ago, but we have forgotten in that relatively short time how to conduct the ancient dance of herder and animal. Nowadays, nearly every rancher in the west simply opens a gate and turns their cattle out in the spring on to public lands grazing allotments like Hat Creek, and finds them come the fall gather. Not one I know of over far and wide lives with their cattle like herders had for centuries prior to 1900, and like we did this past summer.
The result is often adverse habitat impacts from unsupervised cattle, but yesterday’s tour sparked a bit of the vision Caryl and I have for resurrecting these ancient concepts of herding. This is a vision that complements the natural systems out there on the ranges while harvesting wild wellness”¦both for animal and the eater of them.
It’s becoming a common thread in sustainable agriculture. Reinventing nature in industrial agriculture and the “green revolution” has resulted in many endangered or even extinct species worldwide. Recapturing, and honoring the time-tested processes of nature is a pretty sure way to ensure that all the pieces, even if we don’t yet understand their relationship to each other, continue to thrive. And when the landscape is healthy, in all of its diversity, our wild-country harvesting animals are also healthy. The end result is a nutrient density that gets exported to your table, and the continued opportunity for it for generations to come. Isn’t that the definition of sustainable?
Fish that live and grow in wild settings are another example. That parallel is why we have found natural partners in Chris and Heather Maxcy, fishermen (and women) harvesting wild sockeye off the Alaska coast. Theirs is a sustainable fishery, and we are giving you an opportunity to participate in it, because one of the aspects of sustainability agriculture is profitability for the harvesters of wildness. We’re happy to have the Maxcy’s 2015 crop of wild Copper River Sockeye Salmon finally back in stock this week.
Up on the range near Camp Texarkana, the leaves are all turning brilliant shades of gold.
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