Snow still blankets the ranch, but it is weakening under the strength of a late winter sun. I was outdoors nearly all day today, and as I write this I feel the heat on my face of an almost sunburn. The high altitude sun can be fairly unrelenting that way, but the beeves actually seem to lean into the heat—turning broadside to collect as much as they can.
It is a long time from grass in our high valley, and even longer on our mountain summer ranges, but Caryl and I are hard at work putting together our summer grazing plans. I have at least half of our summer horseback crew already hired, and cast an eye toward our rugged ranges, some 10 miles away, thinking about how our beeves will graze that wild country this year.
It is 70 square miles of broken mountain landscape that starts on the shore of the Salmon River and rises nearly 6000 feet from dry desert to lush forests. It culminates at the highest point near the summit of Taylor Mountain in alpine tundra and lingering summer snowfields. We’ll take our beeves on a grand tour of that diverse wilderness landscape, living with them on the range, and shepherding them to graze the best grasses, stay completely out of critical wildlife and fish habitat, and prevent wolf interactions with our beeves.
It was wolves that actually first got us started on how we now herd our beeves on the range. We had lost cattle to wolf predation every year we’ve been up there. Each year, the canines would kill and eat at least two, and at most, 14 beeves. We would find only saucer sized wolf tracks”¦and chewed up large cow bones (their powerful jaws consume all of the smaller ones).
We’ve never hunted them or shot at them because we were always on the lookout for another solution to the negative interactions. Over the years, Caryl and I had several close up encounters with wolves in the Canadian North, and gained a respect for these top of the food chain predators.
Prehistorically they had long been a key part of the ecosystem we live in today, and now were back through the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s successful reintroduction program. From the original reintroduction quantity of 60 Canadian wolves, current numbers in Idaho are thought to be around 800.
Reversing that government directive is a politicall impossibility in our minds, so we resigned ourselves to trying to figure out how we could coexist with them. Perhaps it was hopeless, and the truth could be that we may not be able to run beeves on our wild ranges anymore. But tenacity is a fairly dominant characteristic of the Dutch blood that flows through our veins (some call it simply stubborn), and it seemed too early to give up.
It all came to a head 2 summers ago when we had turned our beeves out for the summer in May. They had only been out a few days, and when looking at our spare tire inventory, I knew I needed to head to the local tire shop to get some flats repaired. The two tracks that we use to access the range are primitive and strewn with brutally sharp volcanic rocks. We average some 10 flats a year. I threw some flat tires in the pickup bed, and trundled off to Challis, 45 minutes away.
I often engage in sparkling conversation with whoever does the fixing; today it was Tony. After getting thru those necessary items like weather, cattle and markets, he headed off into new territory while fixing tire number 3.
“Whatcha thinkin’ about the den?” Tony asks.
“What den?”
“The wolf den. Up there on yer range by the Table, up Little Hat Crick.”
The “Table” was Table Mountain, a large flat topped summit that forms the south border of our grazing country. It’s high, treeless and windswept summit was flat. The Shoshoni were said to gather there during the heat of summer when the flies began to get to them and their horses and take a vacation from the heat”¦and hold horse races”¦centuries before the likes of Secretariat.
“In the quakies?” He knew that I meant aspen, those white barked trees whose leaves tremble or quake when even the gentle breezes waft over the hills they cloak in Upper Little Hat.
“Yep. Somewhere in there.” He was running the wheel balancer. After smacking some lead weights on the rim, he went on. “There’s a bitch dog with a whole litter of pups in there. Idaho Fish and Game knows all about it. Word is that they even radio collared ’em. Yer neighbors from the country to the south of are packin’ iron hoping to kill ’em all.”
“Dog” was what folks around here called wolves. They may say “big dog,” but it was usually “dog.” They were by no means dogs, though. These Northern Rockies wolves were often twice the size of even the large domestic dogs, with conservative weight estimates of up to 160 lbs. They had done very well with Idaho’s abundant big game (and livestock) populations, and likely our more moderate climate than their native country of Canada. Even our 120 lb Great Pyrenees dogs that we entrust with ranch security don’t hold a candle to wolf.
I loaded my tires, got in my pickup, grabbed cell phone, and speed dialed my neighbor Jim. He picked right up and when asked, verified the story. Although he didn’t know exactly where the den was, he was aiming to find it, because they had already lost 10 head to that female and her companions over the past 2 weeks, verified by US Fish and Wildlife Service.
I did the mental math, and realized that they were out nearly $20,000. Females nursing pups have terrific appetites, and the pack that often orbits the den area formed a really solid clean-up crew.
Jim was fully in his legal rights to kill them all as an affected rancher according to law, even outside the wolf hunting season, which runs from fall through winter.
I just couldn’t go there. There had to be another way. I called Fish and Game. The biologist there admitted that it was likely their fault that the den ended up on our range, because after her pups got radio collared, the female relocated all of them to Little Hat, a distance of over 10 miles.
“Could you move them again?”
“The pups are getting too large, and we’ll probably lose a bunch of them in the move. You are perfectly in your rights to kill them.” I told him that I wouldn’t be doing that, and that it would be stupid to kill them all after going through all the trouble radio collaring them. The more data we can have about these animals the better, after all.
I looked at my grass at home, good for that time of year, and did some calculations on cattle numbers. It looked like we could survive by bringing the beeves back home. So the next day in the bunkhouse, I told the cowboy crew that we were pulling those cattle back off the range in another week or so, and sent them out to go get them.
Within a few days, we had them all gathered and accounted for. For this year at least, the wolves had won. Unless if we wanted to feed them Alderspring Ranch Organic Grass Fed Beef, we simply had no recourse, other than killing them ourselves, which was completely unnecessary. Caryl and I resigned ourselves to construct a paradigm shift; there had to be another way to view this.
Before the 1840s, wolves were on the very top of the food chain. Nothing ate them. Disease was largely non-existent, and the only thing that controlled their numbers was their food supply: elk, deer and bison numbers. Indeed, when Lewis and Clark came over Lemhi Pass in 1805, the explorers were quite short on food supplies, as there was little to no game to be found. The Native Americans they encountered on this part of their journey were also hungry for game, even immediately eating raw a deer that a man from Lewis’ advance party shot.
At that time, salmon was a mainstay for the Akaitikka, or Salmon Eaters band of the Lemhi Shoshoni that Lewis and Clark met. Even their name indicated where their protein came from. For clothing, shelter, and the red meat portion of their diet, they relied on the buffalo—the large herds of which were many days horseback away on the Great Plains. It was most likely that top of the food chain predators like wolves and grizzlies kept game numbers very low, and as a result the predator numbers were also fairly low.
Because of their position at the top of the ladder, and abundant game and livestock in Idaho, the Department of Fish and Game had no choice but to control them by hunting. There were simply no other possibilities to limit a wolf population explosion. It was already happening, as the new wolves were wildly successful nearly doubling their numbers every two years. Residents in Salmon, Idaho recall when there was no season on wolves 10 years ago; wolves were coming into town and eating dogs and cats from people’s backyards within city limits under cover of night. Backpackers would report wolves boldly coming into camp and hauling away their food. The “big dogs” had no respect or fear of humanity.
Now, with a hunting season in place, the dogs and cats of Salmon are safe, as the hunting season trained the incredibly intelligent wolves that humans can be a threat; a higher rung on the food chain, if you will. The canids were no longer king, and stopped coming to town. We still see them on the ranch, but not in the frequency of pre-season days.
Thinking about humans as a deterrent was a tipping point for us. We realized that if we could maintain a human presence with our animals all the time, wolf interactions with our cattle would likely stop.
And so they did. Last year, Alderspring cowboys lived with the range herd of beeves for the entire summer, shepherding them to fresh grass every day. At night, at least two cowboys or cowgirls slept near the beeves next to their bedding grounds.
For the first time, every one of the beeves we turned out on the range in May came back in the fall. And because they were carefully herded to great wild grasses every day, they gained weight and brought better flavor home than ever before. It may be that much of their weight gain could have originated from them being quieter than ever, likely due to the relationship they built with all of us cowpokes who lived with them”¦every day.
The range looked better than it likely had for more than 120 years, because it was the first time that domestic grazers were completely controlled with intensive herding. Our streams and springs were essentially ungrazed.
So in the end, it was the strange bedfellow of the “big bad wolf” who brought this new concept of animal husbandry and wildland stewardship to the table at Alderspring. We look forward to honing our skills at this new venture this year, and hopefully documenting it better so we can share it with you and with other livestock producers looking for a way to improve their stewardship of the land and coexist with large predators.
We are thankful that it worked. And you can be too, as it has made our beef better than ever before. It’s why we can call it “Wild Wellness.”
Happy trails.
Glenn, Caryl and Girls
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