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This page last updated February 08, 2009
RangeNet Project
Project WPLGAlbum
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Page 3: Grazing in Utah's Great Basin
by: Christopher "Chris" Christie
February, 2000Disclaimer: The locations of photographs
in this album have not been determined through survey. Due to the
intermingled nature of land ownerships throughout much of the west, some
photographs where the context or caption imply or otherwise indicate government
ownership may actually be located on intermingled or adjoining private lands.
The Great Basin - Rather than a single basin,
the Great Basin Desert actually consists of a series of basins and north-south
trending fault block ranges, totaling about 165,000 sq. mi. in area from
crest of California’s Sierra Nevada to the Wasatch range in Utah &
from the southern edge of the Columbia river drainage in the north to the
edge of the Colorado river drainage on the south. Rivers in the region flow
neither to the Pacific nor to the Atlantic, but into the many basins of Oregon,
Eastern California, Nevada and Utah. (Parts of southern Idaho are also included
in some delineations.) These include Harney and Malheur Lakes (OR), Owens
Valley and Mono Lake (CA), Pyramid and Walker Lakes and the Carson Sink (NV),
Sevier Lake, Great Salt Lake and the rest of prehistoric Lake Bonneville
in Utah. Precipitation ranges mostly between 4 - 10 inches, higher on some
ranges, most of which comes in winter as snow. Winters are cold and summer
is quite warm to hot. Drying winds are frequent. Soils are often alkaline
or saline due to evaporation and accumulation of salts in these ancient basins.
Since the pleistocene, the native plant species, particularly the grasses,
of the Great Basin have not evolved under heavy grazing pressure and, under
the conditions that exist in the Great Basin, have not fared well under
post-settlement domestic grazing pressures.
From the first decade of the century until the Great depression, such pressures
included millions of sheep that sometimes used the same Great Basin land
as hundreds of thousands of cattle in Utah and Nevada. Due to the aridity,
temperature extremes and soil composition, these are fragile and easily disrupted
desert ecosystems. (See discussion in Donahue, The Western Range
Revisited, University of Oklahoma Press, 1999) Unfortunately, these same
ecosystems have been abused by livestock grazing since the 1840’s, with
heavy damage beginning by the 1860’s. Changes in plant community composition
and plant distribution appears to have been substantial, but base line data
is spotty to nonexistent. We do know that degradation has been extensive
and continues at a lowered intensity in ecosystems that now exhibit diminished
productivity and biodiversity. So great has been the damage over so much
of the Great Basin that, in the face of scant data on presettlemet biodiversity,
it is a fair question to ask if we may have lost some species that we never
knew existed.
In Utah, 59% of the mammals, 28% of the birds and 38% of the reptiles and
amphibians occur on the salt deserts. Some commonly known animals that make
their homes on the Great Basin include pronghorn, mule deer, bighorn sheep,
elk, mountain lion, coyote, bobcat, kit fox, badgers, several owls, golden
and bald eagles, ferruginous, swainson’s and red-tailed hawks, sage
grouse, jackrabbits, desert collared and leopard lizards, gopher and
rattlesnakes. The factor that most adversely affects wildlife populations
over the long term is the loss, in quality or quantity, of suitable habitat.
The primary cause of habitat degradation in the Great Basin (besides human
population expansion) is livestock grazing.
In the pictures below, the second and
third pictures are of desert shrub communities, that
while not pristine, are in pretty good shape for areas subjected to livestock
in Utah’s Great Basin. Such areas and the surrounding mountain ranges
would certainly be eligible for any regional biodiversity preserve system.
These two pictures can serve as general comparisons for later pictures of
more commonly encountered scenes. The lands in these pictures are all
administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and those in Millard
County are under the care of the Fillmore field office.
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Picture 1. Great Basin Cattle Country. This picture
is of Wheeler Peak, 13,063 ft, 8,000’ above valley floor, in the Snake
Range (Nevada). In the foreground is Snake Valley-Ferguson Desert and a
salt-desert shrub community, this one dominated by greasewood (Sarcobatus
vermiculatus) on saline and/or alkaline soils. Great Basin National Park
is half of a complete and functional Great Basin landscape level system because
it includes only a portion of the range (Snake Range). The basin, the Snake
Valley and northern edge of the Ferguson desert in the foreground, is winter
range for many wild ungulates and is outside the park, mostly in Utah. |
| Picture 2. Mixed Desert Shrub Community. This
picture shows a mixed salt desert shrub community under light to moderate
cattle grazing in the Ferguson Desert/ southern Snake Valley (Millard County)
consisting primarily of shadscale (Atriplex confertifolia), low sagebrush
which is dying out on this site (Atemesia sp.), winter fat
(Krasheninnikovia [Eurotia] lanata), a sprinkling of mormon tea
(Ephedra sp.) and very few perennial grasses. The perennial grasses
are few on this site because it is grazed out by cattle. |
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| Desert allotments grazed by cattle generally have only pauperized
perennial grass populations and the lack of grass is a clear signal that
it is being grazed by cattle with a preference for grass, even if the usual
widespread and noticeable damage is not present. |
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Picture 3. Three Tule Valley Great Basin Shrub
Communities. This picture, taken in south Tule Valley, Millard County,
shows three different plant communities. The first is the green Indian Rice
Grass (now Achnatherum hymenoides) with the smaller, interspersed
reddish cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum); the second is the gray-green
winter fat (Krasheninnikovia [Eurotia] lanata) community; and past
that is the darker green shadscale (Atriplex confertifolia). This
section is part of a winter sheep allotment, thus the presence of the rice
grass community, as sheep generally prefer to feed on shrubs and forbs. |
| Pictures 4, 5,
6 and 7 - Wrong Animal,
Wrong Place. The cows on what is left of this damaged salt desert
shrub community (Picture 4 Cruel & Unusual Punishment) on Fish Springs
Flat, House Range Resource Area, deserve our sympathy, but those who allowed
them to be put in this unsuitable environment do not. Because most of the
forage is found on nearby springs that the cattle have ruined biologically,
they are able to survive, but their browsing damages the shrub community
and there are few native perennial grasses as compared to nearby sheep
allotments. |
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| Previous damage from sheep feeding on this allotment left large
bare areas and a serious infestation of the poisonous exotic weed, halogeton,
which can be seen in the foreground. Probably because halogeton is more poisonous
to sheep than cattle, this allotment is now subjected to further damage by
cattle grazing, having been converted from earlier use as a sheep allotment. |
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Dead cows
(Picture 5 Dead Cow ) are commonly found littering the
Great Basin and other landscapes in Utah and the arid West. Given the unsuitable
conditions they are expected to exist in, it is no wonder. This expensive
water development is on the Stott-Rowley allotment, Warm Springs Resource
Area, in Millard County. Mr. Rowley, who is the local BLM Field Manager and
not the person the allotment is named after, told me that the allotment was
named for a deceased relative of his. (The Assistant Field Manager, who has
been known to hang poetry from Range magazine on her office wall, is from
a ranching family.) |
| Picture 6 (Moonscape)
is of Petersen Well, managed by the Warm Springs Resource Area, in Millard
County. Like a pioneer rancher cited in Donahue’s book said: “Grazing
livestock take the most flavorful forage first, and when those forms are
killed out they adjust their tastes to the kinds of lesser nutrition. This
process under a regime of unlimited grazing goes on until in a tragically
short time the vegetation left alive on ranges of six to twelve inches of
annual rainfall bears little resemblance to the original forms.” |
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| Most of the native plant communities near this cow-poxed moonscape
are severely degraded or missing altogether. In recent decades livestock
grazing has helped spawn serious die-offs of shrub communities in the eastern
Great Basin thought to be caused by the exacerbation of environmental stresses
by livestock grazing practices. |
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Picture 7, (Tough Times) of the Stott-Rowley
allotment, shows the bleak situation of disturbance and weedy species invasion
created by livestock grazing and to which riparian adapted cows in the Great
Basin are expected to adjust. The plant material in the foreground is tumbleweed
and tumble mustard, both exotic weeds. The light areas behind the cows are
cheatgrass and tumble mustard infestations. |
(Continued on page 3b)
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