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This page last updated February 11, 2005
RangeNet Project
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Page 3: Grazing in Utah's Great Basin
by: Christopher "Chris" Christie
February, 2000
Disclaimer: 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.
| Picture 18. Cows Preparing Sagebrush
Community and Sage Grouse Habitat For Destruction by Fire. Picture
18, on the eastern edge of the Great Basin, shows a fairly typical big sagebrush
(Artemisia tridentata) community and sage grouse habitat. Very large
areas in this vicinity burned in a lightning fire back in 1996, and this
area may be gone as well. The straw colored material between the sagebrush
in the picture is primarily cheatgrass. In Endangered Ecosystems of the
United States: A Preliminary Assessment of Loss and Degradation , Noss,
LaRoe, and Scott state that in the Southwest and Intermounain West, “99%
of remaining sagebrush steppe has been affected by livestock and about 30%
has been heavily grazed,.... (West 1994).” |
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| Ungrazed sagebrush steppe is listed as a “critically
endangered” ecosystem by this same report. Reduced populations of sagebrush
community dependent sage grouse throughout the Great Basin is another example
of habitat destruction caused by livestock grazing contributing to species
decline and endangerment.
According to the State UDWR and the BLM, the area in the picture was habitat
for a sage grouse population. By the early 1990’s, the grouse were all
but extirpated from here and a nearby specially designated sage grouse management
area north of Antelope Point. The area is shown on the BLM Warm Springs Resource
Area recreation guide. Sage grouse chicks are reared on insects and succulent
forbs which are scarce in grazed areas in the basin. Besides their mainstay
of sagebrush, the birds rely on succulent vegetation and some free water.
Meadows and riparian areas which serve this need have been seriously degraded
by livestock grazing in the Great Basin and the birds are in serious decline.
The American Lands Alliance and a coalition of conservation and scientific
organizations recently filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
to list the Gunnison sage grouse, which is thought to be a distinct species,
as endangered. A petition for listing of the Northern sage grouse is likely
in the near future.
(Click
here for pictures of these two species) |
| Picture 19 and 20.
Cheatgrass Invasions in the Eastern Great
Basin. Picture 19 shows a valley filled with cheatgrass and tumble
mustard near an early travel route in Toole County. Picture 20 is of cheatgrass
that has taken over portions of the Stott-Rowley allotment mentioned earlier.
Similar scenes are found elsewhere on BLM alloments of the Warm Springs and
House Range Resource Areas of Millard and Juab Counties. |
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| In pre-settlement sagebrush-bunchgrass communities, fire was
relatively rare because there was little dry herbaceous material to carry
it. By the 1880’s the results of overgrazing were apparent which has
led some to observe that the sagebrush steppe had been destroyed in 40 years
of domestic livestock grazing. The disturbed communities that resulted were
superb environments for invasion by weedy species, many non-native or exotic,
such as cheatgrass, aka downy brome or soft chess (Bromus tectorum),
a native of the Central Asian steppes. It is thought to have entered the
U.S. via contaminated wheat seed shipments or in straw packing. It had come
to the Great Basin by the 1890’s and by 1930 was spread throughout.
It invades any suitable disturbed area (and to some extent, even some relatively
undisturbed areas) and livestock grazing has disturbed millions of acres
in the west. It is highly competitive, takes the early moisture, is highly
flammable, and inhibits the establishment and growth of natives, which results
in what has been described as a closed community. Many of these areas in
the west have also been described as cheatgrass deserts, that due to the
high flammability of fire adapted cheatgrass, are actually very stable
communities that exclude most species of the original native or
“pre-settlement” community. The increased fire frequency alone
makes it highly improbable that the sagebrush community, which requires a
longer fire cycle, could easily re establish itself. The community is said
to have crossed a threshold. To quote from The Western Range Revisited
(Donahue, 1999) “The crossing of a threshold has immense significance
for land management. As Kenneth D. Sanders puts it, ‘once a threshold
is crossed to a more degraded state, improvement cannot be obtained on a
practical time scale without a much greater intervention or management effort
than simple grazing control.’” She adds though, “But this
should not be taken by land managers as an invitation to simply ‘give
up’”
The problem of cheatgrass invasion of the sagebrush steppe has been generally
understood for about 70 years, but this understanding has not been translated
into effective action to stop its increase of remove its major cause, i.e.,
domestic livestock. In Sand County Almanac (1949), A. Leopold noted:
“It is impossible fully to protect cheat[grass] country from fire. As
a consequence, the remnants of good browse plants, such as sagebrush and
bitterbrush, are being burned back to higher altitudes where they are less
useful as winter forage.... The habitable wintering belt is narrow [and is]
... now fast shrinking under the onslaught of cheat fires. .... There is
as yet no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no
sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills
in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices but on
the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance.”
Whatever changes in attitude may have occurred (with the emphasis on may)
in the last fifty years have not been enough. And for the public land agencies,
the sense of pride and sense of shame referred to, appear to remain stunted
at best. There is now an effort underway to restore some degraded range at
a cost that is thought to be more (in non-ecological real estate economic
terms) than its market value.
As expensive as restoration may be in non-ecological economic terms, without
such an attempt, the long term future of these Great Basin arid and semi-arid
ecosystems is bleak, with very high ecological costs for native biodiversity.
The non-restoration scenario will likely include increased regional and local
native species extirpation with associated losses in biological and genetic
diversity and continued loss of operational Great Basin ecosystems as they
are converted to non-native annual grasslands. |
| Picture 21. Sage Grouse Area Fire
“Rehab”. This picture shows the results, including subsequent
“Fire Rehab,” of a large lightning fire that swept through the
sagebrush community in the previous picture, back
in 1996. The fine, light colored grass on the left is cheatgrass and the
coarse grass on the right, looking a lot like a wheat field or pasture, is
non-native crested wheatgrass. The former is what replaces a cheatgrass infested
sagebrush community after a fire without any intervention, and the latter
is supposed to be an improvement, the seed having been ploughed in after
the fire as part of what passes for “fire rehab” at the BLM.
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| The problems with the use of crested wheatgrass are several.
One is that the area in the picture was sage grouse habitat, and as Donahue
has noted, “Sage grouse, a sagebrush obligate, are especially hard hit
by crested wheat seedings.” Related to that is that the grass is a
non-native that like cheatgrass forms rather stable communities, and last,
but not least, it makes the area look like what the BLM probably intended
it to be in the first place: a domesticated cow pasture. The BLM said they
did drop some sagebrush seed onto a nearby area after the fire, but my own
investigation revealed no seedlings in 1999. As far as the use of native
grasses, the BLM says that they are too expensive and that there are not
enough seeds to meet any potential demand. Of course, if they do not ask
for or require them, then there will be no demand for seed growers to respond
to.
On the positive side, crested wheatgrass communities are said to be easier
to manipulate back toward a native community than cheatgrass communities
are, and as the picture indicates, under the right conditions, it tends to
out compete cheatgrass after a fire. (The key here is the “right
conditions.”) This is an ongoing story and more information may become
available as the restoration initiative develops. |
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Picture 22. Get Lost! Don’t forget
your map when you go out on the Great Basin. Partly as a consequence of large
budgets for grazing management, little money is spent on basics such as the
necessary signs that help people figure out where the heck they are when
they venture out on to the over-roaded Great Basin. On the Warm Springs Resource
area in Millard County, there are no signs at many of the intersections one
may encounter, and a good many of the signs that do exist may be missed or
be of little help because they are down or poorly maintained. They have been
fully aware of the poor condition of these signs for years but do nothing
about it. This is just another indicator of the real priorities of the BLM,
which haven’t changed much since the days when they were called the
Grazing Service. |
Contact the BLM and tell them how you feel about
grazing management on the Great Basin. Ranchers read these pages and they
are hoping you don’t. They much prefer the status quo - and they obviously
already have the BLM’s ear.
Contact:
Sally Wisely
State Director
Bureau of Land Management
Utah State Office
E-Mail: Sally_Wisely@blm.gov
PO Box 45155
Salt Lake City, Utah 84145-0155
(801) 539-4010/fax (801) 539-4013 |
Fillmore Field Office
F. Rex Rowley, Field Manager
Patricia Fosse, Assistant Field Manager
35 East 500 North, Fillmore, Utah 84631
(435) 743-3100 Fax (435) 743-3135 |
(Continued on Page 3d)
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