Bait trapping began April 16.  To date, 30 burros and 25 horses have been captured, with one death reported.  No details were given.  The goal is 35 burros and 40 horses.

The operation, not announced on the BLM news page, was necessitated by animals that were damaging private property and creating a safety hazard along roadways.

The HMA covers 179,000 acres in southwestern Arizona.  The AML is 165 wild burros, equivalent to 83 horses, and 150 wild horses, for an aimed-at stocking rate of 1.3 wild horses per thousand acres.  The target stocking rate across all HMAs is one animal per thousand acres.

The roundup is not open to public observation.  Captured animals have been taken to the off-range corrals in Florence.

The pre-gather population was estimated to be 616 wild burros and 274 wild horses.

The report did not indicate if any resources on the HMA had been diverted to other users of public lands.

Refer to this report by KX News of Bismarck, ND.  No mention of Sitting Bull, the Marquis de Mores or Leo Kuntz.

RELATED: Story of the Nokota Horses, Horses of the Badlands.

Horses have the day off.  On Lake Pleasant HMA with Somer Bednar.

A new foal arrived on Shackleford Banks this weekend, according to a story by OBX Today of Nags Head, NC.  The youngster appears to be a chestnut but its sex was not given.  The barrier island can only be accessed by watercraft.

RELATED: New Colt on Shackleford Banks.

Trailcam photos of empty water tank cartwheeling across the Virginia Range, just like a tumbleweed.  System was off for the winter.

RELATED: Life in the Mountains.

The Forest Service announced last month that there were too many wild horses on the Big Summit WHT and that the land was deteriorating as a consequence.

A new approach is needed “…to ensure wild horses are managed in a thriving natural ecological balance with other uses…,” according to the Environmental Assessment for the new management plan (page 11 in the pdf file, emphasis mine).

The high end of the AML would be reduced from 65 to 57 under the proposed action, limited mostly by the availability of winter forage.  The low end would drop from 55 to 12, opening the door to population control measures such as genetic dilution, sex ratio skewing and contraception.

The WHT contains 25,434 acres.  The current AML yields a stocking rate of 2.6 wild horses per thousand acres.  The stocking rate under the proposed AML would be 2.2.

The 57 horses allowed by plan would require 684 AUMs per year.

The horses share the land “…with wildlife and seasonally with domestic sheep; there are no permitted cattle,” according to page 10 of the EA.

The WHT intersects one grazing allotment, which is managed for two pastures.  Table 21 supplies the acreage, forage allocations and grazing seasons.  Map is on the next page.

Approximately 9,000 allotment acres fall outside the WHT.  The WHT lies almost entirely within the allotment.  Table 21 doesn’t give the percentages of the pastures inside the WHT so they were estimated to be .738, which makes the allotment acreage falling within the WHT is almost as large as the WHT.

Herd sizes and stocking rates for horses can’t be compared directly to those for sheep, at least from a resource viewpoint, so cattle will be used as a proxy.  The forage demand of one wild horse is said to be equivalent to that of one cow/calf pair.

The stocking rate allowed by plan on the WHT is 19.3 cow/calf pairs per thousand acres (490 ÷ 25,415 × 1,000), compared to 2.2 wild horses per thousand acres.

The 57 wild horses allowed by the new management plan represent 10% of the grazing animals on the WHT during the summer season (57 ÷ [57 + 490] × 100).

The horses receive 29% of the forage, with the balance going to livestock.  These figures are compared in the following charts.

The problem is not lack of winter forage but scarcity of summer forage.  The horses can’t put on enough weight for the winter and their numbers have to be carefully monitored because most of their food has been diverted to privately owned livestock.

Never mind that the land was set aside for the horses.

The population controls lock the pattern in, guaranteeing the problem goes on forever.

RELATED: Comments Invited on Changes to Big Summit Management Plan.

A report posted yesterday by Horse & Man said one of them received no milk and the other was abandoned.  But wait—great news—they’re going to a sanctuary!  Awww….

What are they supposed to eat?  Who’s going to teach them how to be horses?

Wild horses coming off the range is never good news.  The cases were reported by “volunteers with the American Wild Horse Campaign,” according to the story.

The Virginia Range is a large area, about 450 square miles.  What were those volunteers doing out there?  Darting mares with contraceptives?  Were the foals casualties of their ill-conceived program?  None of this was mentioned in the report.

We know from Assateague Island that PZP produces unnatural sex ratios, high mortality rates in stallions and slow return to fertility when treatments are stopped.

We also know from the Virginia Range that it can result in barren mares stealing foals, pregnant mares aborting foals and abscesses at the injection area.

But don’t worry, it’s safe, because the PZP zealots said so.

A dozen wild horses strayed onto the Bush Highway last Sunday, according to a report by the Payson Roundup.  Personnel from a local advocacy group were able to return them to their home territory and repair the fence, which they believe was intentionally cut to the endanger the horses.

RELATED: Rally Draws Attention to Salt River Fencing.

Ranchers in the Wyoming Checkerboard don’t want any wild horses on their land but want to graze as many of their animals as possible on the horses’ land.  Sound familiar?

Now, the largest private landowner in the area may be interested in selling its property to the state of Wyoming, according to a guest column appearing today in Horse Nation.

RELATED: The Other Rock Springs RMP Amendments.

On the Pryor Mountains WHR with Kris Collett.

No reason to panic.  You have until July 15 to file your taxes.

These figures show you why: Eighty five percent of the forage on 17 areas (representing about two dozen HMAs) goes to privately owned livestock.  Not only do they want the pattern to continue, they want to tip the scales further in the direction of the ranchers, by reversing the growth rate of the horses.

Refer to the signatories of this unified statement from 2018.

Contraceptives are not the answer.  The problem is public-lands ranching.

RELATED: Hypothesis Revisited.

BLM announced today the start of a 30-day comment period on a draft environmental assessment for changes to wild horse management on the Spring Creek Basin HMA in southwestern Colorado.

Resources in the area can support up to 80 wild horses, according to Section 3.1.2 of the EA.  The current AML is 65.  The proposed action would increase the AML but limit herd growth rates to no more than ten percent per year.

Other management objectives involve age distribution, body condition, dispersion and genetic diversity, similar to the goals of the Pryor Mountains revamp.

Livestock grazing has been greatly reduced inside the HMA, a factor contributing to the AML increase.  Forage utilization outside the HMA was not discussed, probably because it’s outside the scope of the management plan.

The HMA is only slightly larger than the tiny Heber WHT and the new AML is only half the size recommended in Section 4.4.6.3 of the WHB Management Handbook.

The population target could be achieved by doubling the size of the HMA, which means taking back the land now designated as a Herd Area (see map in linked post below).

Comments can be submitted at this page.  Substantive only, please.

RELATED: Spring Creek Basin Management Plan to Be Updated.