A third of Utah's wild bison herd won't make it through the winter. Four years of drought have forced Utah's wildlife agency to issue 115 special bison hunting permits in addition to the usual 65.
The herd in the Henry Mountains of Utah is the only free roaming, huntable herd in the United States. For 27 of the last 40 years, a limited number of hunters have been allowed to kill these trophy animals in "once-in-a-lifetime" hunts.
It was no different this year until wildlife officers counted the herd and checked the quality of their desert range. The biologists expected to find 350 animals, but they counted almost 600. The bison had stripped their summer and their winter range, looking for food on drought-ravaged land.
Fifty years ago, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources transplanted 18 Yellowstone bison near Robbers Roost and the Dirty Devil River in southern Utah, an area so remote that it was one of the 1ast places in the continental United States to be explored and mapped. The herd gradually moved west until it settled in the Henry Mountains.
This small mountain range rises above the desert plateaus between Capitol Reef National Park and Lake Powell. Its highest peak, Mount Ellen, has an altitude of 11,615 feet. The bison range from the scree-covered peak to the lowlands of Apple Brush Flat and the canyons of Tarantula Mesa. They roam across 600 square miles.
The herd usually summers on the hillsides of Mount Ellen and Mount Pennell. But this summer the bison spent August and September on their winter range, eating the scarce grasses between the sagebrush down to stubble.
"Usually there's four-to-six-inch-high grass for the herd to winter on. Right now there's nothing," said Jim Karpowitz, the regional big game manager. "If we have a severe winter, some of the animals could starve. We're trying to avoid this with a bigger harvest."
The drought has put the buffalo in a no-win situation. Southern Utah needs snow this winter to put moisture back into the parched desen If it doesn't snow, the drought could continue next summer.
"Drought is the main reason for taking so many buffalo," Karpowitz explained, "but we also have an agreement with the BLM to limit the herd to 250."
Grazing rights on the Henry Mountains have long been allocated to local ranchers. Bison, which eat the same things as cattle, are competition for an already scarce resourceΓÇö grass. Under the 1982 agreement that limited the bison herd to 250 head, piflon and juniper forests were cleared to create more forage for the cattle and bison.
The long drought forced cattlemen to take their livestock off the range earlier this year, and wildlife officials fear another year of drought will kill the better grasses and do long-term damage to the bison's habitat.
Karpowitz points out that bison are hardy animals that have pulled through droughts before. "But," he adds, "the long-range future of the buffalo herd in the Henry Mountains depends on improving their habitat."
Habitat improvement in southern Utah means clearing some of the pinyon and juniper forests that cover the hillsides by dragging a massive chain across the ground to uproot the trees. Last summer wilderness groups protested the practice.
Karpowitz says without hesitation that selective chainings create grassy oases for wildlife and cattle. The agency had plans for limited chainings in the Henry Mountains, but several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, appealed the plan, stopping projects for the next several years.
Karpowitz warns: 'Without any habitat improvement there will be less wildlife, and livestock peopb can expect less forage for livestock. There will be less of everything for everybody."
ΓÇöVicky Osborn
Vicky Osborn is an associate news producer at KUTV, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Osborn, Vicky. "Drought Afflicts Bison in Henry Mountains." High Country News. 31 December 1990. Page 7.
