FE6.3 - Get Yer Ass Outta Here! - Future Ecologies

Episode Transcript
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Racer 1 (00:01):
You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.

Adam Huggins (00:08):
You two do look like some kind of long lost
siblings, I swear to God.

Saxon Richardson (00:12):
I don't think we looked this much alike last
time I saw you.

No, you didn't. You've gone through a variety of
hairstyles, which just tells youhow long we've been
corresponding about this.

Yeah.

But you were definitely clean shaven before,
and, like, had much shorterhair. And now I'm just staring
at you and Mendel in the sameroom, and I'm like, the round
glasses, like the round JohnLennon glasses...

I should put on my beanie.

Yeah, the mustache and beard combo with the long
hair.

Mendel Skulski (00:36):
Yeah I think basically any given facial
feature can be completelydisguised by this combination.
It's like... "wow, you look likebrothers!"... no not really at
all.

Are saying that like your your general
appearance is default disguise?

Yes! Yeah, yeah. It's like, we're wearing Groucho
Marx glasses all the time.

Exactly.

Well, now that we're all here together, should
we get our asses into gear?

Probably.

Probably...

So seriously, who are you and what are you doing
in our studio?

My name is Mendel.

What? Wait! No!!

Honestly, you could have fooled like probably
seven out of 10 people.

I don't know if our voices are that similar.
My name is Saxon Richardson. Iam a filmmaker and a fan of
Future Ecologies, interested ina story about the feral donkeys
in the Mojave Desert. And on anice rainy hike one day, I
think, mentioned it to Mendel.And some decade and a half

(01:33):
later, here we are.

Decade and a half. I mean, that's an
exaggeration.

I think it's been like, a couple years?

A couple years, yeah.

We do sometimes imply that it takes us a long
time to put episodes together,so our listeners understand
that, but this has been aparticularly long time coming
in.

Yes, and I, Saxon not Mendel, will take
credit for that. I'm generallyfairly slow moving with these
kinds of things, so appreciateyou guys for pushing it along.

It matches our pace perfectly.

Great.

We're like a Mojave tortoise.

Exactly.

That is true. Slow is good. Slow is beautiful. And

That's our style.
it's funny, because we all livein this very wet and rainy
place, and yet we share thisfascination for the exact
opposite of where we're living,like the polar opposite — the
desert. And I don't see anycontradiction there. It's
amazing.

Yeah, I think definitely the fact that both
places exist inform my love forthe other, and I love the Mojave
Desert. Everything that livesthere I just have the utmost
respect for and admiration.

What is it that obsesses you about the Mojave
Desert?

Well, the plants are just incredible.

You've got my attention.

The walking and flying creatures that live
there are just incredible.There's a fascinating and
beautiful indigenous history andpioneer history, and it's so
varied and so starkly beautiful,and it's so big. Just imagine
looking over these sagebrushflats, and the flats slowly

(02:59):
slope up to the foothills ofthese crumbling mountains, and
the sun is setting and justkissing the tips of those
mountains. There's barely abreeze. It's so, so quiet.
...And then from just over thenext ridge, you hear this...

(03:19):
HEE HAW HEE HAW HEE HAW!

I'm Mendel,

I'm Adam,

and from Future Ecologies, this is Get Your Ass
Outta Here!

Racer 1 (03:34):
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and asserted
territories of the Musqueam,Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh,
this is Future Ecologies –exploring the shape of our world
through ecology, design, andsound.

So where are you taking us?

Yeah, where are we gonna start?

Let's start in what Edna Brush Perkins called
the White Heart of the Mojave,or you might know it as Death
Valley.

Abby Wines (04:29):
So when you hear the name Death Valley, you probably
think of desert, and DeathValley is the hottest place in
North America, the driest placein North America, and the lowest
place in North America. So ifyou think desert, that's
accurate, but it's also notcomplete. Death Valley is 3.4
million acres, about the size ofthe state of Connecticut, and
within that space are 14mountain ranges. So we have salt

(04:51):
flats down at negative 282 feet,and telescope peak up at 11,049
feet. Right now we're standingat 5000 feet in Wild Rose
Canyon, and you can see thatthere are cottonwoods. There's a
spring here. This is lushhabitat for wildlife.

This is Abby Wines. She's a spokesperson for
the National Park Service atDeath Valley National Park.

So I guess I'll ask the obvious dumb question,
does anything actually live inDeath Valley.

That's the thing. The native people that
live there don't refer to it asDeath Valley. They call it
Timbisha, and it's not a placeof death at all. If you look
closely, sometimes you don'teven have to look that closely,
there's life everywhere. Andit's surprising, and it's
creative, and it's resilient,and it's so, so impressive to
me. And maybe one of the mostunexpected things you could find

(05:42):
living in Death Valley areburros.

Erick Lundgren (05:45):
One of the remarkable things about wild
burros is their sheerphysiological adaptations for
living in such a harsh, dryplace, traversing terrain that
is remarkably rugged. You'll seethese animals, you'll see mother
burrows with their young, withtheir yearlings and their foals
down in the valley bottom in themiddle of summer when it's 120
degrees Fahrenheit. Theseanimals can withstand just

(06:06):
incredible heats.

This is Dr Eric Lundgren. He's an ecologist
and has worked a lot with feraldonkeys.

Amy Dumas (06:14):
And burros, by the way, are the same things as
donkeys, it's the Spanish wordfor donkey.

This is Amy Dumas. She is the program
manager for California's WildHorse and Burro Program for the
Bureau of Land Management.

Yeah.

And I talked to her in Ridgecrest, which is
just outside of Death ValleyNational Park.

Amy Dumas (06:30):
People are like, oh, burros are stubborn. Burros are
not stubborn. Burros are nothorses. They are not little
horses with big ears. They donot behave like horses. When you
expect them to behave likehorses and they don't, then you
think they're stubborn. Burrosare very analytical, and they
don't want to do anything to putthemselves in harm's way. You

(06:52):
just need to be around a donkey.It's kind of hard to put it into
words why these animals are sowonderful, but they really are.
They work their way into yourhearts, huh? And I don't even
know who you are. Random donkeygetting your ears rubbed. All
donkeys love having their earsrubbed. They just don't know it

(07:13):
until they have it done.

There's a lot to love about the desert, and
there's also a lot to love aboutburros. Here's Cindy and Craig.
They're a couple from Reno.Cindy's a vet and a farrier and
a trainer, and they spend a lotof time hiking through the
wilderness with their burros.

Cindy Nielsen (07:32):
I just fell in love with them. They're so calm,
just being around them wascalming, and they're just smart
but quiet. They could carrywater, you know, for us and
them, but they could go all dayand not cross a stream, and
they're fine. They can rehydratethemselves. Literally, I'm not

(07:54):
kidding. I'm not pulling yourleg on this. They can lose about
30% of their body water, andthey can drink enough water and
absorb it and rehydratethemselves back to normal in 10
minutes. So those reasons, theymake great pack animals. And, oh
my gosh, you want to talk aboutsure footed? I don't care what
any — I love mules. We havemules. But if I'm going on a

(08:17):
trail and I know it's gonna betechnical, I'm taking burrows,

Wow, so there's like a real bond here between
people and donkeys.

Totally.

It sounds like it runs really deep.

Yeah. And that's not the only thing that
runs.

... what do you mean?

Burro Race announcer (08:32):
When you want to pass a donkey? Just say
runner on your right or on yourleft, whatever it is. Just don't
surprise them.

People run with their pack burrows. They
don't ride them. They run withthem.

Brad Wann (08:45):
Burro racing's a peculiar sport.

So what's your plan when we get there?

Brad Wann (08:50):
Oh we're gonna do a little donkey whispering.

Sweet — excited to see it.

Brad Wann (08:54):
All right, let's get this show on the road.

Racer 1 (08:57):
My grandparents had donkeys, so I always loved
donkeys. And I love running, andonce I find out that you can
actually run with donkeys, Imean, match made in heaven,
right?

Do you ever run without a donkey now?

Racer 2 (09:08):
I was a pretty competitive ultra runner, back
in my younger days, but yeah,for the last six years, I get my
competitive needs filled donkeyracing.

Racer 1 (09:18):
It's such a fun sport. Once you do it, you're just
addicted.

Alright, we have a few announcements
first, then we'll have ablessing of the donkeys. And
then we'll start all the longdistance runners, the 17/18,
mile and the marathon alltogether. We'll line the donkeys
up in front. It's cool enough, Idon't think we'll have any
problems with snakes, but beaware. Don't wear headphones.

(09:46):
And then repeat after me — if Iget lost, hurt or die...

Racer Pack (09:50):
If I get lost, hurt or die...

It's my own damn fault.

Racer Pack (09:54):
It's my own damn fault.

Are you ready? Five, four, three, two,
one, [starting gun]

Brad Wann (10:10):
Couldn't imagine running by myself ever again.
It's just not worth it.
[Donkey snorts] God bless you.

Wow. So it sounds like basically nothing is
built for the Mojave quite likea burro.

Yeah. Donkeys thrive in this environment. They
evolved in the desert. But theproblem, I guess, is that they
didn't evolve in this particulardesert.

Abby Wines (10:40):
They're not native to North America. They were
animals that were brought in towork for people. And in this
area, in the Mojave Desert, theywere mostly brought in by miners
— people using them as packanimals to carry their tools as
we went prospecting andscrambling all over these hills.
And generally, when their luckran out and things didn't work
out for the miners, they justleft the animals behind.

Of course, those days, the labor was not oil or
diesel or gas, but donkeys. Andthe miners felt some degree of
respect, so when they stoppedusing donkeys for this labor
because they had fossil fuels,trucks, or they stopped being
here because Death ValleyNational Park was created, they
let the donkeys go. And that'sthat's why they're here, sort of

(11:23):
just entangled in human history,like so many organisms are,
maybe all organisms are.

Saxon, where are donkeys originally from? Like,
where did they evolve?

The Sahara, baby — the Eastern Sahara, the
Horn of Africa. The crazy thingis that in their native range,
wild donkeys are criticallyendangered.

If you go back to North Africa, wild burros
were... before they becameburros, before they became
domesticated, were a major partof those ecosystems. They've
since shrunk to a tinypopulation in Ethiopia, in the
wild, about 100 to 300individuals. Of which wild
burros are the descendants, andvery well may outlast the
pre-domestic ancestors of them,the African wild ass.

It's important to remember that these animals
have been domesticated for 1000sof years, and the domestic ass
is all over the place. And it'sthe offspring of those
domesticated asses that you'llfind in the Mojave Desert. And
after these animals werereleased, they did a lot better
than anyone probably expected,and their population just grew

(12:28):
and grew and grew... untilpeople started to get concerned.

Abby Wines (12:34):
Burros have been managed on and off in Death
Valley National Park since thepark was first established as a
national monument in the 1930s.So starting in the mid 30s, the
National Park Service wasshooting burros to reduce their
numbers, because of the concernsabout their impact on the native
wildlife and landscape.

They started killing these donkeys. They
started shooting donkeys.

Yeah, and they did that for a long time, but
people usually don't really likewhen you shoot something that
looks like a horse.

Abby Wines (13:03):
The Park Service largely shied away from lethal
control, from shooting burrosthrough most of the next few
decades. By the 90s, up untilthe early 2000s the main
technique were roundups. Somostly helicopter roundups,
bringing a helicopter, bring insome cowboys on the ground, try

(13:23):
to chase the burros into a penand then capture them in the
pen, transfer them to a holdingfacility, such as the BLM
facility that is in Ridgecrest,California. Those roundups are
fairly expensive and very hardfor the National Park Service to
get funding for. So from 2005on, we had no Park Service

(13:44):
funding to support roundups. Andaround 2005 we think they were
as few as maybe 200 burros, justa few stragglers left in the
park. And I should mention thatduring some of those earlier
roundups, within a two yearperiod, they rounded up 6000
boroughs from the park. So wethink they had the numbers down
to about 200 by 2005 and then wedid nothing, partly because the

(14:08):
problem looked like it wasmostly solved, and partly
because we had no funding to doanything. Then the numbers just
started multiplying. In theory,burros can multiply at 25% per
year without effective predatorcontrol. So we don't know now
how many burrows are in thepark.

But just because lethal control isn't a
thing anymore doesn't mean thatthe Park Service finds their
impacts acceptable. They seethese animals as invasive, that
there's more of them than theecosystem can handle.

Vernon Bleich (14:39):
All of the concerns that I've heard from...
I'll use the term constituents,but you know, people that I've
met across the desert over 45 or50 years have been — boy, if
these donkeys were just wherethey're supposed to be, it would
be fine, but they're everywhere!

This is Dr Vernon Bleich. He was a biology
for the California Department ofFish and Wildlife for decades,
and he specialized in theecology of large mammals in the
desert southwest.

They're a novel creature in these ecosystems
that we are living in now, Iwould say, let's take care of
the native species that we havefirst.

And this perspective is widely shared by
land managers and biologists inthe southwest, and officially
shared by the National ParkService.

Abby Wines (15:27):
The National Park Service as a whole, our
management policies state thatwe will minimize impacts from
invasive species, invasivenon-native species. And so since
the National Park Serviceconsiders feral burros to be
non-native and invasive, ourgoal within Death Valley
National Park is to bring thepopulation to zero. But why?

(15:51):
That's a piece of bureaucraticpaperwork, but why is that
important? Concern is with aspecies that is not from an area
originally, when it comes intothat area if it has some some
adaptation that allows it tosurvive a little bit better than
something else, even if itdoesn't directly eat that thing
or kill that thing, it'sprobably displacing something

(16:13):
from its habitat.

And to help tell us about those impacts,
here's Laura Cunningham.

Laura!

Laura Cunningham (16:19):
So this is typical Mojave desert landscape.
This is a native shrub calledBurro Bush, and it actually is
very edible to burros, and theyhave been kind of grazing it
down. You can see some of theold stems have been cropped off.

Savvy listeners might recognize Laura from our
Rangelands series.

Yeah, she's an artist and naturalist and a
biologist,

and currently work for Western Watersheds
Project, a nonprofit which seeksto restore wildlife and native
ecosystems.

And she took me on a little field trip to
Crater Flat, an area justoutside of Death Valley National
Park, managed by the Bureau ofLand Management.

And we are maybe 5 or 10 miles east of
Death Valley National Park. Sowe're in Nevada, and California
is right over there.

Of everywhere I went in my reporting, Crater
Flat had by far the most burros.

And there used to be bunch grasses here, like
rice grass, desert needle grass,and I don't see any of those.
Those are the ice cream plants,and they go first.

Laura told me that back in the day, one of the
primary grazers here was,surprisingly, the desert
tortoise.

There would have been hundreds of these
tortoises roaming around hereeach spring, when it's warm
enough. And they would just beeating the wildflowers, the
native grasses. They're almostgone. They're like, federally
listed as a threatened speciesbecause of all these impacts,
grazing, mining, solar projects,urbanization, you know, OHVs

(17:53):
running them over. So they're...they're like, headed towards
extinction. So that reptiliangrazer has been replaced by the
mammal grazer, the burros.

And in her work as a tortoise biologist,
Laura told me about a time thatshe got to visit a nearby Air
Force bombing range, which isoff limits to everyone —
tourists, cattle, offroadvehicles, and burros.

So I was the tortoise monitor to make sure
tortoises weren't harmed at thetarget, the live bombing
targets, I was authorized topick tortoises up and move them
out of harm's way. But afterliving in the desert for
decades, I walked onto thismilitary base, and it was like
stepping back into time, and itreadjusted my baseline, because

(18:41):
there were tortoises everywhere.Everywhere. I was seeing dozens
a day. I was finding nests witheggs. I was finding tracks. And
it was just amazing. It was likethe densest tortoise population
I've ever seen to this day. Andit made me realize, Wow, we have
lost a lot. We've lost a lot oftortoises across the landscape,

(19:02):
because we all forget. I didn'tknow they could live that
densely in an arid MojaveDesert, but they can. We forget
about what happened 100 yearsago or 50 years ago, and then we
think that this is the newnormal. Like, the ground should
be bare, there should be herdsof donkeys. There should be no

(19:22):
tortoises, because we didn'tremember seeing that a couple of
years ago. And that's where yourbaseline has shifted, and you've
completely forgotten 500 yearsago this was a tortoise
paradise.

So burros compete with native species like
tortoises for forage, butthey're maybe more widely known
for their impacts on probablythe most valuable resource in
the Mojave Desert... water.
Here's Vernon again

we have been very, very cognizant of the role
that water distribution plays inthe distribution of feral
donkeys. Donks go to water. Ifthere's water there, they will

Abby Wines (20:04):
There are some springs that are so heavily used
find it.
by feral donkeys that it almostlooks like a bomb has exploded
there. Owl's Hole spring is oneof them. If you go there, all it
is is a small pool of watersurrounded by mud filled with
hoof marks and burro poop.

This is a beautiful illustration of what's
called the piosphere — P, I, O,S, P, H, E, R, E, the piosphere
— which is, the closer you getto a water source, the bigger
the impacts from the grazinganimals. So cattle cause this,
sheep, and these feral donkeys.You have the ground, in

(20:47):
concentric circles around thewater source, denuded and
trampled, littered with dung.And the animals have to
gradually walk farther andfarther to find grass and
forage. So this is a commonoccurrence in the West, but in
this case, it's an example offeral donkeys creating this kind
of a blowout zone around thewater.

So do you remember in your Home on the
Rangelands series how you talkedto Dr. Robert Beschta?

I remember Bob.

He's probably best known for his work studying
the effects of thereintroduction of wolves into
Yellowstone National Park. Andhe told me something that might
not surprise you — that if youhave too many burros in a
riparian area, their impacts aregoing to be pretty similar to
having a lot of cattle

Bob Beschta (21:31):
Where I see springs that have been heavily utilized,
the soils are churned, speciesdiversity just drops
dramatically. And they're beingtrampled. They're being eaten.
It becomes much more of asimplified ecosystem site there,
as far as the vegetation goes,and the soil churning can be
quite dramatic. Hoofed animalswalking in these wet sites just

(21:52):
turns everything upside down.It's pretty impressive the
amount of impact that they canhave.

And so all these burros eating and drinking
has crowded out not only theMojave desert tortoise, but
another iconic species... thedesert bighorn sheep.

Christina Aiello (22:07):
Desert tortoise and desert bighorn you
know, they actually have a lotof similarities in terms of the
things that impact them, a lotof overlaps in their ecology. So
I make this joke a lot of times,that desert tortoise are pretty
much desert bighorn, just lowerand slower.

This is Dr. Christina Aiello. She's a
biologist who's worked withdesert tortoise as well as
desert bighorn sheep, and herwork tends to focus on spatial
ecology.

Spatial ecology, I would say, is about
considering kind of whereanimals are in space, how they
move through space, which areasare they using, which areas are
they not using, what resourcesare they targeting, and how that
fits into their behavior, theirdistribution, and how they
interact with other species. Sothe thing about the desert is

(22:51):
it's a basin and rangeecosystem. So you have these
really flat valleys andinterspersed mountain ranges,
these really, you know, starkand massive, steep, gnarly
looking mountains that just popout of these low desert flats.

And these steep, gnarly slopes are where
desert bighorn sheep are most athome.

There used to be like a really large
population of bighorn sheep inthese mountains. And burros are
kind of aggressive and dominantand will keep the bighorn away
from their native springs, wherethe bighorn also need to drink.
Just the physical presence ofthe burros drives bighorn sheep

(23:30):
away. So that's happened a lotin Death Valley National Park, I
think, and that's why a lot ofland managers you know want to
try to remove the feral donkeysfrom parklands.

And just because the roundups that are
happening today are non-lethal,doesn't mean they're not still
highly controversial. Because,as you might have guessed,
reducing the burro population isa pretty divisive topic.

You know, there's a lot of opinions on both sides,
and much of it is opinion. Thereare moves right now to limit the
use of helicopters in roundups.Even today, there are people
saying, oh it's horriblyinhumane to use a helicopter to
round up these animals. I'venever heard anyone say, oh, it's

(24:15):
inhumane to round up or catch abighorn sheep with a helicopter.
So there's a great deal ofemotion involved, and it's
driving everything that happens.It really is.

At this point, I should say that burrows aren't
the only introduced feral equidrunning wild over the desert
southwest. There's also wildhorses. Between horses and
burros, there's somesimilarities in their impacts
and some differences in theirtemperament and preferred
habitat. But by and large,burros simply haven't received
the same amount of researchattention, so we can't say
nearly as much about them withcertainty.

Hmm... more hay has been made about horses.

Yeah, but their fates have been linked in
another way, and that's throughthe Wild Free-Roaming Horses and
Burros Act of 1971... if youwouldn't mind putting a little
patriotic music under there,that would be great.
This Act basically defines wildhorses and burros, an introduced
species, as a symbol of ourwestern heritage, and therefore

(25:14):
they should be protected –

Amy Dumas (25:16):
on US Forest Service and BLM lands.

But...

Abby Wines (25:22):
it does not apply to the National Park Service.

So this has resulted in two government
agencies, each managing hugeswaths of public land, having
conflicting mandates. The BLMmanages for certain herd sizes
in certain areas, and due totheir concern about impacts on
native ecosystems, the ParkService manages for a burro
population of zero.

Abby Wines (25:44):
It becomes very challenging because we are an
island surrounded by otherfederal lands.

So the burros, if they're all eliminated from
the park, these BLM burros canwalk back in there and
repopulate.

Right now where we're sitting, we're right at
the boundary between a Bureau ofLand Management horse management
area for wild burro and NationalPark land where they're not
supposed to be. And I don't knowwhere the boundary is, and the
burros definitely don't knowwhere the boundary is. It's the
same landscape.

Abby Wines (26:15):
Which also ultimately means that even with
our hoped for upcoming roundups,if we were to magically get the
population actually down tozero, it would be zero for what,
three months? Two days? I don'tknow.

As in so many areas, the federal government is
of multiple minds and hasmultiple agencies that are not
always pulling in the samedirection at the same time.

Exactly. So the donkeys gathered on BLM
lands go into government managedcorrals and then are offered up
for adoption. The donkeysgathered in Death Valley
National Park are gathered by aTexas based non-profit called
Peaceful Valley donkey rescue.They get trapped, they get
loaded up into a trailer, andthey get trucked to Texas, and

(27:05):
then are offered up foradoption.

Wait, you're saying that I could adopt a wild
ass?

Amy Dumas (27:11):
If you're 18 years or older and have proper facilities
and experience, you can adoptone of these animals. Now keep
in mind, these animals are wildand untouched, so you are not
getting something that is haltertrained. They're very
affectionate animals, and theylove attention.

And these adopted burros are exactly the
ones that might end up runningin, I don't know, pack burro
races. Some folks like Craig andCindy are almost collectors.

Cindy Nielsen (27:38):
We have two mustangs, a pony, two mini
mules, three mammoth donkeys,and... 12 burros.

Craig (27:46):
Yeah.

Amy Dumas (27:47):
You should never have just one burro. They're social
animals. They do much better ina small herd,

but the rate of burro removal has largely
outpaced the rate of adoption,so the majority of gathered
burrows won't end up in privatecare.

So does that mean there's like burro orphanages?

I think that the government just feeds them
forever, which, due to risingcosts and capacity issues, is a
management strategy that'slooking less and less
sustainable.

So I guess to summarize from everything you've
told us so far, Saxon, we've gota desert — a sensitive
ecosystem. We've got some prettycool species that live within
it, that are at risk. And thenwe have this big, introduced
ungulate that lacks any naturalpopulation control, seemingly,

(28:38):
and so is reproducing rapidlyand eating the available forage
and monopolizing the water andcausing all kinds of problems.
It seems like a fairlystraightforward invasion biology
story, right? And so I guess I'mwondering like, is there more to
the story?

Well, that invasion biology story, it's not
a perspective that everybodyshares. Things are about to get
controversial... after thebreak.

Brad Wann (29:07):
[Running with donkey] Passin' on your left.

Hey, I'll keep it quick. This podcast takes a

(29:28):
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If you can spare us a cup ofcoffee, you'll get access to new
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(29:52):
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patreon.com/futureecologies.Thanks.

(30:20):
Okay, once again, I'm Mendel,

I'm Adam,

and we're here with Saxon Richardson, who's
taking us on a little trip tothe Mojave Desert.

To Death Valley in particular, and telling us a
story that, on its surface lookslike a classic tale of invasion
biology, but which he is aboutto complicate, or so I'm told.

Right. So there's this crisis in feral
burro management. The generalpublic doesn't want to see them

The way I look at it is that if we want to
come to any harm or even removedfrom the landscape, but most
understand these organisms,maybe any pest species, any
ecologists agree that there areway too many, and it's becoming
species at all, we gotta studythem from what they are — as
increasingly expensive andimpractical to gather and corral
wildlife. If we study them assome kind of idea of an invasive
them forever. But what if thiscrisis could be avoided
species, you're not going tofind out much about them,
altogether, maybe by looking atburros under a different light?

(31:09):
because everything you see,you're going to interpret in the
Here's Dr. Erick Lundgren.
metaphor of invasion. I mean, ofcourse, there's great invasion
biologists, but the metaphor hasa tendency to simplify these
things into good and evilnarratives. And the very simple
way this happens is that you goout and you show that wild

(31:33):
burros reduced plant cover by Xpercent at some place, and then
you say, because they reduce Xpercent plant cover, they
clearly are having negativeimpacts on the ecosystem. Now
contrast that to how we mightstudy bison, where we go out,
and we show that they reduceplant cover, but we don't

(31:56):
interpret it as negativeeffects. We interpret it as how
they influence the ecosystem.They're large herbivores.
Reducing plant cover is whatlarge herbivores do. Gotta eat.
A lot of invasion biologyliterature, all it needs to do
is show that the organism has ametabolism, that it takes up

(32:18):
space, that it exists, and theycan prove their point that it's harmful.
I think everybody who'sinterested in the west or in
wild lands in general, and inthe effects of big animals on

(32:40):
these wild lands should go toAfrica. Africa is one of the
places on earth that these biganimals did not go extinct from
human hunting at the end of latePleistocene. Which means we see
systems the way they were formillions of years, which is not
what our idyllic version ofnature is in North America,
where nature is the quiet,pristine spring where it's

(33:02):
undisturbed with a secretivedeer. No, it's loud. It's loud
and it's chaotic. There's poopeverywhere. There are trees
knocked down. It is a vibrantplace, with these giant animals
of a diversity of speciesinfluencing the world.

Erick points to all the herbivorous megafauna
that used to roam North America,diverse species like ground
sloths, mammoths, camels andancient equids, the ancestor of
modern horses and burros. Theylived here for 35 million years,
up until about 12,000 years ago.He claims that modern burros may
be filling a similar ecosystemniche to these long extinct

(33:44):
megafauna and today's elephantsin Africa.

One of my first field jobs out here was in an
area with wild burros — whoreminded me so much of being in
Africa, the way they movedacross the landscape, the way

Bill Lee (33:57):
I can tell you one example of what they do to
they acted.

So I should mention that of all the people I
spoke to, Erick is the only onewho's specifically researching
burros in the field. And one ofhis papers, which was published
in the journal Science in2021... well, it made quite a
splash. Here's Bill Lee, aveteran pack burrow racer, to
explain Erick's findings,

(34:21):
actually help some of the wildcreatures survive. A burro's
senses are so acute that theywill go down to a wash or a draw
— a low spot, like maybe rightdown here where we're comin' to.
And they will walk up that washor draw, or down it, and they

(34:41):
will stop, and they will startdigging with their hooves. And
lo and behold, you know whatthey find? Water. They can smell
it in a sense, evaporating upthrough the sand. They'll get
their drinks and move on. Andwhat other animals move in? The

(35:02):
desert animals that are having ahard time surviving if they
can't find water.

A lot of systems in Africa only have water
because elephants are around,elephants that are able to dig
to great depths to exposegroundwater. And every species
in these systems that requiresdrinking water, which is a lot
of species, humans included,require these features to live
in these landscapes. And it wasimmediate when I came out here

(35:31):
of seeing that for myself, thatindeed, surface water in these
systems is extraordinarilylimited, and it's primarily
found in areas where theseanimals, wild burros are
impacting these sites. The wildburros need water, so they go
into these springs. They maketrails and they dig pools to get
surface water. And if you go toplaces where there aren't wild

(35:53):
burros, if you go nearby toother parts of the park, or even
within the same spring system,you'll find no surface water.
You're in a willow forest, ajungle. There's tons of ground
water right under the surface,but it's very, very hard to get
to because the burros have notdug to it. Sometimes you have to
dig about a half meter to get towater. Other times, you have to
clear two meters of deadvegetation to get to it. This is

(36:16):
something the burros are verygood at doing, and they'll do it
readily and easily, and in doingso, they increase the surface
water availability in theseareas. What's really remarkable
is when you go to a spring thatdoesn't have wild burros, and
it's beautiful and it'sbeautiful, it's a vision of
nature that many of us adore.It's tranquil, it's full of
vegetation, and it's deadsilent. You won't hear any

(36:39):
breeding birds, you won't hearany frogs. Burros change these
wetlands, increase surface wateravailability, which tends to
increase, or seems to increase,birds and bats and other
animals. This place, all of thatwater is being used by these
plants, and it's quite adiverse, beautiful plant
community. We have clematis,this cristanothamnus, willows,

(37:00):
but this place is stillbeautiful. It's not better or
worse for the lack of water.It's just different.

Now, Erick's study for this well digging
paper was conducted mostly inthe Sonoran Desert, which
generally has differenthydrology than the Mojave. But
in both places, he asserts thatburros increase the available
surface water, either by diggingdown into these sandy washes or
by bush-bashing through piles ofovergrown vegetation.

And the real weird thing is that this
behavior happens in many, manyplaces. It's quite common in
areas where you can dig towater, but had never been
described in the scientificliterature with horses or burros
in their introduced range, whichkind of set me down a rabbit
hole of questioning what wethink we know and what we value.
It looked to me like we weredescribing only stories that

(37:49):
confirmed our worldview thatthese animals were harmful to
something or another, however wewanted to define harm, as long
as it supported our view thatburros did not belong on the
landscape,

But not everybody is convinced about the
benefits of well-digging donksthat Erick documented. Here
again is spatial ecologist DrChristina Aiello. She and
several colleagues, includingVernon Bleich, penned a letter
in response to Erick's 2021paper.

Myself and my colleagues, our main problem
with this study was not, youknow, not that the research was
done, not that, you know, thedata was collected. It was about
the story told around the data.And in that study, I think it
was kind of a small scale,focused on just a couple
particular areas in the desertwhere you have this unique
situation, where you have a drywash resource, where there's

(38:41):
actually groundwater underneath,and there were surface water
available at those sites. Butthe behavior of burros to dig
and create more pools ofavailable water from that water
resource is kind of a raresituation. And I think even in
that paper, they mapped outwhere those types of washes
occur in the landscape, and itreally isn't a prevalent

(39:02):
condition. So I just don't thinkthat that behavior is having the
large scale positive impactsthat were kind of presented. And
there are so many other studiesthat counter with a lot of
evidence of negative impacts toa lot of native species. Feral

(39:22):
burro do have impacts onsprings, and the vegetation
that's there, and the soilsaround springs. I think that's
fairly conclusive. By reducingthe vegetative cover and
increasing the amount of openwater, that may actually be a
positive for certain species. Sothings like native fish that
require kind of more open waterhabitats. We shouldn't ignore

(39:44):
that. And when we're decidingthe management priorities, if
the preservation of that habitatfor that fish is really a goal,
you need to consider that inyour feral burro management.
Where we need to be careful,though, is then viewing those
results in the context ofeverything else we've observed

(40:05):
about the species. You know, Ido think a lot of the research
that has been done on negativeimpacts, it is pretty old. It
doesn't mean it isn't valid, butI do think we need to keep
gathering data.

Speaking of gathering data, this 2021 paper
wouldn't be the last timeErick's research revealed
something new about burros inthe desert southwest. I spent a
good bit of time with him, goingfrom spring to spring in the
remote Mojave where he's beenputting camera traps and audio
recorders to better understandhow burro activity affects the
biodiversity of these wateringholes.

I put camera traps on these wells, these, you
could also call them assholesthat these wild ass dig.

Did he just call his study sites assholes? Oh my
god.

And sure enough, every species you can imagine is
coming in and drinking. Birdsare coming in and drinking,
bobcats and mountain lions, andtoads, deer and bighorn sheep,
coyotes, even coatis andringtailed cats. And there's not
too few times where I've neededto drink out of those wells.

And by some weird stroke of luck, on a
camera that had fallen down andended up pointing in the wrong
direction, he caught somethingthat had never been seen before.

That a mountain lion had killed a wild burro —
caught it in mid-kill with, itsarms wrapped around a burro's
head — which had never beendocumented before, never
described in the literature, washotly denied by the Bureau of
Land Management and the NationalPark Service that there was any
predation.

Since that first discovery, Erick's been
noticing the remains of wildburros, freshly killed by
mountain lions, pretty muchevery time he goes on site to
visit — their bones decomposingquickly in the hot and wet
environment of these desertsprings. And by looking closer
at where mountain lions are andare not hunting burros, he's
come to a new understanding.That active predator pressure

(41:56):
changes how the burrows behavearound these springs,

These camera traps, these trail cameras
allowed me to quantify howactive donkeys were at these
sites, these sites with mountainlions and without mountain
lions, and the differences arestark. Sites with mountain
lions, these animals, thesedonkeys, are coming in only in
the middle of the day whenambush risk is low because they
can see well, and they're onlycoming in for around 40 minutes,

(42:19):
leading to minimal impacts onthese places. They're still
coming in anddigging to waterand maintaining surface water,
but then they're getting thehell out. And this is on the
hottest days, super hot dayswhere, if you could, you'd be in
a swimming pool — over 35Celsius, so in the hundreds. And
there'll be tons of birds, andthere'll be a big pool of water
in the middle of the wetlandaround the side that's dug into

(42:40):
the ground with a single trailto it, in an otherwise intact
riparian forest of willows andother plants. At sites without
mountain lions, which areprimarily at campgrounds, burros
were there all day and allnight. For eight hours a day on
those same hot days, justhanging out in the water, eating
everything, tramplingeverything. And it's really
important to know that those arethe sites that the National Park

(43:01):
Service sees on their dailyrounds. These are the sites that
the tourists primarily seebecause there's no mountain
lions there, because they'rethere. It's right by the roads,
right by the campsite. Which canlead to a really myopic view of
way burros influence ecosystems.

Okay, so if I have this straight, Erick is
saying there's basically threeconditions for the springs you
find in the Mojave.

Totally.

The ones without burros, which end up getting so
overgrown that nothing can get adrink. The ones that have burros
but don't have mountain lions,so the burrows end up trampling
and grazing everything andpooping everywhere. And then the
ones that I guess you call thekind of the Goldilocks springs,
where there are both burros andmountain lions.

And plants, and birds, and bats, and all
sorts of other creatures.Exactly. But Erick raises
another point. What if the wholerationale behind the need to
remove burros from thelandscape, which is because of
their overpopulation, isactually founded on a faulty
premise?

One of the justifications the National Park
is using here in Death Valleyfor these removals is a
population figure that they havefor how many wild burros are in
the park. This populationfigure, which is about, if I
remember correctly around 3000burros, is not based on actual
data about how many burros thereare. It's an extrapolation from
about the 200 that were here inthe early 2000s. How do they

(44:27):
extrapolate this? Well, theytook a percent annual growth
rate of the population frompapers of about 20%. That number
comes from systems where, almostcertainly, mountain lions have
been eradicated or heavilycontrolled. So it's almost
certainly not accurate in thissystem where mountain lions are
actually heavily hunting wildburros. Now, luckily, there are

(44:48):
other papers. There's a paperfrom not far from Death Valley
in the White Mountains ofCalifornia that showed that
cougar predation, mountain lionspredation, was completely
regulating a horse population, awild horse population. Mountain
lions were eating every singlefoal every single year, leading
to a population growth rate atzero. And I honestly wouldn't be
surprised if that is possible inDeath Valley. If we limited the

(45:11):
places where burros were safefrom Mountain Lion predation —
these campgrounds. If we fencedoff springs at campgrounds, I
suspect that burro populationgrowth rates would stabilize or
decline. Which is reallyinteresting, because for
decades, people had said thatwild burros and wild horses
don't have predators, andtherefore their populations need
to be controlled.

He even suggests that outside of Death
Valley, certain managementactions involving mountain lions
may be having some unintendedconsequences.

Mountain lions are heavily persecuted. People
hunt them for fun in Arizona,and then the Arizona Game and
Fish Department and others killthem whenever they eat bighorn
sheep, to try to increasebighorn sheep population
numbers. And so as soon as amountain lion kills two sheep,
biologists go out and kill thatmountain lion. Mountain Lion, of
course, are also eating burros.So it's unclear to what extent

(46:06):
those types of managementactivities which are aimed at
increasing bighorn sheeppopulations, may be
inadvertently affecting wildburros.

But once again, Erick's scientific
opinion is far from theconsensus. Here's Christina.

I'm not too surprised to see patterns
emerging where we now see nativepredators consuming feral burro.
You know, you put a preyresource on the landscape and
give an animal enough time andif it has the ability to consume
it, I'm not surprised that theyare. But do I think that that
interaction is enough to controlferal burro populations? No. I

(46:45):
think the places in which thosetwo species overlap is too small
and is just not proportional tothe spatial scale that feral
burro occur and where they'rehaving impacts on the landscape.
So even if you have mountainlions consuming feral burro
around spring sites, inparticular mountain ranges where
there's enough varied topographyto have mountain lions present,

(47:07):
you have burro occurring all theother spaces where there are not
mountain lions. So to think thatthat interaction is going to
control the huge populations offeral burro that we see on the
landscape, I just, I just don'tthink it's reasonable.

Okay, so basically, she's saying that the
mountain lions in Death Valleyrely on the landscape to stay
hidden so that they can ambushtheir prey.

Exactly. Christina believes that there
are just too many springs inopen places where the donkeys
would naturally feel safe, safe,to drink, to graze and trample
to their heart's content. But inresponse, Erick, in typical
maverick form, has another idea.

One solution to that, of course, would be to
prioritize the protection andrecovery of wolves in this area.
Gray wolves can live in a rangeof habitats if there's prey
available. In the Middle East,they live in the desert —
deserts just as hot and dry asDeath Valley, and they could
almost certainly live here, ifthere were things to hunt. Given
that there's wolves not that faraway, you could think maybe

(48:07):
instead of a zero burro policy,we took a really radical and
progressive approach and madeDeath Valley a wolf sanctuary.
Wouldn't that be wild? Wouldn'tthat be interesting?

What you'll hear from the majority of
scientists and land managers,however, is much more cautious.

I think the data that that scientists like
Erick Lundgren has collected isvaluable and it's something to
consider, but I think we shouldbe careful in how we then tell
that story and interpret thatdata and extrapolate it out to
the wider desert ecosystem,because I do think there's
limitations to where we're goingto see those types of
interactions. You don't assessthese impacts in isolation.

Likewise, here's Dr. Vernon Bleich, who
served on the National WildHorse and Burro advisory board.

I don't dispute any argument that there were
North American horses. Theyevolved here, and they also
became extinct here. So didwooly mammoths, and, you know,
giant cave bears and othercreatures. Extinction is part of
life, if you will. That sounds alittle bit dumb, but it is. And

(49:11):
to make the argument that, well,we can go back in time and
re-establish a system that wethink existed without
re-establishing it completely isa falsehood. It's a pipe dream.
I think that the vast majorityof ecologists across North

(49:36):
America and perhaps in theworld, would make the argument
that these are not, quote,unquote a native species. They
had come, been here and gone. Ithink that taking care of what
we have right now is a muchhigher priority than trying to

(49:57):
restore what might have existed12,000 or 15,000 years ago,

And for their part, the Park Service has yet
to be convinced to change theirpolicies. Here again is Abby
Wines, spokesperson for DeathValley National Park.

Abby Wines (50:11):
As a land manager, our job is to manage the land,
and we look at research to dothat, but mostly the National
Park Service doesn't doresearch. We give permits and we
enable research. So we'reexcited about research done by
folks like Dr. Lundgren thathave an alternate point of view.
We'd love to see all of theresearch continue so that the

(50:34):
impacts of burros are clearlyunderstood. However, our goal is
to continue with what weconsider to be the safest path,
which is protecting the nativeplants and animals in this park
by removing non-native species.It may seem rather arbitrary
when you think about a specificpoint in time if we say that

(50:56):
we're trying to keep this spotstatic the way that nature was
before Americans startedcolonializing this area. But you
have to draw a line somewhere,and the greater purpose behind
all of this is not about keepingtime in a bottle. That's not the
point. The point is aboutpreserving the diversity of this
planet, keeping all the specialuniqueness that is what's

(51:21):
characteristic of each place.

Well Saxon, this has been a very strange and
delightful tale.

Donks.

Mendel, what do you make of all of this?

Hmm, I'm so fascinated by what Erick was
saying about how we see, what weexpect to see in this animal,
and how important it is tochallenge those preconceptions,
and what I hear from him is areally interesting proposal for

(51:58):
non intervention

For decades, what we call land management,
which I find a problematic term,has been rooted in this idea
that we can control and fixevery solution with poison or a
bullet or a fence. We cancontrol wildness — non-human
organisms. A different paradigmis to try to find a way for
systems to drive themselves, tobe self sustaining, to be

(52:21):
dynamic, to be resilient.

And to that end, I hear him advocating for us to
respect the sovereignty ofdifferent species, the agency of
different species.

When species can do what they wish, they're going
to go to where they're optimal,and the system is going to
respond dynamically to change.If we control it and try to keep
it in one static place, we'regoing to be doing that based on
our vision of how it should be,which is not as fast or aware or
cognizant of what's actuallyhappening in the world. Do you
think we can plan a future Earthwhen the climate is hotter? No,

(52:58):
but wild plants and animals can.They will go where they want to
be, and in doing so, maintainecosystems. And so I think
wildness is actually the way theworld works. I think it's the
core ingredient to ecosystems,to the dynamism and resilience
of ecosystems.

How about you, Adam?

What do I think?

Yeah.

Oh my god.... oh, I feel like this is like so many
other issues that I actuallyface as a land manager. You have
a situation where you just don'thave enough resources to carry

(53:38):
out the kind of management thatyou think is best. And there are
also doubts. But at the end ofthe day, I I do sympathize with
the National Park Service. Ithink they're in a tough
position here. And if it were upto me, I would probably try to

(53:59):
manage this species at leastwhere there was obvious conflict
with the values that the ParkService is trying to uphold.

If I was put in charge of managing feral
burros and deciding how we limitthem, you know what information
we use to decide thresholds andend goals, I'd probably quit.
It's an incredibly complicatedsituation. There's a lot of
political and social pressure,because the reality is, feral

(54:30):
burros, feral horses, thisspecies in general, is a very
smart, charismatic creature. Imean, if you talk to any
biologist, I don't think anyonereally wishes harm to these
animals. Thinks that they'reevil and should be wiped off the
planet. Honestly, their presenceand their impacts here are our
fault. And just leaving thismanagement problem to continue

(54:52):
to grow and become worse andworse, I think is, is where we
failed the species. And I dothink that some kind of control
measure is definitely warranted.We've seen the negative impacts,
and I think without substantialnatural controls, like predators
on the landscape, it's justgoing to continue to be a
sustained problem. So now it'sup to us to figure out, alright,

(55:13):
we've let these species kind ofrun amok on the landscape. They
are intelligent creatures. A lotof people care about them. What
do we do?

And what about you, Saxon? You've spent so much
time out in the desert withthese scientists, and especially
with Erick, how do you feelabout the wild asses of Death
Valley?

I don't know. I can't say that I've landed. I
think there is a place for theseanimals on this landscape, I
think they have as much of aright to be there as we do. I
also don't think it is so cutand dry as they're positive or
they're negative. To paraphraseErick, it's not necessarily good
or bad, it's just different.

You know, natural is the other
countercurrent in conservationof what we value — something
natural. But the problem withnatural is that everything is
natural. There's no opposite tothe natural, except for the
supernatural, and that's justthe limit of knowledge and
understanding of familiarity.There's no opposite to natural,
but there is an opposite towildness, and that's control.

Oh, I love how complicated it is, like we try
to come up with one answer, andit's not possible.

Bill Lee (56:29):
It's not possible. There's no one answer. There's
no right answer. And that'sabout everything. So many humans
think they know the right way.Lot of people different opinions
about different things, and I'mnot one to say which is the best
of which is right.

We just keep learning.

Bill Lee (56:53):
Just keep learnin'

Brad Wann (56:57):
Keep going. There you go. You're getting off the wheel
of the rope... there you go.Really good. You can say easy.

Racer 3 (57:19):
Easy, Tita.

Brad Wann (57:19):
There, now try and stop her. Say easy.

Racer 3 (57:21):
Easy, easy.

Brad Wann (57:22):
Good job. Well done. Good stop. So why do we practice
stopping? It's because when youwant to stop, you want it to
work.

Racer 3 (57:32):
Yes.

Brad Wann (57:33):
Alright, so we practice our stopping all the
time when we're building arelationship with a donkey. All
right, let's ask her to go againwhen you're ready.

Racer 3 (57:41):
Alright, Tita, are you ready? Come on, hup hup. hup
hup!

Brad Wann (57:46):
She's doing good.
Gotta build a relationship withyour ass to make memories.

This episode of Future Ecologies was reported by
Saxon Richardson, and producedby Mendel Skulski and Adam
Huggins, with music by AidenAyers and our theme by Sunfish
Moon Light. You heard the voicesof Abby Wines, Erick Lundgren,

(58:49):
Amy Dumas, Christina Aiello,Laura Cunningham, Bob Beschta
and Vernon Bleich, plus all thepack burro racers, including
Bill Lee, Brad Wann and CindyNielsen. Special thanks to Karin
Usko, John Auborn, AmyKazymerchyk, and Graham Landin.

(59:10):
You can find some of Saxon'sincredible photography of Death
Valley, along with citations anda transcript of this episode on
our website —futureecologies.net
And as always, this show isbrought to you by our amazing
community of supportinglisteners. Become one yourself
and get all the perks atfutureecologies.net/join

(59:35):
If you like what we're doing,leave us a rating, a review or a
comment wherever you'relistening. Better yet, tell a
friend. You could even drop somedonkey knowledge on your next
conversation. Okay, till nexttime, stay wild.

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