Cover artwork by Ale Silva
Summary
In this very special donkumentary, we’re headed to the Mojave Desert — to Death Valley, in particular — where we find one animal at the centre of a heated debate in land management: the hardy wild burro (AKA donkey, ass, or Equus asinus).
These feral burros, beloved by some and reviled by others, are an introduced species in the desert southwest, but are uniquely entangled in its human history. Since before the establishment of Death Valley as a national monument, they have been widely regarded as overpopulated on the Mojave landscape. In recent years, rising costs, public controversy, and some conflicting legislation have brought the sustainability of conventional burro management into crisis.
But not everyone is convinced that they’re harmful. Could this crisis be avoided altogether if we looked at burros under a different light?
Are they crowding out the native and endangered fauna? Or are they filling an ancient ecosystem niche? Join us as we meet the land managers, ecologists, and donkey racers all trying to do right by the desert.
Ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Our supporters get access to early episode releases, a community discord server, discounted merch, and exclusive bonus content.
A burro in Death Valley
The basin and range ecosystem of the Mojave desert
Show Notes and Credits
This episode was reported by Saxon Richardson, and produced by Mendel Skulski and Adam Huggins.
With the voices of Abby Wines, Erick Lundgren, Amy Dumas, Christina Aiello, Laura Cunningham, Vernon Bleich, Bob Beschta, plus all the pack burro racers, including Bill Lee, Brad Wann, and Cindy Nielsen.
And music by Aiden Ayers, and our theme by Sunfish Moon Light
Special thanks to Karin Usko, John Auborn, Amy Kazymerchyk, and Graham Landin.
This episode includes audio recorded by deleted_user_229898, TRP, tim.kahn, ShangASDFGuy123, reinsamba, Figowitz, CGEffex, conleec, AugustSandberg, golovlev.sound, Bini_trns, djlprojects, craigsmith (2) (3), Benbojangles, Kinoton, sandboks, Garuda1982, Ruben_Villar, Gingerhoney, accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
Learn more about adopting burros from the Bureau of Land Management or Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue
Citations
Abella, S. R. (2008). A systematic review of wild burro grazing effects on Mojave Desert vegetation, USA. Environmental Management, 41(6), 809–819. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-008-9105-7
Bleich, V. C., C. W. Epps, J. S. Sedinger, C. M. Aiello, C. Gallinger, D. A. Jessup, and E. M. Rominger. 2021. Ecological "benefits" of feral equids command disclosure of environmental impacts. Science e-letters (Online). Available at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6775
Douglas, C. L., & Hurst, T. L. (1993). Review and Annotated Bibliography of Feral Burro Literature. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.124981
Karish, T., Roemer, G. W., Delaney, D. K., Reddell, C. D., & Cain, J. W. (2023). Habitat selection and water dependency of feral burros in the Mojave Desert, California, USA. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 87(6). https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.22429
Kodric-Brown, A., & Brown, J. H. (2007). Native fishes, exotic mammals, and the conservation of Desert Springs. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 5(10), 549–553. https://doi.org/10.1890/070002
Lundgren, E. J., Ramp, D., Middleton, O. S., Wooster, E. I., Kusch, E., Balisi, M., Ripple, W. J., Hasselerharm, C. D., Sanchez, J. N., Mills, M., & Wallach, A. D. (2022). A novel trophic cascade between Cougars and feral donkeys shapes desert wetlands. Journal of Animal Ecology, 91(12), 2348–2357. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13766
Lundgren, E. J., Ramp, D., Stromberg, J. C., Wu, J., Nieto, N. C., Sluk, M., Moeller, K. T., & Wallach, A. D. (2021). Equids Engineer Desert Water Availability. Science, 372(6541), 491–495. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd6775
Marshal, J. P., Bleich, V. C., & Andrew, N. G. (2008). Evidence for interspecific competition between feral ass equus asinus and mountain sheep ovis canadensis in a desert environment. Wildlife Biology, 14(2), 228–236. https://doi.org/10.2981/0909-6396(2008)14[228:eficbf]2.0.co;2
McKnight, T. (1957). Feral Burros in the American Southwest. Journal of Geography, 56(7), 315–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221345708983161
Tiller, B. L. (1997). Feral Burro Populations: Distribution and Damage Assessment. https://doi.org/10.2172/663550
Turner, J. W., & Morrison, M. L. (2001). Influence of predation by mountain lions on numbers and survivorship of a feral horse population. The Southwestern Naturalist, 46(2), 183. https://doi.org/10.2307/3672527
Wooster, E. I., Ramp, D., Lundgren, E. J., O’Neill, A. J., Yanco, E., Bonsen, G. T., & Wallach, A. D. (2022). Predator protection dampens the landscape of fear. Oikos, 2022(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.09059
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and iNaturalist.
If you like what we do, and you want to help keep it ad-free, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Pay-what-you-can (as little as $1/month) to get access to bonus monthly mini-episodes, stickers, patches, a community Discord chat server, and more.
Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 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.
Adam Huggins 00:15
No, you didn't. You've gone through a variety of hairstyles, which just tells you how long we've been corresponding about this.
Saxon Richardson 00:20
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 00:21
But you were definitely clean shaven before, and, like, had much shorter hair. And now I'm just staring at you and Mendel in the same room, and I'm like, the round glasses, like the round John Lennon glasses...
Saxon Richardson 00:32
I should put on my beanie.
Adam Huggins 00:33
Yeah, the mustache and beard combo with the long hair.
Mendel Skulski 00:36
Yeah I think basically any given facial feature can be completely disguised by this combination. It's like... "wow, you look like brothers!"... no not really at all.
Adam Huggins 00:45
Are saying that like your your general appearance is default disguise?
Mendel Skulski 00:48
Yes! Yeah, yeah. It's like, we're wearing Groucho Marx glasses all the time.
Saxon Richardson 00:52
Exactly.
Adam Huggins 00:53
Well, now that we're all here together, should we get our asses into gear?
Saxon Richardson 00:57
Probably.
Mendel Skulski 00:58
Probably...
Adam Huggins 00:59
So seriously, who are you and what are you doing in our studio?
Saxon Richardson 01:05
My name is Mendel.
Mendel Skulski 01:08
What? Wait! No!!
Adam Huggins 01:09
Honestly, you could have fooled like probably seven out of 10 people.
Saxon Richardson 01:12
I don't know if our voices are that similar. My name is Saxon Richardson. I am a filmmaker and a fan of Future Ecologies, interested in a story about the feral donkeys in the Mojave Desert. And on a nice rainy hike one day, I think, mentioned it to Mendel. And some decade and a half later, here we are.
Mendel Skulski 01:33
Decade and a half. I mean, that's an exaggeration.
Saxon Richardson 01:36
I think it's been like, a couple years?
Mendel Skulski 01:37
A couple years, yeah.
Adam Huggins 01:38
We do sometimes imply that it takes us a long time to put episodes together, so our listeners understand that, but this has been a particularly long time coming in.
Saxon Richardson 01:45
Yes, and I, Saxon not Mendel, will take credit for that. I'm generally fairly slow moving with these kinds of things, so appreciate you guys for pushing it along.
Mendel Skulski 01:53
It matches our pace perfectly.
Saxon Richardson 01:55
Great.
Mendel Skulski 01:55
We're like a Mojave tortoise.
Saxon Richardson 01:57
Exactly.
Adam Huggins 01:58
That is true. Slow is good. Slow is beautiful. And it's funny, because we all live in this very wet and rainy place, and yet we share this fascination for the exact opposite of where we're living, like the polar opposite — the desert. And I don't see any contradiction there. It's amazing.
Mendel Skulski 01:58
That's our style.
Saxon Richardson 02:15
Yeah, I think definitely the fact that both places exist inform my love for the other, and I love the Mojave Desert. Everything that lives there I just have the utmost respect for and admiration.
Mendel Skulski 02:31
What is it that obsesses you about the Mojave Desert?
Saxon Richardson 02:34
Well, the plants are just incredible.
Adam Huggins 02:37
You've got my attention.
Saxon Richardson 02:38
The walking and flying creatures that live there are just incredible. There's a fascinating and beautiful indigenous history and pioneer history, and it's so varied and so starkly beautiful, and it's so big. Just imagine looking over these sagebrush flats, and the flats slowly slope up to the foothills of these crumbling mountains, and the sun is setting and just kissing the tips of those mountains. There's barely a breeze. It's so, so quiet.
Saxon Richardson 03:12
...And then from just over the next ridge, you hear this...
Saxon Richardson 03:19
HEE HAW HEE HAW HEE HAW!
Mendel Skulski 03:22
I'm Mendel,
Adam Huggins 03:22
I'm Adam,
Mendel Skulski 03:24
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, and sound.
Adam Huggins 04:16
So where are you taking us?
Mendel Skulski 04:17
Yeah, where are we gonna start?
Saxon Richardson 04:19
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 Death Valley is the hottest place in North America, the driest place in North America, and the lowest place in North America. So if you think desert, that's accurate, but it's also not complete. Death Valley is 3.4 million acres, about the size of the state of Connecticut, and within that space are 14 mountain ranges. So we have salt flats down at negative 282 feet, and telescope peak up at 11,049 feet. Right now we're standing at 5000 feet in Wild Rose Canyon, and you can see that there are cottonwoods. There's a spring here. This is lush habitat for wildlife.
Saxon Richardson 05:08
This is Abby Wines. She's a spokesperson for the National Park Service at Death Valley National Park.
Adam Huggins 05:13
So I guess I'll ask the obvious dumb question, does anything actually live in Death Valley.
Saxon Richardson 05:21
That's the thing. The native people that live there don't refer to it as Death Valley. They call it Timbisha, and it's not a place of death at all. If you look closely, sometimes you don't even have to look that closely, there's life everywhere. And it's surprising, and it's creative, and it's resilient, and it's so, so impressive to me. And maybe one of the most unexpected things you could find living in Death Valley are burros.
Erick Lundgren 05:45
One of the remarkable things about wild burros is their sheer physiological adaptations for living in such a harsh, dry place, traversing terrain that is remarkably rugged. You'll see these animals, you'll see mother burrows with their young, with their yearlings and their foals down in the valley bottom in the middle of summer when it's 120 degrees Fahrenheit. These animals can withstand just incredible heats.
Saxon Richardson 06:08
This is Dr Eric Lundgren. He's an ecologist and has worked a lot with feral donkeys.
Amy Dumas 06:14
And burros, by the way, are the same things as donkeys, it's the Spanish word for donkey.
Saxon Richardson 06:19
This is Amy Dumas. She is the program manager for California's Wild Horse and Burro Program for the Bureau of Land Management.
Mendel Skulski 06:26
Yeah.
Saxon Richardson 06:26
And I talked to her in Ridgecrest, which is just outside of Death Valley National Park.
Amy Dumas 06:30
People are like, oh, burros are stubborn. Burros are not stubborn. Burros are not horses. They are not little horses with big ears. They do not behave like horses. When you expect them to behave like horses and they don't, then you think they're stubborn. Burros are very analytical, and they don't want to do anything to put themselves in harm's way. You just need to be around a donkey. It's kind of hard to put it into words why these animals are so wonderful, but they really are. They work their way into your hearts, huh? And I don't even know who you are. Random donkey getting your ears rubbed. All donkeys love having their ears rubbed. They just don't know it until they have it done.
Saxon Richardson 07:16
There's a lot to love about the desert, and there's also a lot to love about burros. 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 lot of 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 was calming, and they're just smart but quiet. They could carry water, you know, for us and them, but they could go all day and not cross a stream, and they're fine. They can rehydrate themselves. Literally, I'm not kidding. I'm not pulling your leg on this. They can lose about 30% of their body water, and they can drink enough water and absorb it and rehydrate themselves back to normal in 10 minutes. So those reasons, they make great pack animals. And, oh my gosh, you want to talk about sure footed? I don't care what any — I love mules. We have mules. But if I'm going on a trail and I know it's gonna be technical, I'm taking burrows,
Mendel Skulski 08:21
Wow, so there's like a real bond here between people and donkeys.
Saxon Richardson 08:25
Totally.
Mendel Skulski 08:26
It sounds like it runs really deep.
Saxon Richardson 08:27
Yeah. And that's not the only thing that runs.
Mendel Skulski 08:30
... what do you mean?
Burro Race announcer 08:32
When you want to pass a donkey? Just say runner on your right or on your left, whatever it is. Just don't surprise them.
Saxon Richardson 08:39
People run with their pack burrows. They don't ride them. They run with them.
Brad Wann 08:45
Burro racing's a peculiar sport.
Saxon Richardson 08:48
So what's your plan when we get there?
Brad Wann 08:50
Oh we're gonna do a little donkey whispering.
Saxon Richardson 08:52
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, and once I find out that you can actually run with donkeys, I mean, match made in heaven, right?
Saxon Richardson 09:06
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 donkey racing.
Racer 1 09:18
It's such a fun sport. Once you do it, you're just addicted.
Burro Race announcer 09:23
Alright, we have a few announcements first, then we'll have a blessing of the donkeys. And then we'll start all the long distance runners, the 17/18, mile and the marathon all together. We'll line the donkeys up in front. It's cool enough, I don't think we'll have any problems with snakes, but be aware. Don't wear headphones. And then repeat after me — if I get lost, hurt or die...
Racer Pack 09:50
If I get lost, hurt or die...
Burro Race announcer 09:52
It's my own damn fault.
Racer Pack 09:54
It's my own damn fault.
Burro Race announcer 09:56
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.
Brad Wann 10:14
[Donkey snorts] God bless you.
Mendel Skulski 10:22
Wow. So it sounds like basically nothing is built for the Mojave quite like a burro.
Saxon Richardson 10:28
Yeah. Donkeys thrive in this environment. They evolved in the desert. But the problem, I guess, is that they didn't evolve in this particular desert.
Abby Wines 10:40
They're not native to North America. They were animals that were brought in to work for people. And in this area, in the Mojave Desert, they were mostly brought in by miners — people using them as pack animals to carry their tools as we went prospecting and scrambling all over these hills. And generally, when their luck ran out and things didn't work out for the miners, they just left the animals behind.
Erick Lundgren 11:03
Of course, those days, the labor was not oil or diesel or gas, but donkeys. And the miners felt some degree of respect, so when they stopped using donkeys for this labor because they had fossil fuels, trucks, or they stopped being here because Death Valley National Park was created, they let the donkeys go. And that's that's why they're here, sort of just entangled in human history, like so many organisms are, maybe all organisms are.
Adam Huggins 11:27
Saxon, where are donkeys originally from? Like, where did they evolve?
Saxon Richardson 11:32
The Sahara, baby — the Eastern Sahara, the Horn of Africa. The crazy thing is that in their native range, wild donkeys are critically endangered.
Erick Lundgren 11:41
If you go back to North Africa, wild burros were... before they became burros, before they became domesticated, were a major part of those ecosystems. They've since shrunk to a tiny population in Ethiopia, in the wild, about 100 to 300 individuals. Of which wild burros are the descendants, and very well may outlast the pre-domestic ancestors of them, the African wild ass.
Saxon Richardson 12:04
It's important to remember that these animals have been domesticated for 1000s of years, and the domestic ass is all over the place. And it's the offspring of those domesticated asses that you'll find in the Mojave Desert. And after these animals were released, they did a lot better than anyone probably expected, and their population just grew and grew and grew... until people started to get concerned.
Abby Wines 12:34
Burros have been managed on and off in Death Valley National Park since the park was first established as a national monument in the 1930s. So starting in the mid 30s, the National Park Service was shooting burros to reduce their numbers, because of the concerns about their impact on the native wildlife and landscape.
Mendel Skulski 12:53
They started killing these donkeys. They started shooting donkeys.
Saxon Richardson 12:56
Yeah, and they did that for a long time, but people usually don't really like when you shoot something that looks like a horse.
Abby Wines 13:03
The Park Service largely shied away from lethal control, from shooting burros through most of the next few decades. By the 90s, up until the early 2000s the main technique were roundups. So mostly helicopter roundups, bringing a helicopter, bring in some cowboys on the ground, try to chase the burros into a pen and then capture them in the pen, transfer them to a holding facility, such as the BLM facility that is in Ridgecrest, California. Those roundups are fairly expensive and very hard for the National Park Service to get funding for. So from 2005 on, we had no Park Service funding to support roundups. And around 2005 we think they were as few as maybe 200 burros, just a few stragglers left in the park. And I should mention that during some of those earlier roundups, within a two year period, they rounded up 6000 boroughs from the park. So we think they had the numbers down to about 200 by 2005 and then we did nothing, partly because the problem looked like it was mostly solved, and partly because we had no funding to do anything. Then the numbers just started multiplying. In theory, burros can multiply at 25% per year without effective predator control. So we don't know now how many burrows are in the park.
Saxon Richardson 14:25
But just because lethal control isn't a thing anymore doesn't mean that the Park Service finds their impacts acceptable. They see these animals as invasive, that there's more of them than the ecosystem 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 or 50 years have been — boy, if these donkeys were just where they're supposed to be, it would be fine, but they're everywhere!
Saxon Richardson 14:57
This is Dr Vernon Bleich. He was a biology for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for decades, and he specialized in the ecology of large mammals in the desert southwest.
Vernon Bleich 15:07
They're a novel creature in these ecosystems that we are living in now, I would say, let's take care of the native species that we have first.
Saxon Richardson 15:19
And this perspective is widely shared by land managers and biologists in the southwest, and officially shared by the National Park Service.
Abby Wines 15:27
The National Park Service as a whole, our management policies state that we will minimize impacts from invasive species, invasive non-native species. And so since the National Park Service considers feral burros to be non-native and invasive, our goal within Death Valley National Park is to bring the population to zero. But why? That's a piece of bureaucratic paperwork, but why is that important? Concern is with a species that is not from an area originally, when it comes into that area if it has some some adaptation that allows it to survive a little bit better than something else, even if it doesn't directly eat that thing or kill that thing, it's probably displacing something from its habitat.
Saxon Richardson 16:15
And to help tell us about those impacts, here's Laura Cunningham.
Mendel Skulski 16:18
Laura!
Laura Cunningham 16:19
So this is typical Mojave desert landscape. This is a native shrub called Burro Bush, and it actually is very edible to burros, and they have been kind of grazing it down. You can see some of the old stems have been cropped off.
Mendel Skulski 16:36
Savvy listeners might recognize Laura from our Rangelands series.
Saxon Richardson 16:39
Yeah, she's an artist and naturalist and a biologist,
Laura Cunningham 16:42
and currently work for Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit which seeks to restore wildlife and native ecosystems.
Saxon Richardson 16:51
And she took me on a little field trip to Crater Flat, an area just outside of Death Valley National Park, managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Laura Cunningham 16:59
And we are maybe 5 or 10 miles east of Death Valley National Park. So we're in Nevada, and California is right over there.
Saxon Richardson 17:08
Of everywhere I went in my reporting, Crater Flat had by far the most burros.
Laura Cunningham 17:14
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.
Saxon Richardson 17:24
Laura told me that back in the day, one of the primary grazers here was, surprisingly, the desert tortoise.
Laura Cunningham 17:31
There would have been hundreds of these tortoises roaming around here each spring, when it's warm enough. And they would just be eating the wildflowers, the native grasses. They're almost gone. They're like, federally listed as a threatened species because of all these impacts, grazing, mining, solar projects, urbanization, you know, OHVs running them over. So they're... they're like, headed towards extinction. So that reptilian grazer has been replaced by the mammal grazer, the burros.
Saxon Richardson 18:04
And in her work as a tortoise biologist, Laura told me about a time that she got to visit a nearby Air Force bombing range, which is off limits to everyone — tourists, cattle, offroad vehicles, and burros.
Laura Cunningham 18:18
So I was the tortoise monitor to make sure tortoises weren't harmed at the target, the live bombing targets, I was authorized to pick tortoises up and move them out of harm's way. But after living in the desert for decades, I walked onto this military base, and it was like stepping back into time, and it readjusted my baseline, because there were tortoises everywhere. Everywhere. I was seeing dozens a day. I was finding nests with eggs. I was finding tracks. And it was just amazing. It was like the densest tortoise population I've ever seen to this day. And it made me realize, Wow, we have lost a lot. We've lost a lot of tortoises across the landscape, because we all forget. I didn't know they could live that densely in an arid Mojave Desert, but they can. We forget about what happened 100 years ago or 50 years ago, and then we think that this is the new normal. Like, the ground should be bare, there should be herds of donkeys. There should be no tortoises, because we didn't remember seeing that a couple of years ago. And that's where your baseline has shifted, and you've completely forgotten 500 years ago this was a tortoise paradise.
Saxon Richardson 19:36
So burros compete with native species like tortoises for forage, but they're maybe more widely known for their impacts on probably the most valuable resource in the Mojave Desert... water.
Saxon Richardson 19:50
Here's Vernon again
Vernon Bleich 19:52
we have been very, very cognizant of the role that water distribution plays in the distribution of feral donkeys. Donks go to water. If there's water there, they will find it.
Abby Wines 20:04
There are some springs that are so heavily used by feral donkeys that it almost looks like a bomb has exploded there. Owl's Hole spring is one of them. If you go there, all it is is a small pool of water surrounded by mud filled with hoof marks and burro poop.
Laura Cunningham 20:24
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 get to a water source, the bigger the impacts from the grazing animals. So cattle cause this, sheep, and these feral donkeys. You have the ground, in concentric circles around the water source, denuded and trampled, littered with dung. And the animals have to gradually walk farther and farther to find grass and forage. So this is a common occurrence in the West, but in this case, it's an example of feral donkeys creating this kind of a blowout zone around the water.
Saxon Richardson 21:08
So do you remember in your Home on the Rangelands series how you talked to Dr. Robert Beschta?
Adam Huggins 21:14
I remember Bob.
Saxon Richardson 21:15
He's probably best known for his work studying the effects of the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. And he told me something that might not surprise you — that if you have too many burros in a riparian area, their impacts are going 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, species diversity just drops dramatically. And they're being trampled. They're being eaten. It becomes much more of a simplified ecosystem site there, as far as the vegetation goes, and the soil churning can be quite dramatic. Hoofed animals walking in these wet sites just turns everything upside down. It's pretty impressive the amount of impact that they can have.
Saxon Richardson 21:58
And so all these burros eating and drinking has crowded out not only the Mojave desert tortoise, but another iconic species... the desert bighorn sheep.
Christina Aiello 22:07
Desert tortoise and desert bighorn you know, they actually have a lot of similarities in terms of the things that impact them, a lot of overlaps in their ecology. So I make this joke a lot of times, that desert tortoise are pretty much desert bighorn, just lower and slower.
Saxon Richardson 22:21
This is Dr. Christina Aiello. She's a biologist who's worked with desert tortoise as well as desert bighorn sheep, and her work tends to focus on spatial ecology.
Christina Aiello 22:29
Spatial ecology, I would say, is about considering kind of where animals are in space, how they move through space, which areas are they using, which areas are they not using, what resources are they targeting, and how that fits into their behavior, their distribution, and how they interact with other species. So the thing about the desert is it's a basin and range ecosystem. So you have these really flat valleys and interspersed mountain ranges, these really, you know, stark and massive, steep, gnarly looking mountains that just pop out of these low desert flats.
Saxon Richardson 23:06
And these steep, gnarly slopes are where desert bighorn sheep are most at home.
Laura Cunningham 23:10
There used to be like a really large population of bighorn sheep in these mountains. And burros are kind of aggressive and dominant and will keep the bighorn away from their native springs, where the bighorn also need to drink. Just the physical presence of the burros drives bighorn sheep away. So that's happened a lot in Death Valley National Park, I think, and that's why a lot of land managers you know want to try to remove the feral donkeys from parklands.
Saxon Richardson 23:43
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 is a pretty divisive topic.
Vernon Bleich 23:54
You know, there's a lot of opinions on both sides, and much of it is opinion. There are moves right now to limit the use of helicopters in roundups. Even today, there are people saying, oh it's horribly inhumane to use a helicopter to round up these animals. I've never heard anyone say, oh, it's inhumane to round up or catch a bighorn sheep with a helicopter. So there's a great deal of emotion involved, and it's driving everything that happens. It really is.
Saxon Richardson 24:27
At this point, I should say that burrows aren't the only introduced feral equid running wild over the desert southwest. There's also wild horses. Between horses and burros, there's some similarities in their impacts and some differences in their temperament and preferred habitat. But by and large, burros simply haven't received the same amount of research attention, so we can't say nearly as much about them with certainty.
Mendel Skulski 24:48
Hmm... more hay has been made about horses.
Saxon Richardson 24:52
Yeah, but their fates have been linked in another way, and that's through the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971... if you wouldn't mind putting a little patriotic music under there, that would be great.
Saxon Richardson 25:06
This Act basically defines wild horses and burros, an introduced species, as a symbol of our western heritage, and therefore they should be protected –
Amy Dumas 25:16
on US Forest Service and BLM lands.
Saxon Richardson 25:21
But...
Abby Wines 25:22
it does not apply to the National Park Service.
Saxon Richardson 25:24
So this has resulted in two government agencies, each managing huge swaths of public land, having conflicting mandates. The BLM manages for certain herd sizes in certain areas, and due to their concern about impacts on native ecosystems, the Park Service manages for a burro population of zero.
Abby Wines 25:44
It becomes very challenging because we are an island surrounded by other federal lands.
Laura Cunningham 25:50
So the burros, if they're all eliminated from the park, these BLM burros can walk back in there and repopulate.
Erick Lundgren 25:58
Right now where we're sitting, we're right at the boundary between a Bureau of Land Management horse management area for wild burro and National Park land where they're not supposed to be. And I don't know where the boundary is, and the burros definitely don't know where 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 to zero, it would be zero for what, three months? Two days? I don't know.
Adam Huggins 26:36
As in so many areas, the federal government is of multiple minds and has multiple agencies that are not always pulling in the same direction at the same time.
Saxon Richardson 26:44
Exactly. So the donkeys gathered on BLM lands go into government managed corrals and then are offered up for adoption. The donkeys gathered in Death Valley National Park are gathered by a Texas based non-profit called Peaceful Valley donkey rescue. They get trapped, they get loaded up into a trailer, and they get trucked to Texas, and then are offered up for adoption.
Adam Huggins 27:07
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 adopt one of these animals. Now keep in mind, these animals are wild and untouched, so you are not getting something that is halter trained. They're very affectionate animals, and they love attention.
Saxon Richardson 27:27
And these adopted burros are exactly the ones that might end up running in, I don't know, pack burro races. Some folks like Craig and Cindy 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 in a small herd,
Saxon Richardson 27:54
but the rate of burro removal has largely outpaced the rate of adoption, so the majority of gathered burrows won't end up in private care.
Adam Huggins 28:01
So does that mean there's like burro orphanages?
Saxon Richardson 28:05
I think that the government just feeds them forever, which, due to rising costs and capacity issues, is a management strategy that's looking less and less sustainable.
Adam Huggins 28:17
So I guess to summarize from everything you've told us so far, Saxon, we've got a desert — a sensitive ecosystem. We've got some pretty cool species that live within it, that are at risk. And then we have this big, introduced ungulate that lacks any natural population control, seemingly, and so is reproducing rapidly and eating the available forage and monopolizing the water and causing all kinds of problems. It seems like a fairly straightforward invasion biology story, right? And so I guess I'm wondering like, is there more to the story?
Saxon Richardson 28:58
Well, that invasion biology story, it's not a perspective that everybody shares. Things are about to get controversial... after the break.
Brad Wann 29:07
[Running with donkey] Passin' on your left.
Mendel Skulski 29:08
Hey, I'll keep it quick. This podcast takes a lot of time and effort to make. We're doing it on a shoestring budget with a small team and zero advertising. The only way we can keep going is with the support of listeners like you. If you can spare us a cup of coffee, you'll get access to new episodes before anyone else, a back catalog of exclusive bonus audio and other goodies, plus your name on our website and our eternal thanks. Every contribution makes a huge difference in our ability to produce this show. So if you like what we're doing, please support us at patreon.com/futureecologies. Thanks.
Mendel Skulski 30:20
Okay, once again, I'm Mendel,
Adam Huggins 30:23
I'm Adam,
Mendel Skulski 30:24
and we're here with Saxon Richardson, who's taking us on a little trip to the Mojave Desert.
Adam Huggins 30:30
To Death Valley in particular, and telling us a story that, on its surface looks like a classic tale of invasion biology, but which he is about to complicate, or so I'm told.
Saxon Richardson 30:43
Right. So there's this crisis in feral burro management. The general public doesn't want to see them come to any harm or even removed from the landscape, but most ecologists agree that there are way too many, and it's becoming increasingly expensive and impractical to gather and corral them forever. But what if this crisis could be avoided altogether, maybe by looking at burros under a different light? Here's Dr. Erick Lundgren.
Erick Lundgren 30:48
The way I look at it is that if we want to understand these organisms, maybe any pest species, any species at all, we gotta study them from what they are — as wildlife. If we study them as some kind of idea of an invasive species, you're not going to find out much about them, because everything you see, you're going to interpret in the metaphor of invasion. I mean, of course, there's great invasion biologists, but the metaphor has a tendency to simplify these things into good and evil narratives. And the very simple way this happens is that you go out and you show that wild burros reduced plant cover by X percent at some place, and then you say, because they reduce X percent plant cover, they clearly are having negative impacts on the ecosystem. Now contrast that to how we might study bison, where we go out, and we show that they reduce plant cover, but we don't interpret it as negative effects. We interpret it as how they influence the ecosystem. They're large herbivores. Reducing plant cover is what large herbivores do. Gotta eat. A lot of invasion biology literature, all it needs to do is show that the organism has a metabolism, that it takes up space, that it exists, and they can prove their point that it's harmful.
Erick Lundgren 32:24
I think everybody who's interested in the west or in wild lands in general, and in the effects of big animals on these wild lands should go to Africa. Africa is one of the places on earth that these big animals did not go extinct from human hunting at the end of late Pleistocene. Which means we see systems the way they were for millions of years, which is not what our idyllic version of nature is in North America, where nature is the quiet, pristine spring where it's undisturbed with a secretive deer. No, it's loud. It's loud and it's chaotic. There's poop everywhere. There are trees knocked down. It is a vibrant place, with these giant animals of a diversity of species influencing the world.
Saxon Richardson 33:21
Erick points to all the herbivorous megafauna that used to roam North America, diverse species like ground sloths, mammoths, camels and ancient equids, the ancestor of modern horses and burros. They lived here for 35 million years, up until about 12,000 years ago. He claims that modern burros may be filling a similar ecosystem niche to these long extinct megafauna and today's elephants in Africa.
Erick Lundgren 33:48
One of my first field jobs out here was in an area with wild burros — who reminded me so much of being in Africa, the way they moved across the landscape, the way they acted.
Bill Lee 33:57
I can tell you one example of what they do to actually help some of the wild creatures survive. A burro's senses are so acute that they will go down to a wash or a draw — a low spot, like maybe right down here where we're comin' to. And they will walk up that wash or draw, or down it, and they will stop, and they will start digging with their hooves. And lo and behold, you know what they find? Water. They can smell it in a sense, evaporating up through the sand. They'll get their drinks and move on. And what other animals move in? The desert animals that are having a hard time surviving if they can't find water.
Saxon Richardson 33:57
So I should mention that of all the people I spoke to, Erick is the only one who's specifically researching burros in the field. And one of his papers, which was published in the journal Science in 2021... well, it made quite a splash. Here's Bill Lee, a veteran pack burrow racer, to explain Erick's findings,
Erick Lundgren 35:09
A lot of systems in Africa only have water because elephants are around, elephants that are able to dig to great depths to expose groundwater. And every species in these systems that requires drinking water, which is a lot of species, humans included, require these features to live in these landscapes. And it was immediate when I came out here of seeing that for myself, that indeed, surface water in these systems is extraordinarily limited, and it's primarily found in areas where these animals, wild burros are impacting these sites. The wild burros need water, so they go into these springs. They make trails and they dig pools to get surface water. And if you go to places where there aren't wild burros, if you go nearby to other parts of the park, or even within the same spring system, you'll find no surface water. You're in a willow forest, a jungle. There's tons of ground water right under the surface, but it's very, very hard to get to because the burros have not dug to it. Sometimes you have to dig about a half meter to get to water. Other times, you have to clear two meters of dead vegetation to get to it. This is something the burros are very good at doing, and they'll do it readily and easily, and in doing so, they increase the surface water availability in these areas. What's really remarkable is when you go to a spring that doesn't have wild burros, and it's beautiful and it's beautiful, it's a vision of nature that many of us adore. It's tranquil, it's full of vegetation, and it's dead silent. You won't hear any breeding birds, you won't hear any frogs. Burros change these wetlands, increase surface water availability, which tends to increase, or seems to increase, birds and bats and other animals. This place, all of that water is being used by these plants, and it's quite a diverse, beautiful plant community. We have clematis, this cristanothamnus, willows, but this place is still beautiful. It's not better or worse for the lack of water. It's just different.
Saxon Richardson 37:07
Now, Erick's study for this well digging paper was conducted mostly in the Sonoran Desert, which generally has different hydrology than the Mojave. But in both places, he asserts that burros increase the available surface water, either by digging down into these sandy washes or by bush-bashing through piles of overgrown vegetation.
Erick Lundgren 37:28
And the real weird thing is that this behavior happens in many, many places. It's quite common in areas where you can dig to water, but had never been described in the scientific literature with horses or burros in their introduced range, which kind of set me down a rabbit hole of questioning what we think we know and what we value. It looked to me like we were describing only stories that confirmed our worldview that these animals were harmful to something or another, however we wanted to define harm, as long as it supported our view that burros did not belong on the landscape,
Saxon Richardson 38:02
But not everybody is convinced about the benefits of well-digging donks that Erick documented. Here again is spatial ecologist Dr Christina Aiello. She and several colleagues, including Vernon Bleich, penned a letter in response to Erick's 2021 paper.
Christina Aiello 38:18
Myself and my colleagues, our main problem with this study was not, you know, not that the research was done, not that, you know, the data 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 desert where you have this unique situation, where you have a dry wash resource, where there's actually groundwater underneath, and there were surface water available at those sites. But the behavior of burros to dig and create more pools of available water from that water resource is kind of a rare situation. And I think even in that paper, they mapped out where those types of washes occur in the landscape, and it really isn't a prevalent condition. So I just don't think that that behavior is having the large scale positive impacts that were kind of presented. And there are so many other studies that counter with a lot of evidence of negative impacts to a lot of native species. Feral burro do have impacts on springs, and the vegetation that's there, and the soils around springs. I think that's fairly conclusive. By reducing the vegetative cover and increasing the amount of open water, that may actually be a positive for certain species. So things like native fish that require kind of more open water habitats. We shouldn't ignore that. And when we're deciding the management priorities, if the preservation of that habitat for that fish is really a goal, you need to consider that in your feral burro management. Where we need to be careful, though, is then viewing those results in the context of everything else we've observed about the species. You know, I do think a lot of the research that has been done on negative impacts, it is pretty old. It doesn't mean it isn't valid, but I do think we need to keep gathering data.
Saxon Richardson 40:17
Speaking of gathering data, this 2021 paper wouldn't be the last time Erick's research revealed something new about burros in the desert southwest. I spent a good bit of time with him, going from spring to spring in the remote Mojave where he's been putting camera traps and audio recorders to better understand how burro activity affects the biodiversity of these watering holes.
Erick Lundgren 40:39
I put camera traps on these wells, these, you could also call them assholes that these wild ass dig.
Adam Huggins 40:46
Did he just call his study sites assholes? Oh my god.
Erick Lundgren 40:50
And sure enough, every species you can imagine is coming in and drinking. Birds are coming in and drinking, bobcats and mountain lions, and toads, deer and bighorn sheep, coyotes, even coatis and ringtailed cats. And there's not too few times where I've needed to drink out of those wells.
Saxon Richardson 41:08
And by some weird stroke of luck, on a camera that had fallen down and ended up pointing in the wrong direction, he caught something that had never been seen before.
Erick Lundgren 41:18
That a mountain lion had killed a wild burro — caught it in mid-kill with, its arms wrapped around a burro's head — which had never been documented before, never described in the literature, was hotly denied by the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service that there was any predation.
Saxon Richardson 41:33
Since that first discovery, Erick's been noticing the remains of wild burros, freshly killed by mountain lions, pretty much every time he goes on site to visit — their bones decomposing quickly in the hot and wet environment of these desert springs. And by looking closer at where mountain lions are and are not hunting burros, he's come to a new understanding. That active predator pressure changes how the burrows behave around these springs,
Erick Lundgren 41:59
These camera traps, these trail cameras allowed me to quantify how active donkeys were at these sites, these sites with mountain lions and without mountain lions, and the differences are stark. Sites with mountain lions, these animals, these donkeys, are coming in only in the middle of the day when ambush risk is low because they can see well, and they're only coming in for around 40 minutes, leading to minimal impacts on these places. They're still coming in anddigging to water and maintaining surface water, but then they're getting the hell out. And this is on the hottest days, super hot days where, if you could, you'd be in a swimming pool — over 35 Celsius, so in the hundreds. And there'll be tons of birds, and there'll be a big pool of water in the middle of the wetland around the side that's dug into the ground with a single trail to it, in an otherwise intact riparian forest of willows and other plants. At sites without mountain lions, which are primarily at campgrounds, burros were there all day and all night. For eight hours a day on those same hot days, just hanging out in the water, eating everything, trampling everything. And it's really important to know that those are the sites that the National Park Service sees on their daily rounds. These are the sites that the tourists primarily see because there's no mountain lions there, because they're there. It's right by the roads, right by the campsite. Which can lead to a really myopic view of way burros influence ecosystems.
Mendel Skulski 43:16
Okay, so if I have this straight, Erick is saying there's basically three conditions for the springs you find in the Mojave.
Saxon Richardson 43:24
Totally.
Mendel Skulski 43:24
The ones without burros, which end up getting so overgrown that nothing can get a drink. The ones that have burros but don't have mountain lions, so the burrows end up trampling and grazing everything and pooping everywhere. And then the ones that I guess you call the kind of the Goldilocks springs, where there are both burros and mountain lions.
Saxon Richardson 43:46
And plants, and birds, and bats, and all sorts of other creatures. Exactly. But Erick raises another point. What if the whole rationale behind the need to remove burros from the landscape, which is because of their overpopulation, is actually founded on a faulty premise?
Erick Lundgren 44:04
One of the justifications the National Park is using here in Death Valley for these removals is a population figure that they have for how many wild burros are in the park. This population figure, which is about, if I remember correctly around 3000 burros, is not based on actual data about how many burros there are. It's an extrapolation from about the 200 that were here in the early 2000s. How do they extrapolate this? Well, they took a percent annual growth rate of the population from papers of about 20%. That number comes from systems where, almost certainly, mountain lions have been eradicated or heavily controlled. So it's almost certainly not accurate in this system where mountain lions are actually heavily hunting wild burros. Now, luckily, there are other papers. There's a paper from not far from Death Valley in the White Mountains of California that showed that cougar predation, mountain lions predation, was completely regulating a horse population, a wild horse population. Mountain lions were eating every single foal every single year, leading to a population growth rate at zero. And I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that is possible in Death Valley. If we limited the places where burros were safe from Mountain Lion predation — these campgrounds. If we fenced off springs at campgrounds, I suspect that burro population growth rates would stabilize or decline. Which is really interesting, because for decades, people had said that wild burros and wild horses don't have predators, and therefore their populations need to be controlled.
Saxon Richardson 45:32
He even suggests that outside of Death Valley, certain management actions involving mountain lions may be having some unintended consequences.
Erick Lundgren 45:41
Mountain lions are heavily persecuted. People hunt them for fun in Arizona, and then the Arizona Game and Fish Department and others kill them whenever they eat bighorn sheep, to try to increase bighorn sheep population numbers. And so as soon as a mountain lion kills two sheep, biologists go out and kill that mountain lion. Mountain Lion, of course, are also eating burros. So it's unclear to what extent those types of management activities which are aimed at increasing bighorn sheep populations, may be inadvertently affecting wild burros.
Saxon Richardson 46:16
But once again, Erick's scientific opinion is far from the consensus. Here's Christina.
Christina Aiello 46:23
I'm not too surprised to see patterns emerging where we now see native predators consuming feral burro. You know, you put a prey resource on the landscape and give an animal enough time and if it has the ability to consume it, I'm not surprised that they are. But do I think that that interaction is enough to control feral burro populations? No. I think the places in which those two species overlap is too small and is just not proportional to the spatial scale that feral burro occur and where they're having impacts on the landscape. So even if you have mountain lions consuming feral burro around spring sites, in particular mountain ranges where there's enough varied topography to have mountain lions present, you have burro occurring all the other spaces where there are not mountain lions. So to think that that interaction is going to control the huge populations of feral burro that we see on the landscape, I just, I just don't think it's reasonable.
Adam Huggins 47:20
Okay, so basically, she's saying that the mountain lions in Death Valley rely on the landscape to stay hidden so that they can ambush their prey.
Saxon Richardson 47:29
Exactly. Christina believes that there are just too many springs in open places where the donkeys would naturally feel safe, safe, to drink, to graze and trample to their heart's content. But in response, Erick, in typical maverick form, has another idea.
Erick Lundgren 47:46
One solution to that, of course, would be to prioritize the protection and recovery of wolves in this area. Gray wolves can live in a range of habitats if there's prey available. In the Middle East, they live in the desert — deserts just as hot and dry as Death Valley, and they could almost certainly live here, if there were things to hunt. Given that there's wolves not that far away, you could think maybe instead of a zero burro policy, we took a really radical and progressive approach and made Death Valley a wolf sanctuary. Wouldn't that be wild? Wouldn't that be interesting?
Saxon Richardson 48:16
What you'll hear from the majority of scientists and land managers, however, is much more cautious.
Christina Aiello 48:21
I think the data that that scientists like Erick Lundgren has collected is valuable and it's something to consider, but I think we should be careful in how we then tell that story and interpret that data and extrapolate it out to the wider desert ecosystem, because I do think there's limitations to where we're going to see those types of interactions. You don't assess these impacts in isolation.
Saxon Richardson 48:43
Likewise, here's Dr. Vernon Bleich, who served on the National Wild Horse and Burro advisory board.
Vernon Bleich 48:49
I don't dispute any argument that there were North American horses. They evolved here, and they also became extinct here. So did wooly mammoths, and, you know, giant cave bears and other creatures. Extinction is part of life, if you will. That sounds a little bit dumb, but it is. And to make the argument that, well, we can go back in time and re-establish a system that we think existed without re-establishing it completely is a falsehood. It's a pipe dream. I think that the vast majority of ecologists across North America and perhaps in the world, would make the argument that these are not, quote, unquote a native species. They had come, been here and gone. I think that taking care of what we have right now is a much higher priority than trying to restore what might have existed 12,000 or 15,000 years ago,
Saxon Richardson 50:02
And for their part, the Park Service has yet to be convinced to change their policies. Here again is Abby Wines, spokesperson for Death Valley National Park.
Abby Wines 50:11
As a land manager, our job is to manage the land, and we look at research to do that, but mostly the National Park Service doesn't do research. We give permits and we enable research. So we're excited about research done by folks like Dr. Lundgren that have an alternate point of view. We'd love to see all of the research continue so that the impacts of burros are clearly understood. However, our goal is to continue with what we consider to be the safest path, which is protecting the native plants and animals in this park by removing non-native species. It may seem rather arbitrary when you think about a specific point in time if we say that we're trying to keep this spot static the way that nature was before Americans started colonializing this area. But you have to draw a line somewhere, and the greater purpose behind all of this is not about keeping time in a bottle. That's not the point. The point is about preserving the diversity of this planet, keeping all the special uniqueness that is what's characteristic of each place.
Adam Huggins 51:25
Well Saxon, this has been a very strange and delightful tale.
Saxon Richardson 51:32
Donks.
Adam Huggins 51:35
Mendel, what do you make of all of this?
Mendel Skulski 51:37
Hmm, I'm so fascinated by what Erick was saying about how we see, what we expect to see in this animal, and how important it is to challenge those preconceptions, and what I hear from him is a really interesting proposal for non intervention
Erick Lundgren 52:00
For decades, what we call land management, which I find a problematic term, has been rooted in this idea that we can control and fix every solution with poison or a bullet or a fence. We can control wildness — non-human organisms. A different paradigm is to try to find a way for systems to drive themselves, to be self sustaining, to be dynamic, to be resilient.
Mendel Skulski 52:23
And to that end, I hear him advocating for us to respect the sovereignty of different species, the agency of different species.
Erick Lundgren 52:35
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're going 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 actually happening in the world. Do you think we can plan a future Earth when the climate is hotter? No, but wild plants and animals can. They will go where they want to be, and in doing so, maintain ecosystems. And so I think wildness is actually the way the world works. I think it's the core ingredient to ecosystems, to the dynamism and resilience of ecosystems.
Mendel Skulski 53:15
How about you, Adam?
Adam Huggins 53:16
What do I think?
Mendel Skulski 53:17
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 53:18
Oh my god.... oh, I feel like this is like so many other issues that I actually face as a land manager. You have a situation where you just don't have enough resources to carry out the kind of management that you think is best. And there are also doubts. But at the end of the day, I I do sympathize with the National Park Service. I think they're in a tough position here. And if it were up to me, I would probably try to manage this species at least where there was obvious conflict with the values that the Park Service is trying to uphold.
Christina Aiello 54:09
If I was put in charge of managing feral burros and deciding how we limit them, you know what information we use to decide thresholds and end goals, I'd probably quit. It's an incredibly complicated situation. There's a lot of political and social pressure, because the reality is, feral burros, feral horses, this species in general, is a very smart, charismatic creature. I mean, if you talk to any biologist, I don't think anyone really wishes harm to these animals. Thinks that they're evil and should be wiped off the planet. Honestly, their presence and their impacts here are our fault. And just leaving this management problem to continue to grow and become worse and worse, I think is, is where we failed the species. And I do think that some kind of control measure is definitely warranted. We've seen the negative impacts, and I think without substantial natural controls, like predators on the landscape, it's just going to continue to be a sustained problem. So now it's up to us to figure out, alright, we've let these species kind of run amok on the landscape. They are intelligent creatures. A lot of people care about them. What do we do?
Adam Huggins 55:24
And what about you, Saxon? You've spent so much time out in the desert with these scientists, and especially with Erick, how do you feel about the wild asses of Death Valley?
Saxon Richardson 55:34
I don't know. I can't say that I've landed. I think there is a place for these animals on this landscape, I think they have as much of a right to be there as we do. I also don't think it is so cut and dry as they're positive or they're negative. To paraphrase Erick, it's not necessarily good or bad, it's just different.
Erick Lundgren 55:57
You know, natural is the other countercurrent in conservation of what we value — something natural. But the problem with natural is that everything is natural. There's no opposite to the natural, except for the supernatural, and that's just the limit of knowledge and understanding of familiarity. There's no opposite to natural, but there is an opposite to wildness, and that's control.
Saxon Richardson 56:18
Oh, I love how complicated it is, like we try to come up with one answer, and it's not possible.
Bill Lee 56:29
It's not possible. There's no one answer. There's no right answer. And that's about everything. So many humans think they know the right way. Lot of people different opinions about different things, and I'm not one to say which is the best of which is right.
Saxon Richardson 56:52
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 you want 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 a relationship with a donkey. All right, let's ask her to go again when 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.
Brad Wann 57:56
Gotta build a relationship with your ass to make memories.
Mendel Skulski 58:28
This episode of Future Ecologies was reported by Saxon Richardson, and produced by Mendel Skulski and Adam Huggins, with music by Aiden Ayers and our theme by Sunfish Moon Light. You heard the voices of Abby Wines, Erick Lundgren, Amy Dumas, Christina Aiello, Laura Cunningham, Bob Beschta and Vernon Bleich, plus all the pack burro racers, including Bill Lee, Brad Wann and Cindy Nielsen. Special thanks to Karin Usko, John Auborn, Amy Kazymerchyk, and Graham Landin. You can find some of Saxon's incredible photography of Death Valley, along with citations and a transcript of this episode on our website — futureecologies.net
Mendel Skulski 59:22
And as always, this show is brought to you by our amazing community of supporting listeners. Become one yourself and get all the perks at futureecologies.net/join
Mendel Skulski 59:35
If you like what we're doing, leave us a rating, a review or a comment wherever you're listening. Better yet, tell a friend. You could even drop some donkey knowledge on your next conversation. Okay, till next time, stay wild.