Not For The Eyes of Tourists
Recent news stories warned Olympic National Park tourists they might be exposed to the sound of high-powered rifles. The Park Service had assigned teams of “trained volunteers” to take care of “lethal removal” of mountain goats. Over at Grand Teton National Park, a hue and cry against aerial gunning of goats by Park Service helicopters caused cancellation of the air attack and resorting to similar volunteer shooting teams. The assigned shooters in each team are allowed as many goats as they can bag.
This rubs me the wrong way, after decades in which hunters were allowed one goat, if lucky enough to score a sought-after tag. (Not, of course, in parks. The Park Service has banned hunting for years, with ugly results for animals in their charge.) You would have thought the disastrous Kaibab experiment on mule deer in Arizona, soon after Theodore Roosevelt initiated parks, would have taught federal wildlife managers better. But anti-hunting sentiment is bedded in federal policy.
To protect tourists from the sound of gunfire, Grand Teton officials were reportedly urging their shooters to use silencers on their rifles. Dealing lethally with over-browsing or “invasive” wildlife species evidently upsets delicate tourist sensibilities. Nothing was said about the year-long wait the federal government imposes to purchase a silencer; maybe one federal agency has the clout to cut through another’s red tape.
Parenthetically, assigned shooters don’t get to keep the horns, hide, or meat of animals they kill. Trophies of a lifetime for lifelong licensed hunters — turned over to the feds. Supposedly the meat is to be distributed to agencies feeding the needy. Am I the only one who remembers when the government banned supplying wild meat to the destitute — on the grounds it was not Grade A government inspected? Bureaucracy run amok, chasing its own tail.
Been going on a long time too. The recent news called to mind a news story I wrote in 1975. Montana was at the end of a long, hard winter that year. In my Seattle-based job as outdoor writer, I was making my weekly calls to Western game departments to see how big-game herds were faring.
Not For The Eyes of Tourists
“Montana’s big game is wintering in good shape,” a spokesman for Montana Game and Fish Department said. He paused. “But elk in Yellowstone National Park are dying like flies.”
He spoke bitterly about early-winter “nature tourists” on groomed snowmobile trails in the park, snapping pictures and oohing and ahhing about the sheer abundance of Yellowstone elk. Professional wildlife biologists saw the park’s overpopulation beyond carrying capacity, and knew what was coming in the month Indians call Starvation Moon.
Nature had taken its ugly course. Nobody was advertising snowmobile tours this spring, the official said grimly. He had just been in the Yellowstone elk “disaster area” — his words. Images lodged in his memory past forgetting: nine big bull elk within a 50-yard radius, “in various stages of decomposition” after starving to death. Park vegetation gnawed down to nothing.
Yellowstone elk that still could walk were scattering out of the park into Montana, driven by impending starvation. Disease cut them down as they fled. A state game warden took a road count at the park boundary. Never left his car, just used binoculars — and counted 41 dead.
“Their resistance to disease is minimal,” the Game and Fish official said. “Ticks, parasites, everything just seems to load onto animals in this condition.”
The Yellowstone biologist, a federal employee responsible for the park’s elk herd, admitted over a thousand would die before spring green-up. Montana residents, shocked by skin-and-bones, pest-ridden Yellowstone elk in their pastures, demanded state Game and Fish feed the starving animals. But the agency simply had no budget to purchase and truck in expensive late-season fodder hoarded by ranchers for their cattle.
“The Yellowstone herd is the responsibility of the National Park Service, and they believe in letting nature take its course,” the Game and Fish official said. “Letting nature take its course is fine — if you’re prepared for the course Mother Nature chooses. She can be pretty rough sometimes.”
With hunting prohibited in Yellowstone, the herd doubled. The park just wasn’t big enough to support the increase. So Mother Nature, with brutal efficiency, began to cull the herd back within carrying capacity. Meanwhile healthy elk herds on state lands survived the bitter winter in good shape. A successful calving season was expected.
The Game and Fish official credited “that old management tool — hunting” for trimming state herds to leave adequate winter forage for the rest. And in the process supply winter meat for a lot of Montana families. “With hunting as the control, you can maintain an elk herd — well, forever,” he said.
Tour operators, he concluded, do not offer late-winter Yellowstone nature tours to observe the result of Mother Nature’s heavy hand correcting the elk-herd imbalance. “It’s not for the eyes of tourists.”
