Sides air differences on grazing

ELLENSBURG -- Livestock grazing on the Quilomene and Whisky Dick wildlife areas in eastern Kittitas County is a wonderful management tool that will benefit adjacent landowners and the wildlife for which the areas were purchased.

Or it's a travesty that will bring ruin to one of the state's last remaining stands of shrub-steppe.

There seems to be no middle ground on the divisive issue.

Fervent believers from both philosophical camps were at the Kittitas Valley Event Center on Tuesday to offer input as the state wildlife department develops a Environmental Impact Statement for its proposed five-year grazing plan spanning those wildlife areas.

The grazing is part of the Wild Horse Coordinated Resource Management (CRM) plan, which in turn grew out of a Kittitas County-based group, the Big Game Management Roundtable (BGMR), that was dealing with elk damage issues. Proponents of the plan say well-managed grazing can actually help keep the elk on those wildlife areas and not down creating damage on private property.

"The long-term solution is to make that habitat desirable for elk -- particularly the stuff that hasn't been grazed for a few years has gotten so wolfy that unfortunately we were unable to keep the elk on it," said Jim Huckabay, a BGMR steering committee member and past president of Kittitas County Field and Stream. "This is a way we can make it desirable for elk and get them to stay on the land that's really been set aside for them."

Dave Duncan, a Kittitas County rancher and one of the founders of the BGMR, agreed.

"It freshens the forage. There's a lot of decadent forage up there," Duncan said of the short-term, monitored grazing planned for the wildlife areas. The "collaborative process" of the big-game roundtable and the CRM that led to it, he said, "has worked quite well. I think we've come a long way with the depredation problem."

'An ecosystem approach'

But elk aren't the only wildlife to be considered, said Bob Tuck of Selah.

"That dead-grass material is extremely important habitat in and of itself for ground-nesting birds, and that's not being taken into consideration. There's other critters out there," said Tuck, a former member of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission.

"We shouldn't have an elk-centric approach here. We have to have an ecosystem approach. And on lands owned by WDFW, they shouldn't be tilting the management approach to the extreme that they damage the habitat for other critters they're equally responsible for just so they can manage the elk distribution."

Virtually all of the land within the Quilomene and Whisky Dick areas were once heavily-grazed, privately-owned ranching land, and much of it is still routinely grazed -- even state wildlife land not scheduled for grazing.

About 30 square miles of the Whisky Dick Wildlife Area and the adjacent Skookumchuck area are owned by the Department of Natural Resources or the Bureau of Land Management, most of it in one-mile sections.

"And they all have a grazing lease," said WDFW regional director Jeff Tayer. "The DNR's mandate is to make money, and they can either put wind farms up there or cattle. And there's no fences on a lot of them -- under open range law, if you want to keep cattle out, it's your responsibility to fence them out. And without fences, what's to keep cattle from going from one pasture to another?"

The DNR and BLM have largely been mirroring the wildlife department's grazing managing practices -- "being sensitive to our issues of sage grouse and fish" in those areas, Tayer said.

Cattle and creek beds

On the WDFW land, those issues include limiting forage removal on any pasture to 35 percent. But that doesn't mean the cattle can only munch a third of the way down in any area; it's an "averaging," a concept shrub-steppe expert Steve Herman finds abhorent.

"The whole thing about a percentage is fine if we're talking about an alfalfa field, but that's not what rangeland is like. It's varied in every aspect," said Herman, an emeritus faculty member at Evergreen State College who has studied Washington shrub-steppe habitat for three decades. He's also an advisory board member of Western Watersheds Project, which has sued the state wildlife department over its Whisky Dick grazing plans.

Herman's contention -- one echoed by retired fisheries biologist Don Johnson, who wasn't at Tuesday's meeting but has been following both the Kittitas grazing and the state's pilot grazing project in Asotin County -- is that the cattle invariably gravitate to green riparian areas and trample creek beds in which there could be redds from endangered bull trout, steelhead and salmon.

"When you do that, you can't then continue to pretend -- and I think that's a reasonable word -- that you're doing it to benefit fish and wildlife habitat," Johnson said.

Cattlemen say, though, that cattle -- especially those with suckling calves -- won't stay down in the creek bed.

"Not with their calves up on the ridgetop," Duncan said. "They'll go down, get a drink and head back up to the calves. They're not going to leave those babies alone for long."

Cows going down for a quick sip from the creek and then heading back up the slope? Not likely, said former wildlife department regional lands manager Del Peterson.

"If you believe that, I'll sell you my share of the Eiffel Tower," Peterson said with a laugh. "In the past, there's been a lot of damage done to riparian zones with grazing."

'From soup to nuts'

The current cooperative grazing project on those Kittitas County wildlife areas has certainly improved relations between the cattlemen and the wildlife department. Even as recently as five years ago, prior to the Big Game Management Roundtable negotiations and the Wild Horse CRM, that relationship was nothing short of barely concealed hostility.

"In those days, you'd have the cattlemen over there on one side of the room and the (wildlife) agency people over here, both pretty much glaring at each other," said Jack Field, executive vice president of the Washington Cattlemen's Association. "In the beginning (of the BGMR and CRM meetings), I'm pretty sure everybody thought the same thing: I'm the only one with a real concern here, with a real interest in the land and the resource.

"Now it's everything from soup to nuts in terms of the variety of interests at the table. It's everybody saying, 'OK, we need money for a plan that's going to produce the results that will benefit everybody in the room.'"

That once-uneasy coexistence could be a metaphor for what wildlife managers hope will happen in the Whisky Dick and Quilomene shrub-steppe -- the spread of the neighboring sage grouse populations into that natural grouse habitat, perhaps aided by a well-managed grazing program. After all, they say, one of the state's largest populations of sage grouse has always been on the Yakima Training Center, which until a decade ago was routinely grazed.

"Don't read too much into that," said Herman, the shrub-steppe expert. "So the cattle and the sage grouse coexisted there. A lot of people coexist with cancer for a long time.

"And then they die."

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