Where burros roam and tourists swoon, feds seek to reduce herds on Arizona rangelands
OATMAN — Tourists crowded this Wild West-themed town on a recent Friday to coo at and feed the resident wild burros that help the historic mining camp retain its wooly character.
Led by Oliver, the “alpha male”, who locals say determines when his herd of 13 comes into town or goes out on the arid range, the holdovers from northwest Arizona prospecting days ambled along the Route 66 pavement and boardwalks accepting cubes of compressed hay sold in local shops.
Curt and Cheryl Fritz, of Appleton, Wisconsin, day-tripped from their Lake Havasu vacation rental and admired the burros while their daughter and a friend fed them.
“They’re awesome,” Curt Fritz said. His wife added: “If they didn’t have the burros, I wouldn’t have driven up here.”
These particular burros are honored local residents, and most will likely live out their days in the area. Outside of town, however, a helicopter contractor for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was rounding up a few dozen of the 1,000 burros that officials hope to remove from western Arizona’s federal range this winter. The government often uses helicopters to haze wild burros or horses toward a corral before trucking the animals away.
The goal is to move most of the current Black Mountain herd into captivity and adopt them out to families. Although federal law and land managers support maintaining some wild burros, they also seek a balance with cattle and native bighorn sheep. The BLM says it wants a herd that can live on as an enduring symbol — not a denuding force.
“Burros have no natural predators, and I’ve watched them eat trees down to the ground,” said John Hall, who manages BLM’s wild horse and burro program in Arizona.
Reducing the herd to manageable numbers
While other western states have much larger wild horse herds on the federal range, Arizona’s burro population of more than 6,000 leads the nation. Most of those live in western Arizona, though BLM plans another gather in February to reduce a herd that lives around Lake Pleasant, just northwest of Phoenix. The crew working that roundup will use hay- and water-baited corral traps rather than helicopters, Hall said.
Although the agency wants to reduce burro numbers, it recognizes the animals’ cultural importance to Oatman and other parts of the state, Hall said.
“Oatman is a very particular case because that town’s basically all about burros.”
The Black Mountain herd wanders desert mountains and arroyos east of the Colorado River from north of Lake Havasu City north to Kingman and then Hoover Dam. The zone covers 1.1 million acres, a range nearly as big as Grand Canyon National Park. The herd numbered about 1,900 before the roundup began on Jan. 9.
Federal range managers hope to remove enough of them this winter so that pairing the roundup with ongoing birth control treatments can edge the herd toward what range scientists have determined as an optimal number of 478. (Statewide, BLM’s target population is 2,500.)
Daily totals of Black Mountain burros gathered in the first couple of weeks of the months-long effort ranged from 24 to 171 as the crew occasionally relocated to pursue the animals in different parts of their range.
The BLM, part of the U.S. Interior Department, hired a contractor to herd burros by helicopter toward a corral. As the burros approach the trap, cowboys emerge from hiding and push them the rest of the way in. The crew then loads them onto a trailer and trucks them to a holding site near Kingman, and from there, they are shipped to off-range wild horse and burro corrals in Florence and in Ridgecrest, California, in preparation for adoptions.
'Somebody needs to be watching' the roundup
On the Friday when the Fritzes walked among Oatman’s burros, Jan. 12, the BLM gathered 60 burros across the mountain range south of town. Burro advocate Laurie Ford was on hand with a long camera lens, blogging for a group called Wild Horse Education and making sure the cowboys treated the animals humanely.
“Somebody needs to be watching,” she said.
Compared to BLM-contracted roundups she has witnessed in other states, she said, Hall’s program appeared well-run.
Still, Ford felt a pang when watching a load of burros leave the site, their ears visible through slats in the trailer. “Oh, poor little burritos,” she said to herself while watching through the lens. “Poor little munchkins.”
Ford is a burro enthusiast, having adopted and raised several at her home in Glenwood, New Mexico. They’re great companions, she said.
“They’re just so appreciative of you, and they’re very needy. They love attention, affection and approval. And they’re very playful. They’ll play with anything.”
Ford acknowledged that too many burros on the land can create competition with wildlife, especially during dry years when there’s little grass in the desert. In fact, BLM officials said some of the burros they’re collecting have bony hips and patchy coats indicating poor nutrition, especially among jennies that are nursing foals.
But Ford does not accept BLM’s prescribed numbers as the appropriate population, and she wants to keep burros from disappearing on the public range.
“It’s a million-acre herd area and it can only support 470 burros?” she said. She suspects deference to ranchers who graze cattle on the public lands is the real reason for such a large reduction. “I’d rather leave all the land to the burros.”
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Tourists' attention isn't always good for burros
Although some of the burros are malnourished, BLM spokeswoman Dolores Garcia said, the agency also has a problem with people feeding burros. That’s especially true in Oatman, where feeding can sicken the animals.
Oatman shopkeeper Rachel Mursick said one problem is that tourists love giving apples and carrots to the burros. A treat now and then might be OK, she said, but much of the family unit that frequents town developed diabetes from all the carrots. Her shop, Jenny and Jack’s ARTifacts, sells hay cubes, and she said she will offer those to anyone she sees tempting a burro with something else.
Gold miners left their pack animals behind when they left to fight World War II and then moved on to other mining prospects, Mursick said. The burros proliferated across the range, and the herd occasionally needs thinning. The BLM recently reduced even the town's small burro herd, she said, because they had grown to more than two dozen and were fighting among themselves.
Sometimes unsuspecting tourists risk injury by approaching too close when burros are fighting. Fights are a burro family’s way of driving out young jacks who might otherwise stay around and lead to in-breeding, she said.
“They’re very smart animals,” Mursick said as some of them worked a crowd that gathered for an Old West gunfight re-enactment. “I always say they have everyone else well trained.”
Some of the tourists still wouldn’t succumb to their charms.
“Hello baby,” one woman said to a burro while pulling a snack bag of spicy rolled tortilla chips away from its inquiring nose. “You cannot eat Takis. They would burn your mouth.”
Want to watch the roundup?
It should last until March, or however long it takes to gather 1,000 burros. The Bureau of Land Management permits viewing of the Black Mountain Herd roundup from a safe distance. Depending on the terrain where the corral is placed on any given day, that may or may not allow a direct sightline into the corral where the helicopter and cowboys drive the burros. An agency staffer accompanies viewers to the designated site early in the morning, and vehicles with high clearance and four-wheel drive may be required, depending on location. Generally speaking, the herd management area is a three- to four-hour drive to the northwest from Phoenix. For information about a given day’s viewing opportunity, contact BLM Public Affairs Specialist Dolores Garcia at 602-828-8734 or dagarcia@blm.gov.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Where burros rule and tourists swoon, government seeks herd reduction
