Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

I recently helped out the Absaroka Fence Initiative retool an old fence so it was wildlife friendly. It was a fence that defined private/public property where the ranch owner ran cattle in the summer. The fenceline looked over the vast expanse of the Clark’s Fork Canyon where masses of elk overwinter. The Absaroka Fence Initiative has been replacing fences for several years to make them more wildlife friendly, mostly concentrating in the desert areas around Cody. All volunteer and there were plenty of people who turned out for the morning—probably over 30. There’s a formula for height of wires and how many. Pronghorn don’t like to go over fences so a higher bottom wire that is smooth helps them out. Height matters so elk and deer who jump fences don’t get their hooves caught. It’s a wonderful NGO that is doing great work for wildlife and ranchers as well throughout our area.

But it also got me thinking about fences in general. A few weeks ago I came across a very large old bull elk that was killed by a mountain lion. The bull was caught between a wooden fence and a dirt road (that edged a steep hill on the other side ). Even though this was an easy low visible fence for an elk or deer to jump, moose are not so adept at jumping fences, nor are they very agile. The cat obviously used his advantage of the fence, killed the moose where he would have been easily visible from the road, then dragged the carcass a few feet next to the fence hidden by bushes.

On a recent March morning I was hiking through a hillside of sparse tree cover bordered by a large meadow. Deer like to travel on animal trails through the tree cover, feed in the meadow, and move and rest in the trees. I came to what’s known as a “drift fence”, a fence that solely serves the purpose on public lands to keep cattle on one side or the other. I was following a deer trail, went under the fence and found a myriad of deer bones on the other side. I estimated about 4 deer over the years had been killed right at that fence line. No way of knowing what kind of predator that was, but certainly they were using the fence like a wall.

Last year I visited with Quinton Martins, a mountain lion biologist who has been doing a study in the Bay Area Sonoma County, CA since 2017. He took me to several of his sites where he had picked up the GPS signal from a few different females he was tracking. While we rode together he told me about his study area:

“The males we have collared—P5 has 17,000 private properties in his territory. P31 has 11,000 private properties. How do you contact that many people and access all those properties to inspect fences or signs of prey? This dilemma is confounded by an increase in weekend private property owners. When you overlap a land parcel map it is as if you are looking at 50,000 or 100,000 mini ecosystems, so you can’t just throw a vegetation layer over it and say ‘OK, this is what the cats are doing.’ As their primary prey is deer, it might look like great deer habitat on a map, but in many cases these properties are fenced to keep deer out. So there might be no deer in areas where you expect deer, but cannot tell because you can’t access the properties very easily. And walking each individual land parcel, one finds different plant and animal resources, a variety of fence types that block or allow animals to move through, and each parcel managed differently to some degree.”

Martins told me the lions are using fences of any type to strategically block or corner and kill deer. In fact, as we approached the previous property, Martins pointed out a cougar-killed deer carcass hanging against the fence that enclosed the vineyard.

This is not just an issue on lands in the West that border vast parcels but clearly applies to rural areas as well near cities. Having worked as a landscape designer in Marin and Sonoma Counties in the Bay Area, I know the push to keep deer out of people’s private property so they can grow a garden of their choosing. But as Martins explains, these fences are not only keeping resources from deer, but aiding predators.

But fences on public or private lands that are untended, in other words, have loose barbed wires, are even greater hazards because fleeing ungulates can easily get their hooves caught when the wires aren’t tight and clearly visible. AFI also rolls up these dangerous and useless fences.

The saying goes that barbed wire settled the West. That’s because it was so cheap and easy to install vs. wooden fences. It was then, in the 1880s, that our wide open ranges disappeared.

Filed under: New ideas | Tagged: absaroka-fence-initiative, conservation, deer, Elk, Fences, hiking, Moose, mountain lions, nature, quinton-martins, sonoma-county-mountain-lion-study, travel, Wildlife |