Fighting Battles for Grizzlies
Baiting bears and Elk into leaving Yellowstone
so they can be taken by hunters has become all too common. Ranger Action Jackson,
who is trying to stop the practice, is both revered and reviled.
By FRANK CLIFFORD,
L.A. Times Environmental Writer
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK --
For 20 seasons, the simple life was its own reward for Bob Jackson, the only resident
law enforcement officer in the most remote wilderness outpost of the lower 48 states--this
park's Thorofare district. The woodwind echoes of whistling elk, the lacy imprint
of grizzly bear tracks in autumn snow, the grandeur and solitude made up for the
rest--the two-room cabin, the frigid outhouse, the $10K salary, the lack of pension
and medical benefits, the wilderness scofflaws who poisoned his horses and periodically
try to get him fired. It is all part of a mystique he revels in as one
of the last lawmen still chasing down outlaws on horseback. "Action Jackson"
is perhaps Yellowstone's most revered and reviled back country park ranger, poacher
hunter and champion of the grizzly bear.
These days, new threats to the wilds he patrols every summer and fall
along the southern boundary of the park have left Jackson with a sense of unaccustomed
helplessness. The Thorofare region is under siege, he warns, by unscrupulous
hunters and commercial outfitters operating just outside the park's sanctuary in
the adjoining Teton Wilderness, where he has no authority. Standing at the park boundary
near his cabin, he points to dozens of illegal, artificial salt licks and to signs
of reckless hunting practices. He says grizzly bears, which are on the endangered
species list, and elk are being lured out of the park to their deaths, and the safety
of backpackers and horseback riders is also in jeopardy from bullets flying into
the park. Jackson has made his feelings known -- and thus has found himself
a lightning rod for controversy in one of the new West's defining debates over wilderness
and wildlife -- in particular, the future of the grizzly, the park's majestic icon.
The fate of the Yellowstone bears is again in question a quarter-century after they
were nearly killed off. The federal government, contending that the bears are thriving,
is moving toward taking grizzlies off the endangered list. Many wildlife scientists
object, however, and their skepticism has been reinforced by Jackson's claims that
the bears are vulnerable where they are supposed to be safest. Jackson is no
scientist. But mounted on his high-spirited sorrel, with the burnished stock of an
old lever-action carbine poking out of its scabbard, the 52 year old peace officer
lends an air of authenticity to an environmental camp not usually known for its cowboy
charisma. And, as a member of a vanishing breed, he said, he can identify with
the grizzly bear.
"Those bears are a unique living link with our untamed, pioneer heritage,
and they deserve a place out here." Instead, a wilderness sanctuary has
become "a killing zone," he said, pointing to the litter of bone fragments
scattered about one of the salt licks that dot the Thorofare countryside. The elk
are attracted to the salt and the bear prey on the elk.
As fresh grizzly tracks and well-worn game trails make clear, the animals
that congregate at these baiting stations are coming out of the safety of the park,
where hunting is prohibited. Four feet deep in places, the salt craters resemble
misplaced sand traps strung across miles of mountain meadows. Salt licks change
the nature of big game hunting, eliminating what sportsmen refer to as "fair
chase" and turning the experience into target practice.
Baiting wild animals with salt was first outlawed in East Africa in 1934 at
the behest of big game hunters who said the practice corrupted their sport, like
shooting fish in a barrel. The practice is illegal in many states and was banned
in 1990 in federal wilderness areas in the United States. Lack
of Staff Near Yellowstone, the high cost of eliminating salt-contaminated soil is
one major obstacle to enforcing the law. The U.S. Forest Service, which has jurisdiction,
says that it lacks the staff to patrol the 586,000 acre Teton Wilderness during hunting
season and does not have the money to remove the salt from the ground. "I
regret to say we haven't had the presence we should have in the back country,"
said Michael Schrotz, acting supervisor of the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
Also, in the Rocky Mountain West the law collides with a culture that is famously
hostile to federal regulation, especially when business opportunities are at stake.
And in glorious back country like the Thorofare, teeming with cutthroat trout and
trophy elk, business is thriving. Jackson's conception of the proper wilderness
experience is a throwback, as he is, to the days when hunters in this region tended
to be hearty souls willing to walk or ride for many miles just to get a shot at an
elk. Hunting camps in those days did not offer hot baths and warm tents, let alone
the prospect of bagging a set of antlers a stone's throw from camp.
The landscape that Jackson patrols has changed along with the hunting
ethic. Today, the dim game trails once followed by explorers from Jim Bridger,
the legendary 19th century scout and mountain man, to Teddy Roosevelt are broad,
dusty corridors for daily caravans of hunters and fishermen who pay handsomely to
be shepherded through the wilds. Along the way, meadows have been scoured by outfitter
herds of 70 to 100 horses and vistas marred by semi-permanent hunting camps.
Visible for miles, the camps look like fortified compounds. Rows of big, bright-walled
tents are fitted out with beds and stoves, and ringed by corrals and electrified
fences to keep out bears and other hungry wildlife. All of this and the throbbing
motors of portable generators have become fixtures in a federal wilderness area,
despite a law that says the hand of man is to be almost invisible. In the Thorofare,
outfitters pay a quarter of a million dollars or more for hunting camps along the
border with Yellowstone Park, where the elk herds are big and the salt licks are
most numerous. The hunters who come to these camps by the hundreds each fall pay
$3,000 to $4,000 for the chance to shoot an elk, and the competitive pressure to
give them their money's worth is fierce.
Forest Service officials acknowledge that conditions in the Teton Wilderness
have deteriorated. "We certainly advocate the spirit of fair chase
in hunting, and we have tried to promote a land ethic out there," Schrotz said.
"Not enough monitoring has been done. We don't have any grazing
standards, and we know the ground has gotten pretty beaten up in places. We're going
to work with the outfitters to make changes," Schrotz said. Wyoming Department
of Game and Fish officials, meanwhile, are on record saying that salting the ground
is a harmless vice -- despite its being illegal under federal law -- and not a bad
way to cull the large Yellowstone elk herd.
"After all, isn't baiting kind of like putting a worm on a hook?"
said state game warden John Hyde in response to Jackson's criticism of the outlawed
practice. Jackson had just shown Hyde where hunters had been using an
unmanned state Game and Fish cabin as a blind to shoot elk in a salt lick 25 yards
away. Others who have made the 30-mile horseback trip into the Thorofare Wilderness
have been less sanguine about what they found.
"It is a total disgrace," said Tory Taylor in a letter to federal
wildlife officials. Taylor is a hunting guide and secretary of the Wyoming Wildlife
Federation who visited the Thorofare in late September. "Purely for the convenience
of the lazy hunters, these baiting stations have been set up, some less than 50 yards
from Yellowstone Park's boundaries," Taylor said in an interview. "This
is wild country. It doesn't get any wilder, but it's being operated as a game farm
for filthy rich Bubbas. " Richard Clark, an outfitter and director of
the Professional Guide Institute at Western Montana College, decried the decline
in back-country ethics but said that guides are merely reacting to the demands of
hunters. They'll call up an outfitter, Clark said, and ask just two questions:
"What is your kill ratio, and can I get a trophy elk [a buck with a large crown
of antlers]?" Jackson, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, was fresh out of
college when he went to work as a seasonal ranger in Yellowstone in 1969. Nine years
later, he was assigned to his present post. He estimates he has spent
50,000 miles on horseback patrolling the park's south boundary, following blood-flecked
trails of animals that have been shot inside the park and then tracking down the
hunters through thickets and streams.
"Where Bob is different," said Clark, "he doesn't give up just
because he didn't catch the perp in the act of shooting. He'll take people to court
on circumstantial evidence, footprints or spent cartridges, and get convictions.
He's cost outfitters a lot of money in penalties, $20 to $40,000, and some of them
don't forget." Jackson's horses were poisoned, his cabin was vandalized
and his life was threatened during his first years in the Thorofare. His campaign
against the salt licks has stirred old antagonisms. "I think Bob Jackson
is a loose cannon," said outfitter Harold Turner." I've questioned some
of his actions in the past, and I think the information he has been putting out is
self-serving and inaccurate."
Turner was quoted by a Wyoming newspaper last year saying that his camps still
use salt, although he recently denied having made the statement. As for the
grizzly bears, Turner said he thinks more of them are helped than hurt by the carcasses
left behind by hunters. "A bear can get the minimum amount of proteins
he needs to get through the winter from one gut pile," he said. But went
on to say the loss of some bears would not be a bad thing. "They're eating
themselves out of house and home. We're going to have to eradicate some of the aggressive
ones."
Most Game is Wasted Undaunted, Jackson argues that the bears
are becoming collateral casualties of wilderness salting. The grizzlies are drawn
to the carcasses left in the salt pits by hunters interested primarily in taking
home antlers. Leaving large portions of edible game to rot is also illegal under
a Wyoming law banning wanton waste. As the bears become habituated to a salt
lick and its reliable cache of elk meat, the characteristically solitary grizzlies
congregate, as if at a dump. As Jackson sees it, the chances of fatal encounters
with heavily armed humans grow exponentially. The majority of the 250 known
grizzly bear deaths in the Yellowstone region over the last 20 years have occurred
at the hands of hunters just outside the national park.
Typically, bears are killed during surprise encounters with hunters who are
after elk, bighorn sheep or other legal prey. Although shooting a bear is illegal
under the Endangered Species Act, exceptions are made in cases of self-defense. Hunters
who claim self-defense are rarely charged with violating the act, even when they
kill bearcubs. Jackson lacks the authority to probe bear deaths outside the
park. Federal agencies, authorized to protect bears and prosecute people who violate
the law against salting, so far have not acted on Jackson's allegations. "Salting
is clearly wrong. But tying it to bear mortalities, at least directly enough to make
a case is not something anyone, including Bob, has been able to do," said Dominic
Domenici, a bear management expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency
responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act and the leading federal advocate
for removing Yellowstone grizzly bears from the endangered species list. The
pressure to delist the bears is coming from the states bordering Yellowstone--Wyoming,
Montana and Idaho. Officials there say that grizzly bears have become too numerous.
They want a hunting season reestablished. They want broader latitude to kill bears
any time that they are marauding livestock, even on public land, and they want restrictions
relaxed on new development, roads and mechanized recreation in bear habitat.
The current size of the Yellowstone grizzly population is estimated by experts at
400 and 600, three to four times the size it was when the bears were put on the endangered
list. The case for delisting presumes that the bears would be safe inside the
heart of their current range -- about 9,200 square miles of park land and wilderness
-- where the bears would be entitled to much of the same protection they receive
under the act. But skeptics like Jackson say that the strategy effectively exiles
the bears to an island of habitat too small to sustain a healthy population.
Food Sources Decline Scientists including Mark Boyce, author
of a congressional study on grizzly habitat, warn that the bears' traditional food
sources are declining all across the Yellowstone region. Bison herds are half the
size they were during the 1980s. Cutthroat trout, on which bears in southern Yellowstone
feed, are being devoured by illegally introduced lake trout, and a fungus is killing
the white bark pine forests that supply nuts that many bears fatten up on in the
fall. Historically, bears have been in most peril when food shortages have
caused them to stray from the safety of the park to places where conflicts with hunters
and other people are more likely to occur. Jackson says that the salt pits, with
their reliable cache of dead elk, are among the more likely places for such conflicts.
Last month, Utah State University ecologist Barrie Gilbert became the first bear
scientist to second Jackson's call for an investigation of illegal salting practices
in the Teton Wilderness.
"We need to put pressure on the management agencies," said Gilbert,
who survived a near-fatal attack by a bear in 1978 to become one of the nation's
leading experts on grizzlies. His stature has bolstered Jackson's contentions, at
a time when the park ranger's credibility is under attack by local outfitters.
"Action Jackson is the genuine article, a great back-country ranger with a deep
love of the park," said Bob Barbee, a former superintendent of Yellowstone Park
who was Jackson's boss for 12 years. Barbee is now the regional director of all national
parks in Alaska.
Jackson closed the Thorofare cabin early this year, before the end of the
hunting season. He said he needed to get back to his family's bison farm in Iowa,
but he said he was also glad to get away. "I didn't come to the most remote
place in the 48 states to get into the middle of a controversy. I don't like it when
people don't like me. But I don't see how you can be out here in the middle of God's
Country if you're not going to defend it."
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