WLD is working hard to protect Sage Grouse habitat in West Little Owyhee/Louse Canyon country. WLD’s Katie Fite visited the Campbell Allotment this year and found this critical habitat being decimated by livestock, noxious weed presence as well as alarming desertification occurring throughout the site.Given the findings of Katie’s monitoring of the 2015 grazing impacts, WLD is asking Vale BLM to address the damage these wild lands are enduring due to the presence of livestock. Photos of grazing impacts, desertification and site conditions can be viewed by following this link: WLO 2015 Antelope Creek dying waters
nd grouse focal habitats #1‘Vale BLM cattle grazing is destroying the West Little Owyhee portion of the sage-grouse focal habitat area that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has claimed will receive highest levels of protection.’ Katie reminded a BLM official. ’What will BLM do about this?’ She asks.
The sage-grouse Focal Habitats in the uplands will go to cheatgrass and the springs and meadows crucial to brood rearing will die if BLM continues authorizing grazing here. As Gene Bray and myself documented, BLM put large gravel pits in, and dumped gravel all along roadsides. This caused an initial cheatgrass infestation. Now with the severe cattle grazing and trampling impacts, the cheatgrass is moving out across the landscape. WLO 2015 cheatgrass spreading from road gravel margin into surrounding unburned lands
The cows couldn’t eat this any lower if they tried. in fact, it looks to me like the main cattle food source here is dirt. Meadow after meadow is being destroyed across this country, and sever
e cattleman abuse of public lands continues unchecked. Utterly beat to death, yet again, by the out of control livestock grazing that takes place across the West Little Owyhee country. wlo 2015 Antelope Creek enormous headcuts, dying meadows and headwater spring sage-grouse Focal Habitat
For detailed information, please contact katie@wildlandsdefense.org