Fire and Owls
Land managers at the Valles Caldera National Preserve went forward with a prescribed burn in the Banco Bonito area on the southwest corner of the Preserve in October at a time when prescribed burning on neighboring US Forest Service lands had been halted by a lawsuit centered on the Mexican spotted owl.
WildEarth Guardians sued the Forest Service in 2014 because the Region 3 Forest Service had not kept its surveys of the spotted owl populations current. Spotted owls require mature forests with open understory for feeding and nesting. That forest type is increasingly rare in the Southwest as logging and fire suppression converted many forests to young tree thickets or mature forests with dense thickets in the understory. Both of these forest conditions are prone to high severity fire such as we’ve experience in the Jemez Mountains since 1996 and do not support spotted owl populations.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) requires agencies to maintain habitat for endangered animals and plants. Though the Trump administration has taken steps to severely weaken the ESA, federal agencies are still obligated to find spotted owl populations and protect them and to create and protect habitat that will support the owls and a host of other species that require the same habitat.
The lawsuit stopped prescribed fire as well as logging which still takes place in limited areas of the Southwest on Forest Service lands. Prescribed fire with our without careful thinning can be an effective tool for restoring spotted owl habitat but U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins of the federal district court in Tucson, Arizona included controlled burning in his injunction against the agency.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service is responsible for designating critical habitat on federal lands and the USFWS has designated 8.6 million acres in New Mexico and Arizona. Some of those acres may be on the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
The Valles Caldera National Preserve was exempted from the lawsuit since it is managed by the National Park Service and not the US Forest Service. It is unclear whether the NPS or its predecessor agency, the Valles Caldera Trust, has surveyed for spotted owls on the Preserve.
Susan’s Liquors has Taps
There are two really serious liquor stores in the Santa Fe area; Kokoman in Pojoaque and Susan’s in Santa Fe. Kokoman has a massive inventory and has wines that cost thousands of dollars in areas of the store that most people don’t know about. They have a huge selection of beers. Susan’s takes a more limited approach, offering wine and many specialty beers, many by the bottle rather than six pack.
I came blinking off the street into Susan’s the other day seeking beer to drink in the woods and found that they have developed a full bar and they have beer taps. Their beer buyer Jordon Jensen has set up around 10 taps from which he pours mostly New Mexico beers. When I was there he had a couple of Colorado beers as well. You can get a beer or two and walk around the store admiring all the wines or the tequila or you can just look out the window at the traffic at Santa Fe’s busiest intersection (St. Francis and Cerrillos Road).
No IPA on tap though. He had stouts, ambers, pilsners and some unusual brews but no IPA. He said he would bring in the New England style IPA (hazy) this week from Blue Corn. That will be worth a trip.
White Cows on the Highway
Driving down Highway 63 in the Pecos Canyon last night at sunset I encountered three white cows licking salt off the pavement. One rarely sees cows in that area at all, thankfully. Yet here were three pure white cows. It was dream-like, white cows on a cold evening with white snow on the roadsides. As I edged by them going about 3 mph, they looked at me with those cow eyes that don’t convey intelligence necessarily.
I don’t like the fact that humans raise cattle. They are destructive to delicate environments like northern New Mexico and they produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas. They don’t belong in wilderness areas trashing vegetation and polluting streams. They belong Viet Nam where their species originated or in Iowa where they can’t vote in the primary elections.
The cattle industry is slowly dying in New Mexico. While I understand many rural New Mexicans have long raised cows as part of their traditional life style and while I support traditional cultures and rural living, I’ve long felt there must be more lucrative and less environmentally destructive ways for people to sustain themselves than raising cows. Given the falling number of cattle we see throughout the state I suspect that that younger generation, urbanized by the internet and economic necessity, may be letting some of their parent’s grazing allotments go unused.
Meanwhile, as I waited for the white cows to get off the road, the Pecos River rushed along among ice coated rocks, making white noise to go along with the white cows and the white snow of the high country. It was a white out of an unusual sort, a twisted dream moment in a far, solitary and beautiful place.
