ROUGHLY EDITED TRANSCRIPT BUREAU of LAND MANAGEMENT WILD HORSE and BURRO ADVISORY BOARD OCTOBER 18, 2017 8:00 A.M. Capt
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ROUGHLY EDITED TRANSCRIPT BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT WILD HORSE AND BURRO ADVISORY BOARD OCTOBER 18, 2017 8:00 A.M. Captioning Provided by: Closed Caption Productions, LLC www.CaptionFamily.com Phone: (800) 335-0911 * * * REALTIME CAPTIONING AND/OR CART (COMMUNICATIONS ACCESS REALTIME TRANSLATION) ARE PROVIDED IN ORDER TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION ACCESSIBILITY AND MAY NOT BE A TOTALLY VERBATIM RECORD OF THE PROCEEDINGS. * * * >> KATHIE LIBBY: So let's all get settled. Folks let's get settled. Okay, folks. >> DR. SUE McDONNELL: Kathie? >> KATHIE LIBBY: It was a long day yesterday and we have a really, really good day today. Really a bunch of issues were really looking forward to, and I will go over that in a minute. Let me just say very briefly about that very long rules of room thing. This is the tape that says, the public is here and the board is here because this basically is a board meeting and the public comment section is over. So typically the speakers are speaking to the board and the board is questioning and getting additional information from the speakers and we are all listening in, taking notes. Again, the presentations will be posted so you don't have to take down every single word you hear. Those will be available to you next week. So this morning, everything over to Dr. Julie. We are going to hear -- and this is something we talk about all the time, kind of no matter where we sit, is that we need to be more collaborative. We will talk about some really important Colorado collaborative partnerships. I try hard not to say TJ Maxx. TJ Holmes will start us off and we'll have SWAT and GEMS presentations. And I know ladies you had these seats available to you and they got usurped from you. I have been asked not to have people standing here. As soon as you get seated, it's hard for the technicians to manage things. That may or may not include you. So following -- and this is really a great set of presentations. Following that, Dr. Terry Messmer will be briefing us on the Utah Summit presentation. Then we'll take a break and then we're getting into something a bit more focused on action and what we can collectively and what BLM can do and where we should put our priorities. So we'll be looking at Mary Jo Rugwell, the BLM Wyoming state director. We are really pleased. Where are you, Mary Jo? Oh, there you are. Hiding in the room. Hiding in the doorway. Come on over and sit. And so she'll be going over some of the key elements of the sustainable wild horse and burro program, and then after lunch, the board will be -- in terms of looking at recommendations, will be kind of doing that around some of those elements and some key questions about how to move forward. So I think that will be a really interesting productive session. We will adjourn at 5:00. We try to do things on time around here. So help us with that. Okay? Dr. Julie? >> DR. JULIE WEIKEL: Good morning, everybody. Thank you for showing up again. We really appreciate it. I want to check, who do we have on the phone this morning. Dr. McDonnell, are you here? >> DR. SUE McDONNELL: Hi, Julie, I'm here, but could you let the sound people know that the phone -- I'm not hearing you very well. >> DR. JULIE WEIKEL: Okay, sound folks, you heard that. Please try to fix it. You magic people. So for sometime, some of us on the board who don't think we can immunocontracept ourselves -- and by golly that is a verb -- out of the current dilemma with respect to the wild horse and burro program, show us the best example of where and how that can work. And so we have been trying to get Colorado for a while, and we finally got here and so we're really looking forward to that presentation and let's get on with it. Thank you. TJ. Turn it over. >> TJ HOLMES: In southwest Colorado. Definitely want to thank you guys for specifically inviting us to talk along with SWAT and GEMS and having the -- having the tour out in Little Book Cliffs on Tuesday which is a great example and the first one I know of in Colorado, to get things kicked off. My name is TJ Holmes, the darter and documenter of Spring Creek mustangs. I'm going to kind of -- I'm nervous as hell. I will kind of do a combination of reading and taking inspiration from my horses and I will probably do this a lot. I want to acknowledge first of all that it takes a village to do everything that we do on the range, on America's public lands and that's no different in southwest Colorado. We have very active village of committed advocacy groups in southwest Colorado for our herd. We are only two people of that whole group, so thank you for acknowledging me, specifically, but I want to acknowledge all of them. The Colorado chapter of the National Mustang Association has been advocating for this herd since the late 1990s. I have been on the board of NMA Colorado since 2007. In early 2008, I was a founding member of coalition group wildlife partners. I don't know why that's making me cry. Geez, man! (Laughter) It's a long time ago! This includes representatives of NMA Colorado, four corners back country horsemen, Mesa Verde, and Mesa valley which is where we live and our horses live. Our philosophy with these groups has always been that we want to help keep Spring Creek Basin mustangs wild on their home range and working together and with BLM we can do the work that has led to that reality. I think I gave you guys or somebody provided these brochures for you guys. This is also a collaborative effort between wild bunch and our herd management area or BLM, that gives some of the details about Spring Creek Basin. We used Little Book Cliffs wonderful brochure as a template and now all the herd management areas have these. So real quickly, Spring Creek Basin heard management area is in southwest Colorado. It's the southern most of Colorado's herd management areas. 22,000 acres, it's the smallest herd management area in Colorado and has an AML of 35 to 65 adult horses. We have a current population of 60. 60 mustangs. And to move on from that, I want to talk about why Spring Creek and Spring Creek Basin are not the same thing and are not interchangeable things. And I don't think Bruce Rittenhouse is here. I'm going to drag him in, because he's an awesome guy. I met last foul, Bruce Rittenhouse is Colorado's BLM branch chief for natural resources. If I got that wrong, think it's pretty close. Last week we rendezvoused and SWAT does this amazing rendezvous in Sandwash Basin every year. It's a very community collaborative effort. It brings in people from all over who come to the range, not only to see and photograph those horses and name foals but they come in to do work, removing wire, enhancing water, various other projects. So I met Bruce there and in May, he came to visit Spring Creek Basin and all along he had been sending emails about how excited he was to visit Spring Creek. We were excited to visit spring creak. Cat Wild, here's Spring Creek, I said. And he looks around and said, what? And I said -- and we never even had to go into Spring Creek Basin. They went to Spring Creek Basin to see the horses managed by BLM. Spring Creek Basin is a big geographic basin. Westerner understand this Spring Creek drains Spring Creek Basin. All of these little Arroyos, cut -- it only runs when we have a big rain event in the basin and the horses are rarely in Spring Creek because it's usually dry. We do have some seeps, but they are fenced into and thus are managed in Spring Creek Basin herd management area. If anybody tells me about Spring Creek later, I'm not going to invite you. (Laughter) Which I will do at the end. Okay. So my background a little bit in 2002, as a journalist in Durango, Colorado, slowing down. With the lifelong connection no horses I was given an assign. To write a feature story about the mustangs of Spring Creek Basin and that's all it took. I continued visiting for the next few years. Mostly just photographing and enjoying the horses. A month after observing and reporting on the 2007 roundup in Spring Creek Basin, I attended the roundup in Little Book Cliffs. The volunteers here took an active part and their calm presence really impressed me. They knew which horses had come into pens and they knew which ones to remove for adoption. This literally -- this Grand Junction, this Little Book Cliffs is write learned the importance of documentation and volunteer advocate partnerships with BLM. And I want to say that we had had some challenging issues even though I had only been recently in things. A couple of weeks after, that I traveled to Pryor Mountain, wild horse range where I learned about bait trapping and fertility control with PZP. It occurred to me during that visit that BLM didn't have an over population problem.