ESPN  

YAKIMA, Wash. — The whole concept sounds like an oxymoron: bringing cattle in to graze on state wildlife lands … for the sake of the wildlife.

Try to get your head around that one.

That's precisely what state wildlife managers have been doing since entering into a cooperative pilot program with the Washington Cattlemen's Association to see if selective grazing can indeed improve habitat and growth of wildlife forage.

To some, the concept may seem incongruous. "It just defies logic," groused one critic. But some Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials involved in the project are defending it as potentially a very good thing — and not, apparently, simply because the program was foisted upon them by the state governor.

"When I first heard about it, I thought this may not be such a bad thing," said Bob Dice, manager of four wildlife areas in southeast Washington, three of which already are or will soon become part of the pilot grazing program.

Much of that land had been cattle range before the state acquired it, largely because of its abundance of mule deer and elk. Now, Dice said, "We've got lands that have been sitting essentially idle for 15, 20 years, with no impact as far as fire and grazing."

And, said state range specialist Edd Bracken, that minimal impact has not been to the liking of the big-game species so coveted by hunters.

"Over and over again we hear, 'Geez, we see all these deer on the (grazing land), and we go on the wildlife areas and we don't see any of them," Bracken said. "Obviously, there's lots of deer using them, but it's a fair question: why there (in the rangelands) and not on the wildlife area?"

The answer, he said, lies in the same basic concept behind lawn maintenance: Let it go for a couple of years and the tall weeds will shade out the growing parts of the plants, and each year the lawn will produce what Bracken called "a little less biomass." And what grows in the wildlife areas after years of no impact — by grazing cattle or fire — isn't the kind of forage that attracts wildlife.

Fire, though, promotes new, green growth in the ensuing months. And grazing, like mowing the lawn, does the same — which is why so many elk wander onto cattle land in search of forage.

"Elk like disturbance," Dice said. "Some of the neighboring private lands, where there was active management going on, where the vegetation was being manipulated (by grazing), actually had more deer and elk on them than our lands."

The cattlemen's association, meanwhile, had a state-wildlife-lands grazing program on its wish list "for five or six years now," according to cattlemen's association executive vice president Jack Field.

The group's window of opportunity came two years ago, when Gov. Chris Gregoire spoke at one of its meetings. Recalled Field, "She asked us point-blank, 'What can I do as the governor to try to help agriculture?' One of the members said rangeland and quality forage is at a premium; we simply don't have enough."

That member was Jim Sizemore, a Klickitat County rancher and chairman of the group's grazing committee. He proposed a cooperative program in which, in exchange for the opportunity to graze on state wildlife lands, the cattlemen would agree to schedule their grazing at times best suited for the regeneration of green forage when the wildlife needed it most.

And the pilot grazing project was born.

"It involves the expertise from both sides of the fence," Sizemore said. "In the past, a grazing lease had a turnout date — a date that allowed me to take my cows to that pasture — and then a pullout date some time in the future. That time period, and that time of year and length of time, might not have had anything to do with the habitat.

"We're changing that. The goal is to improve the habitat. We're just going to do it with cows."

This past April, 255 cattle were turned out in the Pintler Creek pasture of the Asotin Wildlife Area, where they grazed first one side of the unit, then another side, for a total of six weeks. Next up for approval are grazing plans at two nearby sites: the Asotin's Smoothing Iron Ridge and the Shumaker unit in the Chief Joseph Wildlife Area.

"It's going to take time to see how well this thing is going to work. It's a pilot program," Dice said, adding that it might be "two or three years" before its positives — or problems — become evident.

A lot of field-level people in the wildlife department — many of them habitat and wildlife biologists who don't want to be quoted on such a politically touchy issue — have very real concerns about moving ahead with the pilot project before the Pintler results are in.

But the Smoothing Iron and Shumaker stages of the project will go before the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission at its Olympia meeting this weekend.

Those areas could prove tricky. Elk use the Smoothing Iron both for winter range and for spring calving; portions of it are even closed to motorized vehicles in the spring because of the potential for disturbing calving elk. And any wildlife biologist will tell you that, while elk may like to chow down in cattle-grazed areas, they avoid them while the cattle are around.

Handled well, though, monitored livestock grazing can be beneficial to all concerned. The Klickitat Wildlife Area has for several years run a similar, smaller-scale cooperative program with a couple of ranching families, and even outspoken critics of the current pilot program point to the Klickitat grazing as a paragon of how controlled grazing can be done right.

Doing it right, Field and Sizemore both maintain, is the cattlemen's focus.

"We're not trying to approach this as having Fish and Wildlife open up the gate and let us in," Field said. "We're hoping Fish and Wildlife will see the benefits and will be saying, 'Hey, we'd like to have cattle on our land, because we've seen what it did in the Asotin."'

Of course, nobody knows yet what grazing did for the Asotin wildlife. It isn't as if the elk and mule deer came racing back as soon as the cattle left. This will be a program of short bursts of grazing by lots of cattle, and then assessing the results — both the speed and extent of forage return, and the resulting effect on wildlife.

"Years ago when these type of areas would be grazed," the WDFW's Bracken said, "they might turn the livestock out in April or March and come back two or three months later and truck them someplace else. That's gone. That's not the way we operate.

"And the cattlemen know that type of practice isn't acceptable to the public. They know there's a lot of people looking over their shoulder, watching what happens out there."