HANFORD REACH NATIONAL MONUMENT – To folks driving by, the massive elk roaming freely across south-central Washington’s rugged, sagebrush-dotted federal land are a delightful sight. To hunters, they are an enticing target that can’t be touched.
For Bud Hamilton, a wheat farmer whose property abuts the Hanford Reach, the large stands of elk pose a bust to his crop.
“They come out at night, eat my fields or trample my crops, and go back to the federal land in the morning,” Hamilton said. “What am I supposed to do?”
Managing the rapidly growing herd has been a problem for state and federal wildlife managers for years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is offering up some new options in an elk management plan for public comment – including hunting on federal property that hasn’t been opened to the public in decades.
Former President Clinton created the Hanford Reach National Monument by proclamation five years ago. The monument, an odd, almost horseshoe-shaped property surrounding the Hanford nuclear reservation, stretches along a free-flowing leg of the Columbia River renowned for salmon runs, bird habitat and rare plant life on its banks.
The area includes land, known as the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve, that is considered one of the few large, contiguous blocks of arid shrub-steppe habitat remaining in the Northwest. The reserve used to be part of Hanford and has been closed to the public since the nuclear site was created in the 1940s.
That closure, along with the nearby Yakima Training Center, a U.S. Army training site, give the elk vast room to roam – and reproduce – on federal land.
During a recent tour of the monument, dozens of elk could be spotted thundering through canyons and coulees. Even more stood still across a dry, dusty field, bugling. Wildlife managers estimate the herd at 770 elk – roughly 400 more than some believe the area can support and certainly more than area farmers are willing to tolerate.
Since 2000, the state has paid more than $500,000 in crop damages just from this herd.
“For about a decade now, we have been trying pretty much everything we can think of to manage this elk herd,” said Jeff Tayer, regional director for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Hunting is a tool … it’s effective, it’s cost effective and biologically effective. It’s a tool that hasn’t been used up until now.”
Five years ago, the herd stood at about 800 animals. Fire forced many elk off the federal land, allowing hunters to kill some animals on private land. Wildlife managers also captured and relocated another 200 elk.
Today, the population is booming again, as elk continue to seek refuge during hunting season.
The state has issued a select number of hunting permits to landowners on the edges of the reserve, who may charge hunters to hunt on their private land as long as they haven’t made crop damage claims, Tayer said. But with too many hunters shooting bull elk for their antlers – rather than cow elk that produce calves – additional hunting is needed.
“The primary goal was to get as much hunting access, and therefore harvest, around the monument as we could, at the same time knowing that unless and until there was some remedy to the escape zone on the monument, that we weren’t going to be able to solve this problem. And we haven’t,” Tayer said. “Hunting up there would be a huge step forward.”
Rick Leaumont, conservation committee chair for the lower Columbia Basin Audubon Society, disagrees. Leaumont argues that the proposed seven-month hunting season would cause too much damage to the near-pristine reserve and drive elk to yet another closed area: the remaining land of the nearby Hanford nuclear reservation, the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.
“We’re not resolving the problem, we’re just relocating the problem,” he said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Hanford Reach, issued three alternatives for managing the area’s elk. The agency’s preferred alternative calls for controlled public hunting, a trap and relocation program and, if necessary, a government cull, in which wildlife officers could hunt the animals by ground or air to reduce the size of the herd.
The plan follows years of debate and public meetings to discuss all of those options, some of which have proven controversial. Many residents have spoken out against government culls, still others believe the reserve is too sacred and pristine to open to the public.
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