Cheatgrass

Fire and Forage on the Range

James A. Young, Charlie D. Clements

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780874177855
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Wissenschaft Allgemein

Cheatgrass ( Bromus tectorum, downy brome ) is an exotic species that appeared in North American in the late nineteenth century and has since become a dominant plant in the arid rangelands between the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and Rocky Mountains. A shallow-rooted annual, it is the first grass to appear after the region's long, cold winters and has become an important forage plant for livestock and wildlife. It is also a major environmental hazard in the sagebrush plant communities where it has established itself, providing fuel for the ferocious wildfires that have ravaged so much of the Great Basin since the mid-twentieth century. Cheatgrass is the first comprehensive study of this highly invasive plant that has changed the ecology of millions of acres of western rangeland. Authors James A. Young and Charlie D. Clements have researched the biology and impact of cheatgrass for four decades. Their work addresses the subject from several perspectives: the history of the invasion; the origins and biology of cheatgrass, including the traits that allow it to adapt so successfully to a wide range of soil and precipitation conditions; its genetic variations, breeding system, and patterns of distribution; its impact on grazing management; and the role it plays, both positive and negative, in the lives of high desert wildlife. The authors also describe efforts to control cheatgrass and offer some new approaches that have the potential to halt its further expansion.

CHAPTER 1

The Many Faces of Cheatgrass

Newspapers and television news programs have fostered a widespread association between cheatgrass and wildfires in the Great Basin. Cheatgrass has also come to personify the concept of alien invasion. Only a very small percentage of the population living in the large metropolitan centers of the Great Basin can identify cheatgrass. Residents of smaller towns, however, are far more familiar with cheatgrass-dominated landscapes. They know the annual cycle from springtime green to flushes of pinkish red near maturity to the tawny tan of mature herbage. Anyone who has walked in cheatgrass when the seeds are mature knows the pain of trying to pick the sharp-pointed, barbed seeds from socks or from a dog’s coat. Those whose livelihood is directly dependent on Great Basin rangelands for livestock production, along with hunters who enjoy upland bird and big game hunting, may have a different perspective of the nature and environmental consequences of cheatgrass invasion. The beauty or evil of cheatgrass is in the eyes of the beholder. The perception of this exotic species has changed over time.

The worst sound a sagebrush country rancher could hear was the bawling of starving cows. It was a familiar sound in the nineteenth-century Great Basin, where 160-acre homesteads could not produce enough hay to bring cows through the winter. It took awhile, but early in the twentieth century Congress finally gave in to pressure from the western states and increased the size of homesteads from 160 to 640 acres.¹ Easterners did not understand the problem. They found it inconceivable that a person could farm 160 acres, even if he was lucky enough to raise three or four strapping boys to work with him. In the arid portions of Spanish colonial domains, the basic land grant for extensive livestock production had been 40,000 acres, so even the 640-acre stock-raising homestead was in many cases far from adequate for range livestock production. If a cowboy with the urge to work for himself could find a creek in the Great Basin with sufficient watershed to provide irrigation water, he or she had the makings of a stock-raising homestead.

The hard winter of 1889–1890 had driven home the absolute necessity of setting aside one ton of hay for each wintering brood cow.² There was a significant difference between realizing that conserved forage as hay was necessary for wintering livestock, though, and having the required infrastructure to produce that hay in the sagebrush country. Hay production required irrigation, and only mountain ranges with appreciable areas of watershed near or above 10,000 feet in elevation could produce sufficient runoff to support the streams that provided sufficient irrigation water. These constraints limited irrigation to about 5 percent of the total landscape.³

Hay meadows produced only three-quarters of a ton to a ton of marginal-quality hay per acre, which meant that a rancher needed an acre of hay ground for every brood cow he planned to overwinter, plus additional hay for replacement heifers and 2-year-old steers. By the time the stock-raising homestead law was enacted, the big ranchers had bought most of the irrigable land in Nevada.⁴ Stock-raising homesteaders had to look to the little creeks on lower mountain ranges to locate their prospective ranches. The flow of potential irrigation water in these small creeks was limited and undependable. The ranchers had to laboriously clear small, semicircular fields on the opposite sides of rocky canyons along the creeks that wound down from the uplands. The cleared land was often more creek-washed rock than soil. During the winter, the rancher and his family would follow a mule pulling a sled across the fields in endless efforts to remove enough rock to make mowing hay less hazardous.

When the rancher finished stacking his hay the previous summer he knew he was in trouble.⁵ The creek had dried up early in the season, and the hay he had been able to cut made a pretty small stack. Putting up hay was backbreaking toil; the entire family worked from daylight until dark. The oldest boy drove the dump rake and the youngest the derrick horse. The rancher’s wife and daughter cooked for the haying crew that he could not afford but had to have. Between the meals, his wife and daughter canned vegetables from the garden they had painstakingly watered from the well. Just as the cows needed hay for the winter, the family had to preserve enough food to get them through. Last summer’s haying campaign had been mercifully short, but the size of the resulting haystack had cast a pall over the family’s future.

The rancher put off feeding hay until the cows had cleaned the dry field of every possible straw of forage. After the first snow fell and failed to completely melt, he grudgingly began digging into the stack of hay. The cows would stand at the fence bawling with hunger as he drove the team and hay wagon out of the stack yard each morning. Cutting the frozen, snow-encrusted long hay with a hay knife was tough, hard work in the early morning cold. There was never as much hay on the wagon as he knew there should be, but he had to gauge what was left in the stack while trying to figure how long the winter was going to last.

As the summer accumulation of flesh wasted away from the frames of the old cows, they licked up every piece of hay off the feed ground and drifted to the fence to bawl. The sound grated on everyone’s nerves. The rancher’s wife became more and more silent. He could see the fear in her eyes. She looked out the single window above the tin sink at her flowerbeds watered from the dishwater drainage. Her look seemed to say, “We are going to lose everything we have worked so hard to build together as a family.”

Finally, he opened the gate to the field so the starving cows could work the woody vegetation along the creek. They savaged the wild rose and willow thickets and even began to hedge the big sagebrush plants that grew on the gravel bars along the stream. Twice the rancher had to run off a band of wild horses that starvation and deep snow had brought down off the ridges, their fear of humans overcome by the chance for a mouthful of hay. One morning a single thin mule deer doe joined the cows at the fence. The ranch dogs poised ready to jump from the wagon as they approached the stack yard each morning, knowing that a mob of jackrabbits had spent the night eating tunnels into the bottom of the stack. Normally a mature jackrabbit was very difficult prey for the average ranch dog, but as the winter wore on, the dogs made multiple kills every morning.

As the rancher closed the door of his small stone barn and started for the house with a bucket of warm milk, he paused to look down the canyon toward the valley below. All day long, the March snow showers had draped their cold touch across the ridges. The endless north wind brought a whiff of pinyon smoke from the kitchen stove chimney. Normally he loved the pinyon or juniper smoke, but the bawling cows at the hay field fence made enjoyment impossible. “Is this winter never going to end?” he wondered as he walked toward the square of lamplight in the kitchen window.

Something kept tickling at the back of the rancher’s mind, bothering him as he harnessed the team to do the morning feeding. The days were getting longer because he was able to harness the team and hitch the hay wagon without using a lantern. He had fed the last of the stack the morning before. All he could do this morning was scrape mostly rotten flakes of hay from the mud where the stack had stood. He would get more rabbit pellets than hay, but it was all he had to offer.

The team seemed especially frisky this morning as they rounded the house and started down to the field. Suddenly it dawned on him: the cows were not bawling at the fence. “My God,” he thought, his heart sinking down into his boots, “they all died last night.” Reason told him that was impossible; but where had they gone? As the morning sun broke over the ridge top and lighted the brush-covered slope across the creek, he saw the cows widely spread out and working their way up the slope. Their heads were down and they were rustling for feed around the sagebrush plants. As he left the team and ran up the slope, he caught a hint of green under the shrubs. He dropped to his knees and looked closely under the sagebrush canopies. There was not much to see except fine, hairy green grass leaves emerging from a rosette of leaves on the soil surface. It was not much forage, but it was enough to keep the cows moving from shrub to shrub as they climbed the hill.

Cows typically left the feed grounds once there was enough spring growth on the grasses to make grazing worthwhile, but the rancher had been overutilizing the native bunchgrasses close to the ranch headquarters, and each year they had been getting scarcer. He hunted around under the shrubs, found a dried seed head from the previous season, and held it up to the light. “I’ll be damned,” he thought. “It’s that new grass that came in along the railroad.” Most of the cowboys called it bronco grass because the sharp seeds injured the eyes and mouths of horses, but other people called it cheatgrass. The foreman of the big ranch nearby had talked about trying to get seed of this cheatgrass, but before he could find any it had appeared spontaneously on the bed grounds of a sheep outfit that moved through the valley in the spring and fall. The rancher recalled that a tramp band of sheep had moved down the creek a couple of summers ago before he got his rifle and ran them off. Apparently, they had left behind a present of cheatgrass. “Cheat be damned,” he thought. “It sure as hell cheated death today.”

We have heard variations of this story from numerous sources, including James A. Young’s grandfather. Cheatgrass spread in the biological near-vacuum left by the destruction of the native perennial grasses. At first the ranchers welcomed it. Some ranges that had been excessively grazed had been nearly bare for more than a decade when the cheatgrass arrived. It was better forage than nothing.⁶

As the farmer pulled his buggy into the wheat field, the big Harris combine stopped. The twenty mules that provided the power to move it needed water, and the maze of chains and sprockets that transformed the traction power generated by the mules into a sophisticated machine that cut, threshed, separated, and cleaned wheat from straw needed oil. The part of the crew not engaged in watering or oiling were resting in the shade of the combine, tipping back water jugs covered with wet burlap. The owner did not begrudge the crew their break. The ones resting did the brutal work of sacking the wheat, sewing sacks, and throwing the heavy bags onto wagons. The farmer always felt a surge of pride when he saw the combine. It was a marvel of engineering with a hardwood frame and body supporting the maze of pulleys and chains. Most of his neighbors in the Big Meadows on the Humboldt were still cutting grain in the field with a binder and threshing it with a stationary steam engine and a separator. The Harris had cost a lot of money, but it eliminated the cost of hauling the bundles of straw, chaff, and grain to the separator. Handling the bundles always resulted in unnecessary loss of grain. The farmer hoped to pay off the balance he owed on the combine with this season’s wheat crop.

He had sent all the way to California for his seed grain. When it had arrived at the rail station in Lovelock, Nevada, he could not wait to open a sack and check the grain. It was Pacific bluestem, the wonder wheat that had helped California to become the nation’s leading wheat producer. Farmers grew wheat on dry land in the central valleys of California during the rainy winter months, but here in the deserts of Nevada, grains had to be grown under irrigation during the spring and summer. He had hauled manure from his feed yard all winter and supervised the preparation of the seedbed with great care. He was out for bragging rights with a bumper crop. The seed grain had looked to be of excellent quality. He had noticed a little bur clover seed mixed in with the wheat, but that was no problem, and also a few seeds of a grass he did not recognize. He would probably not even have noticed had the sharp point on the grass seed not pricked his finger as he dipped into the sack to get a good sample of the wheat.

With carefully timed irrigation, the bluestem had grown as high as the barbed-wire fence surrounding the field. As the season progressed, the farmer worried about the tall wheat lodging or a stray thunderstorm dropping damaging hail. His worries were all in the past now; the wheat was almost in the sack.

When the threshing crew’s foreman walked across the wheat stubble wearing a worried frown, the farmer glanced at the combine to see if an equipment breakdown had occurred. “Boss, you are not going to be happy with the yield of wheat,” the foreman said apologetically. Before the stunned farmer could reply, the foreman continued, “Come look at the cleaner.” The Harris combine was equipped with a fanning mill re-cleaner that produced exceptionally clean grain. When they reached the back of the combine, the foreman snapped open an access door to a paddle elevator that raised grain for the re-cleaning cycle. He caught a handful of wheat grains as they spilled out and held them up for inspection. The wheat grains were small, and many were shriveled. A closer look revealed the presence of the slender, pointed seeds of the grass the farmer had noticed in the seed grain shipment.

The foreman pointed to the standing wheat and said, “It’s thick under the wheat. I saw it before when I worked up in the Palouse in Washington. Farmers up there called it ‘cheat’ because it robbed you of a crop.” The stunned farmer looked from the cheatgrass seeds in his hand to the abundant plants below the canopy of uncut wheat and wondered what he had done to his best field. How would he ever get rid of this new pest?

Human cultures are built on simple things. Primitive farmers cleared away competing vegetation and scratched a slot in the soil surface to accept seeds saved from the previous year’s harvest and protected during the long winter from the damp and from hungry mice. It required faith and patience to watch these plants grow while weeds were pulled and water was carried in earthen jars to nourish the crop’s growth. The harvest with a manyfold increase in seeds brought joy and the promise of surviving another winter. Humans domesticated certain animals, and in return for a promise to protect them from predators and provide access to adequate forage received living storehouses of nutrition for use in times of want. Before either of these things occurred, humans ventured into the wilderness in search of prey, armed with weapons to help them overcome their prey’s advantages of strength, agility, or cunning. Hunting is one of the most basic instincts of humans.

When Peter Skene Ogden brought a brigade of Hudson’s Bay Company trappers to the Humboldt River in the 1820s, his hunters found no bison and very few mule deer.⁷ In fact, the band of professional hunters had trouble finding enough big game animals to feed the brigade. The only large grazer present in the vast sagebrush-covered valleys was the pronghorn, which the men complained was as tough as goat and tasted like sagebrush.

Another native animal that characterized the sagebrush landscapes and often tasted like sagebrush was the sage grouse. The first naturalist to be startled when a sage grouse exploded from beneath his feet was certain that he had discovered the western version of the turkey. The leaves of sagebrush are essential items in the diet of the sage grouse. Those privileged to stumble on a flock of sage grouse and watch them rise in a magnificent succession of slate gray waves from the silvery sagebrush canopy never forget the sight. In search of mates, sage grouse males strut their stuff on traditional leks each spring. Many a homesteader, cowboy, or prospector baked sage grouse in a cast iron Dutch oven and was grateful for the meal.

During the 1930s, hunting enthusiasts introduced the chukar partridge to the Great Basin.⁸ This native of Pakistan and Afghanistan was preadapted to survive in degraded sagebrush-grass rangelands dominated by cheatgrass. The chukar became the number one upland game bird in the Intermountain Area. Smaller than sage grouse, chukars are challenging birds to hunt. They rise from the sagebrush in a whir of wings beating so fast that the birds are a blur as they dive off the high ridges and glide into the distance. Once they land, the coveys scatter and the birds run with remarkable speed. Insanity is not a requirement to hunt chukar, but having the lungs and legs of a Sherpa is a distinct advantage. The first time you hunt chukars it is for the enjoyment of the sport; subsequent hunts are for revenge.

Hunting is a cherished tradition in the West. Each generation learns the skills and responsibilities of game hunting from the one before it. Hunting chukars is often the first hunting experience for young people in the Great Basin.

The boy jumped when his father touched his shoulder and told him to get out of bed; it was opening day of chukar season. He had not been able to sleep the night before because he was so excited. This would be his first “real” hunt. The pickup’s seats were cold in the predawn darkness even though it was only early October. Their bird dog eagerly jumped into the camper shell. The pointer would be too sore-footed to walk tomorrow, but today he was an eager participant in the quest for the elusive chukar. The boy had been going with his father on chukar hunts since he was big enough to walk, packing his toy shotgun and trying to remember to “shoot” when the birds broke cover. All the while he had been acquiring the knowledge essential for a hunter. All guns are considered loaded. You always know where your hunting partners are, and you never follow a bird toward another hunter. You eat what you kill. You do not repeat at the dinner table the stories Dad’s hunting buddies told.

The pickup’s headlights caught the nocturnal animal life of the high deserts. Kangaroo rats made a bipedal race to escape the onrushing vehicle. The stars were fading and the eastern horizon was beginning to show the first hint of dawn. The heater had finally warmed the truck cab. The boy’s anticipation had reached fever pitch. It was barely light when they let the bird dog out of the camper at the canyon bottom. Dad allowed one mad dash in a circle around the truck before he sternly brought the dog to heal. The dry big sagebrush released a pungent odor as they brushed against it and started up the steep slope. It was cold, but the steepness of the climb soon generated some warmth. Until the first fall rains increased the number of potential watering places, the birds were restricted to the few available springs, and Dad knew where the Department of Wildlife had installed a guzzler for chukars. He explained to his son that a guzzler consisted of an inclined roof that captured rainfall and channeled the runoff into a large tank buried under the shadow of the roof. An opening at one end of the tank and a ramp provided access to the water.

Just as the boy thought his lungs were going to burst and he could not lift his legs for another step they heard the chukar’s call. It started as a low-intensity chuck, chuck, chuck, given slowly with definite breaks between each call. As the intensity of the call rose, it changed to per CHUCK, per CHUCK, and this in turn gave way to CHUkar, CHUkar, CHUkar. The throaty chuck reverberated among the canyons and cliffs. Dad explained that the birds were greeting the sun as it touched the rim rocks.

The first time the dog came to point, the father gave his son a nod of reassurance. When the birds burst from the sagebrush, Dad hesitated long enough to give the boy a chance for the first shot. The .410 slammed against his shoulder before he had a chance to hold it tight, and he knew he had shot too soon. His bird continued in flight. Dad fired two quic...