The Refuge

By Susan J. Tweit

Dawn comes late to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on winter mornings. When the sun finally edges over the high ridges that crowd the town of Jackson and paints the Tetons pink, the huddled mounds studding the snow-covered meadows along Flat Creek finally come into focus as thousands of sleeping elk. They stir, shaking the hoarfrost from thick pelts with a clatter of antlers and flapping of ears. Plumes of breath rise from thousands of black nostrils, forming a shimmering cloud in the frigid air as the elk wait for breakfast to be served.

And soon it is: The growl of engines in low gear accompanies the sunlight as rubbertracked crawler tractors appear, pulling trailers loaded with 20 to 30 tons of alfalfa pellets across the snow. As a tractor approaches a group of elk, the driver opens a gate in the underside of the trailer, releasing a stream of green pellets.

The elk crowd flank to flank like so many dairy cows, lipping the pellets from the snow and pawing for more. When the pellets are eaten, some elk drift away to forage in the snow-covered landscape. Others hang out in groups, digesting their meal. As the first of the day's horse-drawn sleigh tours thread their way through the crowd of animals, a few bulls pick fights with each other, clashing racks while cameras record the scene.

This is the National Elk Refuge, nearly 25,000 acres of wet meadow, willow, and sagebrush flats, and aspen-studded foothills that are home to the largest winter concentration of elk in the world--up to 8,000 animals--along with some 1,000 bison. In summer, these same elk spread out into Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks as well as adjacent national forest lands. In fact, nearly all of Grand Teton's estimated 3,200 head of elk are completely dependent on this refuge every winter. When the refuge was established in 1912, the Jackson Hole elk herd was one of the few sizable herds left. Descendants of that herd helped restock habitat across the continent.

But this refuge is a landscape in crisis, according to Tim Young, former director of NPCA's field office in Jackson Hole. The winter feeding program has had serious unintended consequences, causing elk and bison herds to balloon beyond the size the landscape can naturally sustain. Their browsing has severely degraded the refuge's riparian and aspen habitat. Worse yet, the unnatural crowding essentially guarantees disease outbreaks. Chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurological disease in elk and deer, was recently found within 90 miles of the refuge, making it, in Young's words, "a nuclear bomb that could go off at any time."

How did the National Elk Refuge and Grand Teton National Park evolve from a safe harbor for the nation's largest remaining herd of elk to a threat to their descendants' survival? Slowly, over nearly a century of shifting wildlife management, land use, and public opinion.

By the early 1900s, ranch development at lower elevations had shifted winter elk migration patterns, leaving herds marooned in Jackson Hole's deep snows, where some elk began poaching hay from local ranches and many others starved to death. In 1910, the Wyoming legislature appropriated $5,000 to purchase elk feed, and in 1911, Washington, D.C., was asked to pitch in. Congress appropriated money for emergency feeding, and in 1912, additional funds to acquire land that would provide habitat for elk and other wildlife. By the late 1930s, the refuge had reached its present size of 24,700 acres, but the elk herd was still growing. Although Grand Teton encompasses more than 300,000 acres, very little of this area is suitable winter range, which means the annual migration to the refuge is crucial to the herd's existence.

Today, the refuge serves up compressed alfalfa pellets trucked in by the semi-trailer load. Refuge Manager Barry Reiswig says one elk consumes eight to ten pounds, or the equivalent of two coffee cans full of pellets a day, while bison eat 20 to 28 pounds. The crawler-tractor rigs haul 25 tons apiece--a semi-trailer load of feed--and dole out around two semi-loads of pellets each day for about 70 days a year. That's 2,100 to 3,500 tons of alfalfa pellets each winter, depending on the number of animals and length of the feeding season. What began as an emergency response is now the norm: Elk have been fed in all but nine winters since the program was initiated in 1910.

The herds drawn to the chow lines are a popular tourist attraction, one of the sights that bring an estimated 800,000 visitors to the National Elk Refuge each year, making it one of the most heavily-visited units of the National Wildlife Refuge system. Some 25,000 of these visitors take the daily sleigh rides to ogle elk and bison up close.

Maintaining a wildlife feed-ground hemmed in by a pricey resort town has serious drawbacks, including the cost of feed and the degradation of habitat for other species. But it's the crowding-induced threat of epidemics like chronic wasting disease that has biologists really alarmed, a threat that could devastate Grand Teton's elk herd and transmit fatal disease to Yellowstone National Park.

First observed in the late 1960s at Colorado State University's wildlife research pens, chronic wasting disease is the elk version of mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. All are transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, named for the sponge-like pattern of holes that consume affected animals' brains when typical protein molecules are altered into misshapen prions, which destroy the cells, alter other proteins, and spread the disease. Chronic wasting disease does just what its name suggests: Affected animals lose weight, become listless, and eventually waste to death. It's an ugly process, and there is no cure. Infected deer and elk are slaughtered--entire herds are destroyed when necessary.

Much about chronic wasting disease remains unclear, including whether the prions actually cause the disease or are simply byproducts of other disease agents. But new research shows that the disease is passed around through saliva and blood, most likely when animals nuzzle or groom one another. According to Dr. Tom Roffe, wildlife veterinarian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it's also clear that the disease is linked to the density of animal populations. Rates of infection in elk soar over 90 percent when animals are crowded into game farms and decline to single digits in free-ranging populations. Decreasing animal density to natural levels and allowing natural roaming patterns, Roffe and other biologists argue, is the best tool for reducing the impact of the disease. It's possible that the presence of predators such as wolves might disperse the herd and help control the disease, says Dr. Margaret Wild, wildlife veterinarian with the National Park Service; chronic wasting disease is not present in ecosystems like Yellowstone National Park, which reintroduced wolves more than ten years ago. This natural system of predators may even be starting to work in Grand Teton: Five wolf packs in and around the park are helping to restore a natural balance while providing magnificent wildlife viewing for park visitors.

The National Elk Refuge's winter feeding program has already experienced outbreaks of other density-dependent diseases, such as foot rot and brucellosis, a bacterial disease that results in spontaneous abortions in elk, bison, and cattle. This disease (first contracted from cattle) has already infected a portion of Grand Teton's elk herd. As with chronic wasting disease, brucellosis infection rates are low in free-ranging elk and much higher when the animals are crowded.

Because chronic wasting disease has been found in areas where elk often migrate after leaving the refuge, biologists agree that it's not a question of if the disease will reach the refuge but when. The scenario is not a pretty one. On the winter feed-grounds, elk begin to sicken and grow listless. They become gaunt and emaciated and eventually die--perhaps only a handful the first year. Within a few years, sick and dying elk are everywhere, scattered across Grand Teton and Yellowstone, for millions of visitors to see. And once that happens, the land will be contaminated indefinitely: Altered prions persist for generations; the pens where the disease was first discovered 40 years ago are still fatal to deer confined there.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department cooperatively manage the Jackson Hole elk and bison herds, and the two federal agencies are finishing the environmental analysis of a 15-year management plan. The thousand-page Environmental Impact Statement identifies the winter feeding program as the main cause of the refuge's biological issues, including habitat degradation, unnaturally large elk and bison herds, high levels of brucellosis infection, and the threat of deadly disease.

Despite detailed analysis based on eight years of research and comments from biologists and the public, the draft of the agencies' preferred alternative, slated to be formalized this winter, is a compromise that sidesteps rather than solves the problems. It would continue the winter feeding program and expand hay farming on the refuge, while maintaining elk and bison numbers at about twice what can be sustained by the natural habitat. It would "protect" a small portion of the most degraded habitat by erecting expensive bison and elk-proof fencing around 1,000 acres of aspen and several hundred acres of riparian habitat. And it would leave the elk herd vulnerable to chronic wasting disease.

If the biological issues that have turned the National Elk Refuge from a sanctuary to a landscape potentially fatal to elk, why not simply stop the winter feeding program?

Because there is strong pressure to continue, says Tim Young. Pressure from ranchers, who fear that if elk aren't corralled by the feeding program, they will spread out, eat the ranchers' hay, and infect their cattle. (Wyoming's cattle industry lost its brucellosis-free status in 2004.) Pressure from sportsmen and outfitters, who don't want to see elk numbers reduced. Pressure from the public, which doesn't want to see elk starve during a harsh winter.

It is apparently easier to condemn the nation's greatest elk herd to months on a reservation where they may be decimated by disease than it is to find ways to restore their natural habits and environment the way we have in Yellowstone, where elk, bison, and wolves co-exist and chronic wasting disease does not.

But change is coming, thanks in part to NPCA (see sidebar). Public comment on the draft Environmental Impact Statement, supported by NPCA's members and activists, strongly favors a shift to a more natural disease-resistant management regime. There is hope that the imminent decision from the Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service will heed the public's concern and improve the final record of decision. It's also encouraging that a few visionary ranchers have participated in the dialogue, in recognition of the fact that the occasional inconvenience of a plundered bale of hay is a small price to pay for the long-term consequences of a healthy livestock, and a viable elk herd that can thrive in the shadow of the Grand Tetons.

Susan J. Tweit began her career as a field ecologist studying sagebrush and grizzly bear habitat in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. She now writes for Audubon, Popular Mechanics, and Martha Stewart Living Radio.