In this very special donkumentary, we’re headed to the Mojave Desert — to Death Valley, in particular — where we find one animal at the centre of a heated debate in land management: the hardy wild burro (AKA donkey, ass, or Equus asinus).

These feral burros, beloved by some and reviled by others, are an introduced species in the desert southwest, but are uniquely entangled in its human history. Since before the establishment of Death Valley as a national monument, they have been widely regarded as overpopulated on the Mojave landscape. In recent years, rising costs, public controversy, and some conflicting legislation have brought the sustainability of conventional burro management into crisis.

But not everyone is convinced that they’re harmful. Could this crisis be avoided altogether if we looked at burros under a different light?

Are they crowding out the native and endangered fauna? Or are they filling an ancient ecosystem niche? Join us as we meet the land managers, ecologists, and donkey racers all trying to do right by the desert.

Find photos, credits, a transcript, and citations at futureecologies.net/listen/fe-6-3-get-yer-ass-outta-here

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You are listening to Season Six of Future Ecologies.

You two do look like some kind of long lost

siblings, I swear to God.

I don't think we looked this much alike last

time I saw you.

No, you didn't. You've gone through a variety of

hairstyles, which just tells you how long we've been

corresponding about this.

Yeah.

But you were definitely clean shaven before,

and, like, had much shorter hair. And now I'm just staring

at you and Mendel in the same room, and I'm like, the round

glasses, like the round John Lennon glasses...

I should put on my beanie.

Yeah, the mustache and beard combo with the long

hair.

Yeah I think basically any given facial

feature can be completely disguised by this combination.

It's like... "wow, you look like brothers!"... no not really at

all.

Are saying that like your your general

appearance is default disguise?

Yes! Yeah, yeah. It's like, we're wearing Groucho

Marx glasses all the time.

Exactly.

Well, now that we're all here together, should

we get our asses into gear?

Probably.

Probably...

So seriously, who are you and what are you doing

in our studio?

My name is Mendel.

What? Wait! No!!

Honestly, you could have fooled like probably

seven out of 10 people.

I don't know if our voices are that similar.

My name is Saxon Richardson. I am a filmmaker and a fan of

Future Ecologies, interested in a story about the feral donkeys

in the Mojave Desert. And on a nice rainy hike one day, I

think, mentioned it to Mendel. And some decade and a half

later, here we are.

Decade and a half. I mean, that's an

exaggeration.

I think it's been like, a couple years?

A couple years, yeah.

We do sometimes imply that it takes us a long

time to put episodes together, so our listeners understand

that, but this has been a particularly long time coming

in.

Yes, and I, Saxon not Mendel, will take

credit for that. I'm generally fairly slow moving with these

kinds of things, so appreciate you guys for pushing it along.

It matches our pace perfectly.

Great.

We're like a Mojave tortoise.

Exactly.

That is true. Slow is good. Slow is beautiful. And

That's our style.

it's funny, because we all live in this very wet and rainy

place, and yet we share this fascination for the exact

opposite of where we're living, like the polar opposite — the

desert. And I don't see any contradiction there. It's

amazing.

Yeah, I think definitely the fact that both

places exist inform my love for the other, and I love the Mojave

Desert. Everything that lives there I just have the utmost

respect for and admiration.

What is it that obsesses you about the Mojave

Desert?

Well, the plants are just incredible.

You've got my attention.

The walking and flying creatures that live

there are just incredible. There's a fascinating and

beautiful indigenous history and pioneer history, and it's so

varied and so starkly beautiful, and it's so big. Just imagine

looking over these sagebrush flats, and the flats slowly

slope up to the foothills of these crumbling mountains, and

the sun is setting and just kissing the tips of those

mountains. There's barely a breeze. It's so, so quiet.

...And then from just over the next ridge, you hear this...

HEE HAW HEE HAW HEE HAW!

I'm Mendel,

I'm Adam,

and from Future Ecologies, this is Get Your Ass

Outta Here!

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and asserted

territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh,

this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape of our world

through ecology, design, and sound.

So where are you taking us?

Yeah, where are we gonna start?

Let's start in what Edna Brush Perkins called

the White Heart of the Mojave, or you might know it as Death

Valley.

So when you hear the name Death Valley, you probably

think of desert, and Death Valley is the hottest place in

North America, the driest place in North America, and the lowest

place in North America. So if you think desert, that's

accurate, but it's also not complete. Death Valley is 3.4

million acres, about the size of the state of Connecticut, and

within that space are 14 mountain ranges. So we have salt

flats down at negative 282 feet, and telescope peak up at 11,049

feet. Right now we're standing at 5000 feet in Wild Rose

Canyon, and you can see that there are cottonwoods. There's a

spring here. This is lush habitat for wildlife.

This is Abby Wines. She's a spokesperson for

the National Park Service at Death Valley National Park.

So I guess I'll ask the obvious dumb question,

does anything actually live in Death Valley.

That's the thing. The native people that

live there don't refer to it as Death Valley. They call it

Timbisha, and it's not a place of death at all. If you look

closely, sometimes you don't even have to look that closely,

there's life everywhere. And it's surprising, and it's

creative, and it's resilient, and it's so, so impressive to

me. And maybe one of the most unexpected things you could find

living in Death Valley are burros.

One of the remarkable things about wild

burros is their sheer physiological adaptations for

living in such a harsh, dry place, traversing terrain that

is remarkably rugged. You'll see these animals, you'll see mother

burrows with their young, with their yearlings and their foals

down in the valley bottom in the middle of summer when it's 120

degrees Fahrenheit. These animals can withstand just

incredible heats.

This is Dr Eric Lundgren. He's an ecologist

and has worked a lot with feral donkeys.

And burros, by the way, are the same things as

donkeys, it's the Spanish word for donkey.

This is Amy Dumas. She is the program

manager for California's Wild Horse and Burro Program for the

Bureau of Land Management.

Yeah.

And I talked to her in Ridgecrest, which is

just outside of Death Valley National Park.

People are like, oh, burros are stubborn. Burros are

not stubborn. Burros are not horses. They are not little

horses with big ears. They do not behave like horses. When you

expect them to behave like horses and they don't, then you

think they're stubborn. Burros are very analytical, and they

don't want to do anything to put themselves in harm's way. You

just need to be around a donkey. It's kind of hard to put it into

words why these animals are so wonderful, but they really are.

They work their way into your hearts, huh? And I don't even

know who you are. Random donkey getting your ears rubbed. All

donkeys love having their ears rubbed. They just don't know it

until they have it done.

There's a lot to love about the desert, and

there's also a lot to love about burros. Here's Cindy and Craig.

They're a couple from Reno. Cindy's a vet and a farrier and

a trainer, and they spend a lot of time hiking through the

wilderness with their burros.

I just fell in love with them. They're so calm,

just being around them was calming, and they're just smart

but quiet. They could carry water, you know, for us and

them, but they could go all day and not cross a stream, and

they're fine. They can rehydrate themselves. Literally, I'm not

kidding. I'm not pulling your leg on this. They can lose about

30% of their body water, and they can drink enough water and

absorb it and rehydrate themselves back to normal in 10

minutes. So those reasons, they make great pack animals. And, oh

my gosh, you want to talk about sure footed? I don't care what

any — I love mules. We have mules. But if I'm going on a

trail and I know it's gonna be technical, I'm taking burrows,

Wow, so there's like a real bond here between

people and donkeys.

Totally.

It sounds like it runs really deep.

Yeah. And that's not the only thing that

runs.

... what do you mean?

Burro Race announcer: When you want to pass a donkey? Just say

runner on your right or on your left, whatever it is. Just don't

surprise them.

People run with their pack burrows. They

don't ride them. They run with them.

Burro racing's a peculiar sport.

So what's your plan when we get there?

Oh we're gonna do a little donkey whispering.

Sweet — excited to see it.

All right, let's get this show on the road.

My grandparents had donkeys, so I always loved

donkeys. And I love running, and once I find out that you can

actually run with donkeys, I mean, match made in heaven,

right?

Do you ever run without a donkey now?

I was a pretty competitive ultra runner, back

in my younger days, but yeah, for the last six years, I get my

competitive needs filled donkey racing.

It's such a fun sport. Once you do it, you're just

addicted.

Burro Race announcer: Alright, we have a few announcements

first, then we'll have a blessing of the donkeys. And

then we'll start all the long distance runners, the 17/18,

mile and the marathon all together. We'll line the donkeys

up in front. It's cool enough, I don't think we'll have any

problems with snakes, but be aware. Don't wear headphones.

And then repeat after me — if I get lost, hurt or die...

If I get lost, hurt or die...

Burro Race announcer: It's my own damn fault.

It's my own damn fault.

Burro Race announcer: Are you ready? Five, four, three, two,

one, [starting gun]

Couldn't imagine running by myself ever again.

It's just not worth it.

[Donkey snorts] God bless you.

Wow. So it sounds like basically nothing is

built for the Mojave quite like a burro.

Yeah. Donkeys thrive in this environment. They

evolved in the desert. But the problem, I guess, is that they

didn't evolve in this particular desert.

They're not native to North America. They were

animals that were brought in to work for people. And in this

area, in the Mojave Desert, they were mostly brought in by miners

— people using them as pack animals to carry their tools as

we went prospecting and scrambling all over these hills.

And generally, when their luck ran out and things didn't work

out for the miners, they just left the animals behind.

Of course, those days, the labor was not oil or

diesel or gas, but donkeys. And the miners felt some degree of

respect, so when they stopped using donkeys for this labor

because they had fossil fuels, trucks, or they stopped being

here because Death Valley National Park was created, they

let the donkeys go. And that's that's why they're here, sort of

just entangled in human history, like so many organisms are,

maybe all organisms are.

Saxon, where are donkeys originally from? Like,

where did they evolve?

The Sahara, baby — the Eastern Sahara, the

Horn of Africa. The crazy thing is that in their native range,

wild donkeys are critically endangered.

If you go back to North Africa, wild burros

were... before they became burros, before they became

domesticated, were a major part of those ecosystems. They've

since shrunk to a tiny population in Ethiopia, in the

wild, about 100 to 300 individuals. Of which wild

burros are the descendants, and very well may outlast the

pre-domestic ancestors of them, the African wild ass.

It's important to remember that these animals

have been domesticated for 1000s of years, and the domestic ass

is all over the place. And it's the offspring of those

domesticated asses that you'll find in the Mojave Desert. And

after these animals were released, they did a lot better

than anyone probably expected, and their population just grew

and grew and grew... until people started to get concerned.

Burros have been managed on and off in Death

Valley National Park since the park was first established as a

national monument in the 1930s. So starting in the mid 30s, the

National Park Service was shooting burros to reduce their

numbers, because of the concerns about their impact on the native

wildlife and landscape.

They started killing these donkeys. They

started shooting donkeys.

Yeah, and they did that for a long time, but

people usually don't really like when you shoot something that

looks like a horse.

The Park Service largely shied away from lethal

control, from shooting burros through most of the next few

decades. By the 90s, up until the early 2000s the main

technique were roundups. So mostly helicopter roundups,

bringing a helicopter, bring in some cowboys on the ground, try

to chase the burros into a pen and then capture them in the

pen, transfer them to a holding facility, such as the BLM

facility that is in Ridgecrest, California. Those roundups are

fairly expensive and very hard for the National Park Service to

get funding for. So from 2005 on, we had no Park Service

funding to support roundups. And around 2005 we think they were

as few as maybe 200 burros, just a few stragglers left in the

park. And I should mention that during some of those earlier

roundups, within a two year period, they rounded up 6000

boroughs from the park. So we think they had the numbers down

to about 200 by 2005 and then we did nothing, partly because the

problem looked like it was mostly solved, and partly

because we had no funding to do anything. Then the numbers just

started multiplying. In theory, burros can multiply at 25% per

year without effective predator control. So we don't know now

how many burrows are in the park.

But just because lethal control isn't a

thing anymore doesn't mean that the Park Service finds their

impacts acceptable. They see these animals as invasive, that

there's more of them than the ecosystem can handle.

All of the concerns that I've heard from...

I'll use the term constituents, but you know, people that I've

met across the desert over 45 or 50 years have been — boy, if

these donkeys were just where they're supposed to be, it would

be fine, but they're everywhere!

This is Dr Vernon Bleich. He was a biology

for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for decades,

and he specialized in the ecology of large mammals in the

desert southwest.

They're a novel creature in these ecosystems

that we are living in now, I would say, let's take care of

the native species that we have first.

And this perspective is widely shared by

land managers and biologists in the southwest, and officially

shared by the National Park Service.

The National Park Service as a whole, our

management policies state that we will minimize impacts from

invasive species, invasive non-native species. And so since

the National Park Service considers feral burros to be

non-native and invasive, our goal within Death Valley

National Park is to bring the population to zero. But why?

That's a piece of bureaucratic paperwork, but why is that

important? Concern is with a species that is not from an area

originally, when it comes into that area if it has some some

adaptation that allows it to survive a little bit better than

something else, even if it doesn't directly eat that thing

or kill that thing, it's probably displacing something

from its habitat.

And to help tell us about those impacts,

here's Laura Cunningham.

Laura!

So this is typical Mojave desert landscape.

This is a native shrub called Burro Bush, and it actually is

very edible to burros, and they have been kind of grazing it

down. You can see some of the old stems have been cropped off.

Savvy listeners might recognize Laura from our

Rangelands series.

Yeah, she's an artist and naturalist and a

biologist,

and currently work for Western Watersheds

Project, a nonprofit which seeks to restore wildlife and native

ecosystems.

And she took me on a little field trip to

Crater Flat, an area just outside of Death Valley National

Park, managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

And we are maybe 5 or 10 miles east of

Death Valley National Park. So we're in Nevada, and California

is right over there.

Of everywhere I went in my reporting, Crater

Flat had by far the most burros.

And there used to be bunch grasses here, like

rice grass, desert needle grass, and I don't see any of those.

Those are the ice cream plants, and they go first.

Laura told me that back in the day, one of the

primary grazers here was, surprisingly, the desert

tortoise.

There would have been hundreds of these

tortoises roaming around here each spring, when it's warm

enough. And they would just be eating the wildflowers, the

native grasses. They're almost gone. They're like, federally

listed as a threatened species because of all these impacts,

grazing, mining, solar projects, urbanization, you know, OHVs

running them over. So they're... they're like, headed towards

extinction. So that reptilian grazer has been replaced by the

mammal grazer, the burros.

And in her work as a tortoise biologist,

Laura told me about a time that she got to visit a nearby Air

Force bombing range, which is off limits to everyone —

tourists, cattle, offroad vehicles, and burros.

So I was the tortoise monitor to make sure

tortoises weren't harmed at the target, the live bombing

targets, I was authorized to pick tortoises up and move them

out of harm's way. But after living in the desert for

decades, I walked onto this military base, and it was like

stepping back into time, and it readjusted my baseline, because

there were tortoises everywhere. Everywhere. I was seeing dozens

a day. I was finding nests with eggs. I was finding tracks. And

it was just amazing. It was like the densest tortoise population

I've ever seen to this day. And it made me realize, Wow, we have

lost a lot. We've lost a lot of tortoises across the landscape,

because we all forget. I didn't know they could live that

densely in an arid Mojave Desert, but they can. We forget

about what happened 100 years ago or 50 years ago, and then we

think that this is the new normal. Like, the ground should

be bare, there should be herds of donkeys. There should be no

tortoises, because we didn't remember seeing that a couple of

years ago. And that's where your baseline has shifted, and you've

completely forgotten 500 years ago this was a tortoise

paradise.

So burros compete with native species like

tortoises for forage, but they're maybe more widely known

for their impacts on probably the most valuable resource in

the Mojave Desert... water.

Here's Vernon again

we have been very, very cognizant of the role

that water distribution plays in the distribution of feral

donkeys. Donks go to water. If there's water there, they will

There are some springs that are so heavily used

find it.

by feral donkeys that it almost looks like a bomb has exploded

there. Owl's Hole spring is one of them. If you go there, all it

is is a small pool of water surrounded by mud filled with

hoof marks and burro poop.

This is a beautiful illustration of what's

called the piosphere — P, I, O, S, P, H, E, R, E, the piosphere

— which is, the closer you get to a water source, the bigger

the impacts from the grazing animals. So cattle cause this,

sheep, and these feral donkeys. You have the ground, in

concentric circles around the water source, denuded and

trampled, littered with dung. And the animals have to

gradually walk farther and farther to find grass and

forage. So this is a common occurrence in the West, but in

this case, it's an example of feral donkeys creating this kind

of a blowout zone around the water.

So do you remember in your Home on the

Rangelands series how you talked to Dr. Robert Beschta?

I remember Bob.

He's probably best known for his work studying

the effects of the reintroduction of wolves into

Yellowstone National Park. And he told me something that might

not surprise you — that if you have too many burros in a

riparian area, their impacts are going to be pretty similar to

having a lot of cattle

Where I see springs that have been heavily utilized,

the soils are churned, species diversity just drops

dramatically. And they're being trampled. They're being eaten.

It becomes much more of a simplified ecosystem site there,

as far as the vegetation goes, and the soil churning can be

quite dramatic. Hoofed animals walking in these wet sites just

turns everything upside down. It's pretty impressive the

amount of impact that they can have.

And so all these burros eating and drinking

has crowded out not only the Mojave desert tortoise, but

another iconic species... the desert bighorn sheep.

Desert tortoise and desert bighorn you

know, they actually have a lot of similarities in terms of the

things that impact them, a lot of overlaps in their ecology. So

I make this joke a lot of times, that desert tortoise are pretty

much desert bighorn, just lower and slower.

This is Dr. Christina Aiello. She's a

biologist who's worked with desert tortoise as well as

desert bighorn sheep, and her work tends to focus on spatial

ecology.

Spatial ecology, I would say, is about

considering kind of where animals are in space, how they

move through space, which areas are they using, which areas are

they not using, what resources are they targeting, and how that

fits into their behavior, their distribution, and how they

interact with other species. So the thing about the desert is

it's a basin and range ecosystem. So you have these

really flat valleys and interspersed mountain ranges,

these really, you know, stark and massive, steep, gnarly

looking mountains that just pop out of these low desert flats.

And these steep, gnarly slopes are where

desert bighorn sheep are most at home.

There used to be like a really large

population of bighorn sheep in these mountains. And burros are

kind of aggressive and dominant and will keep the bighorn away

from their native springs, where the bighorn also need to drink.

Just the physical presence of the burros drives bighorn sheep

away. So that's happened a lot in Death Valley National Park, I

think, and that's why a lot of land managers you know want to

try to remove the feral donkeys from parklands.

And just because the roundups that are

happening today are non-lethal, doesn't mean they're not still

highly controversial. Because, as you might have guessed,

reducing the burro population is a pretty divisive topic.

You know, there's a lot of opinions on both sides,

and much of it is opinion. There are moves right now to limit the

use of helicopters in roundups. Even today, there are people

saying, oh it's horribly inhumane to use a helicopter to

round up these animals. I've never heard anyone say, oh, it's

inhumane to round up or catch a bighorn sheep with a helicopter.

So there's a great deal of emotion involved, and it's

driving everything that happens. It really is.

At this point, I should say that burrows aren't

the only introduced feral equid running wild over the desert

southwest. There's also wild horses. Between horses and

burros, there's some similarities in their impacts

and some differences in their temperament and preferred

habitat. But by and large, burros simply haven't received

the same amount of research attention, so we can't say

nearly as much about them with certainty.

Hmm... more hay has been made about horses.

Yeah, but their fates have been linked in

another way, and that's through the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and

Burros Act of 1971... if you wouldn't mind putting a little

patriotic music under there, that would be great.

This Act basically defines wild horses and burros, an introduced

species, as a symbol of our western heritage, and therefore

they should be protected –

on US Forest Service and BLM lands.

But...

it does not apply to the National Park Service.

So this has resulted in two government

agencies, each managing huge swaths of public land, having

conflicting mandates. The BLM manages for certain herd sizes

in certain areas, and due to their concern about impacts on

native ecosystems, the Park Service manages for a burro

population of zero.

It becomes very challenging because we are an

island surrounded by other federal lands.

So the burros, if they're all eliminated from

the park, these BLM burros can walk back in there and

repopulate.

Right now where we're sitting, we're right at

the boundary between a Bureau of Land Management horse management

area for wild burro and National Park land where they're not

supposed to be. And I don't know where the boundary is, and the

burros definitely don't know where the boundary is. It's the

same landscape.

Which also ultimately means that even with

our hoped for upcoming roundups, if we were to magically get the

population actually down to zero, it would be zero for what,

three months? Two days? I don't know.

As in so many areas, the federal government is

of multiple minds and has multiple agencies that are not

always pulling in the same direction at the same time.

Exactly. So the donkeys gathered on BLM

lands go into government managed corrals and then are offered up

for adoption. The donkeys gathered in Death Valley

National Park are gathered by a Texas based non-profit called

Peaceful Valley donkey rescue. They get trapped, they get

loaded up into a trailer, and they get trucked to Texas, and

then are offered up for adoption.

Wait, you're saying that I could adopt a wild

ass?

If you're 18 years or older and have proper facilities

and experience, you can adopt one of these animals. Now keep

in mind, these animals are wild and untouched, so you are not

getting something that is halter trained. They're very

affectionate animals, and they love attention.

And these adopted burros are exactly the

ones that might end up running in, I don't know, pack burro

races. Some folks like Craig and Cindy are almost collectors.

We have two mustangs, a pony, two mini

mules, three mammoth donkeys, and... 12 burros.

Yeah.

You should never have just one burro. They're social

animals. They do much better in a small herd,

but the rate of burro removal has largely

outpaced the rate of adoption, so the majority of gathered

burrows won't end up in private care.

So does that mean there's like burro orphanages?

I think that the government just feeds them

forever, which, due to rising costs and capacity issues, is a

management strategy that's looking less and less

sustainable.

So I guess to summarize from everything you've

told us so far, Saxon, we've got a desert — a sensitive

ecosystem. We've got some pretty cool species that live within

it, that are at risk. And then we have this big, introduced

ungulate that lacks any natural population control, seemingly,

and so is reproducing rapidly and eating the available forage

and monopolizing the water and causing all kinds of problems.

It seems like a fairly straightforward invasion biology

story, right? And so I guess I'm wondering like, is there more to

the story?

Well, that invasion biology story, it's not

a perspective that everybody shares. Things are about to get

controversial... after the break.

[Running with donkey] Passin' on your left.

Hey, I'll keep it quick. This podcast takes a

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like what we're doing, please support us at

patreon.com/futureecologies. Thanks.

Okay, once again, I'm Mendel,

I'm Adam,

and we're here with Saxon Richardson, who's

taking us on a little trip to the Mojave Desert.

To Death Valley in particular, and telling us a

story that, on its surface looks like a classic tale of invasion

biology, but which he is about to complicate, or so I'm told.

Right. So there's this crisis in feral

burro management. The general public doesn't want to see them

The way I look at it is that if we want to

come to any harm or even removed from the landscape, but most

understand these organisms, maybe any pest species, any

ecologists agree that there are way too many, and it's becoming

species at all, we gotta study them from what they are — as

increasingly expensive and impractical to gather and corral

wildlife. If we study them as some kind of idea of an invasive

them forever. But what if this crisis could be avoided

species, you're not going to find out much about them,

altogether, maybe by looking at burros under a different light?

because everything you see, you're going to interpret in the

Here's Dr. Erick Lundgren.

metaphor of invasion. I mean, of course, there's great invasion

biologists, but the metaphor has a tendency to simplify these

things into good and evil narratives. And the very simple

way this happens is that you go out and you show that wild

burros reduced plant cover by X percent at some place, and then

you say, because they reduce X percent plant cover, they

clearly are having negative impacts on the ecosystem. Now

contrast that to how we might study bison, where we go out,

and we show that they reduce plant cover, but we don't

interpret it as negative effects. We interpret it as how

they influence the ecosystem. They're large herbivores.

Reducing plant cover is what large herbivores do. Gotta eat.

A lot of invasion biology literature, all it needs to do

is show that the organism has a metabolism, that it takes up

space, that it exists, and they can prove their point that it's harmful.

I think everybody who's interested in the west or in

wild lands in general, and in the effects of big animals on

these wild lands should go to Africa. Africa is one of the

places on earth that these big animals did not go extinct from

human hunting at the end of late Pleistocene. Which means we see

systems the way they were for millions of years, which is not

what our idyllic version of nature is in North America,

where nature is the quiet, pristine spring where it's

undisturbed with a secretive deer. No, it's loud. It's loud

and it's chaotic. There's poop everywhere. There are trees

knocked down. It is a vibrant place, with these giant animals

of a diversity of species influencing the world.

Erick points to all the herbivorous megafauna

that used to roam North America, diverse species like ground

sloths, mammoths, camels and ancient equids, the ancestor of

modern horses and burros. They lived here for 35 million years,

up until about 12,000 years ago. He claims that modern burros may

be filling a similar ecosystem niche to these long extinct

megafauna and today's elephants in Africa.

One of my first field jobs out here was in an

area with wild burros — who reminded me so much of being in

Africa, the way they moved across the landscape, the way

I can tell you one example of what they do to

they acted.

So I should mention that of all the people I

spoke to, Erick is the only one who's specifically researching

burros in the field. And one of his papers, which was published

in the journal Science in 2021... well, it made quite a

splash. Here's Bill Lee, a veteran pack burrow racer, to

explain Erick's findings,

actually help some of the wild creatures survive. A burro's

senses are so acute that they will go down to a wash or a draw

— a low spot, like maybe right down here where we're comin' to.

And they will walk up that wash or draw, or down it, and they

will stop, and they will start digging with their hooves. And

lo and behold, you know what they find? Water. They can smell

it in a sense, evaporating up through the sand. They'll get

their drinks and move on. And what other animals move in? The

desert animals that are having a hard time surviving if they

can't find water.

A lot of systems in Africa only have water

because elephants are around, elephants that are able to dig

to great depths to expose groundwater. And every species

in these systems that requires drinking water, which is a lot

of species, humans included, require these features to live

in these landscapes. And it was immediate when I came out here

of seeing that for myself, that indeed, surface water in these

systems is extraordinarily limited, and it's primarily

found in areas where these animals, wild burros are

impacting these sites. The wild burros need water, so they go

into these springs. They make trails and they dig pools to get

surface water. And if you go to places where there aren't wild

burros, if you go nearby to other parts of the park, or even

within the same spring system, you'll find no surface water.

You're in a willow forest, a jungle. There's tons of ground

water right under the surface, but it's very, very hard to get

to because the burros have not dug to it. Sometimes you have to

dig about a half meter to get to water. Other times, you have to

clear two meters of dead vegetation to get to it. This is

something the burros are very good at doing, and they'll do it

readily and easily, and in doing so, they increase the surface

water availability in these areas. What's really remarkable

is when you go to a spring that doesn't have wild burros, and

it's beautiful and it's beautiful, it's a vision of

nature that many of us adore. It's tranquil, it's full of

vegetation, and it's dead silent. You won't hear any

breeding birds, you won't hear any frogs. Burros change these

wetlands, increase surface water availability, which tends to

increase, or seems to increase, birds and bats and other

animals. This place, all of that water is being used by these

plants, and it's quite a diverse, beautiful plant

community. We have clematis, this cristanothamnus, willows,

but this place is still beautiful. It's not better or

worse for the lack of water. It's just different.

Now, Erick's study for this well digging

paper was conducted mostly in the Sonoran Desert, which

generally has different hydrology than the Mojave. But

in both places, he asserts that burros increase the available

surface water, either by digging down into these sandy washes or

by bush-bashing through piles of overgrown vegetation.

And the real weird thing is that this

behavior happens in many, many places. It's quite common in

areas where you can dig to water, but had never been

described in the scientific literature with horses or burros

in their introduced range, which kind of set me down a rabbit

hole of questioning what we think we know and what we value.

It looked to me like we were describing only stories that

confirmed our worldview that these animals were harmful to

something or another, however we wanted to define harm, as long

as it supported our view that burros did not belong on the

landscape,

But not everybody is convinced about the

benefits of well-digging donks that Erick documented. Here

again is spatial ecologist Dr Christina Aiello. She and

several colleagues, including Vernon Bleich, penned a letter

in response to Erick's 2021 paper.

Myself and my colleagues, our main problem

with this study was not, you know, not that the research was

done, not that, you know, the data was collected. It was about

the story told around the data. And in that study, I think it

was kind of a small scale, focused on just a couple

particular areas in the desert where you have this unique

situation, where you have a dry wash resource, where there's

actually groundwater underneath, and there were surface water

available at those sites. But the behavior of burros to dig

and create more pools of available water from that water

resource is kind of a rare situation. And I think even in

that paper, they mapped out where those types of washes

occur in the landscape, and it really isn't a prevalent

condition. So I just don't think that that behavior is having the

large scale positive impacts that were kind of presented. And

there are so many other studies that counter with a lot of

evidence of negative impacts to a lot of native species. Feral

burro do have impacts on springs, and the vegetation

that's there, and the soils around springs. I think that's

fairly conclusive. By reducing the vegetative cover and

increasing the amount of open water, that may actually be a

positive for certain species. So things like native fish that

require kind of more open water habitats. We shouldn't ignore

that. And when we're deciding the management priorities, if

the preservation of that habitat for that fish is really a goal,

you need to consider that in your feral burro management.

Where we need to be careful, though, is then viewing those

results in the context of everything else we've observed

about the species. You know, I do think a lot of the research

that has been done on negative impacts, it is pretty old. It

doesn't mean it isn't valid, but I do think we need to keep

gathering data.

Speaking of gathering data, this 2021 paper

wouldn't be the last time Erick's research revealed

something new about burros in the desert southwest. I spent a

good bit of time with him, going from spring to spring in the

remote Mojave where he's been putting camera traps and audio

recorders to better understand how burro activity affects the

biodiversity of these watering holes.

I put camera traps on these wells, these, you

could also call them assholes that these wild ass dig.

Did he just call his study sites assholes? Oh my

god.

And sure enough, every species you can imagine is

coming in and drinking. Birds are coming in and drinking,

bobcats and mountain lions, and toads, deer and bighorn sheep,

coyotes, even coatis and ringtailed cats. And there's not

too few times where I've needed to drink out of those wells.

And by some weird stroke of luck, on a

camera that had fallen down and ended up pointing in the wrong

direction, he caught something that had never been seen before.

That a mountain lion had killed a wild burro —

caught it in mid-kill with, its arms wrapped around a burro's

head — which had never been documented before, never

described in the literature, was hotly denied by the Bureau of

Land Management and the National Park Service that there was any

predation.

Since that first discovery, Erick's been

noticing the remains of wild burros, freshly killed by

mountain lions, pretty much every time he goes on site to

visit — their bones decomposing quickly in the hot and wet

environment of these desert springs. And by looking closer

at where mountain lions are and are not hunting burros, he's

come to a new understanding. That active predator pressure

changes how the burrows behave around these springs,

These camera traps, these trail cameras

allowed me to quantify how active donkeys were at these

sites, these sites with mountain lions and without mountain

lions, and the differences are stark. Sites with mountain

lions, these animals, these donkeys, are coming in only in

the middle of the day when ambush risk is low because they

can see well, and they're only coming in for around 40 minutes,

leading to minimal impacts on these places. They're still

coming in anddigging to water and maintaining surface water,

but then they're getting the hell out. And this is on the

hottest days, super hot days where, if you could, you'd be in

a swimming pool — over 35 Celsius, so in the hundreds. And

there'll be tons of birds, and there'll be a big pool of water

in the middle of the wetland around the side that's dug into

the ground with a single trail to it, in an otherwise intact

riparian forest of willows and other plants. At sites without

mountain lions, which are primarily at campgrounds, burros

were there all day and all night. For eight hours a day on

those same hot days, just hanging out in the water, eating

everything, trampling everything. And it's really

important to know that those are the sites that the National Park

Service sees on their daily rounds. These are the sites that

the tourists primarily see because there's no mountain

lions there, because they're there. It's right by the roads,

right by the campsite. Which can lead to a really myopic view of

way burros influence ecosystems.

Okay, so if I have this straight, Erick is

saying there's basically three conditions for the springs you

find in the Mojave.

Totally.

The ones without burros, which end up getting so

overgrown that nothing can get a drink. The ones that have burros

but don't have mountain lions, so the burrows end up trampling

and grazing everything and pooping everywhere. And then the

ones that I guess you call the kind of the Goldilocks springs,

where there are both burros and mountain lions.

And plants, and birds, and bats, and all

sorts of other creatures. Exactly. But Erick raises

another point. What if the whole rationale behind the need to

remove burros from the landscape, which is because of

their overpopulation, is actually founded on a faulty

premise?

One of the justifications the National Park

is using here in Death Valley for these removals is a

population figure that they have for how many wild burros are in

the park. This population figure, which is about, if I

remember correctly around 3000 burros, is not based on actual

data about how many burros there are. It's an extrapolation from

about the 200 that were here in the early 2000s. How do they

extrapolate this? Well, they took a percent annual growth

rate of the population from papers of about 20%. That number

comes from systems where, almost certainly, mountain lions have

been eradicated or heavily controlled. So it's almost

certainly not accurate in this system where mountain lions are

actually heavily hunting wild burros. Now, luckily, there are

other papers. There's a paper from not far from Death Valley

in the White Mountains of California that showed that

cougar predation, mountain lions predation, was completely

regulating a horse population, a wild horse population. Mountain

lions were eating every single foal every single year, leading

to a population growth rate at zero. And I honestly wouldn't be

surprised if that is possible in Death Valley. If we limited the

places where burros were safe from Mountain Lion predation —

these campgrounds. If we fenced off springs at campgrounds, I

suspect that burro population growth rates would stabilize or

decline. Which is really interesting, because for

decades, people had said that wild burros and wild horses

don't have predators, and therefore their populations need

to be controlled.

He even suggests that outside of Death

Valley, certain management actions involving mountain lions

may be having some unintended consequences.

Mountain lions are heavily persecuted. People

hunt them for fun in Arizona, and then the Arizona Game and

Fish Department and others kill them whenever they eat bighorn

sheep, to try to increase bighorn sheep population

numbers. And so as soon as a mountain lion kills two sheep,

biologists go out and kill that mountain lion. Mountain Lion, of

course, are also eating burros. So it's unclear to what extent

those types of management activities which are aimed at

increasing bighorn sheep populations, may be

inadvertently affecting wild burros.

But once again, Erick's scientific

opinion is far from the consensus. Here's Christina.

I'm not too surprised to see patterns

emerging where we now see native predators consuming feral burro.

You know, you put a prey resource on the landscape and

give an animal enough time and if it has the ability to consume

it, I'm not surprised that they are. But do I think that that

interaction is enough to control feral burro populations? No. I

think the places in which those two species overlap is too small

and is just not proportional to the spatial scale that feral

burro occur and where they're having impacts on the landscape.

So even if you have mountain lions consuming feral burro

around spring sites, in particular mountain ranges where

there's enough varied topography to have mountain lions present,

you have burro occurring all the other spaces where there are not

mountain lions. So to think that that interaction is going to

control the huge populations of feral burro that we see on the

landscape, I just, I just don't think it's reasonable.

Okay, so basically, she's saying that the

mountain lions in Death Valley rely on the landscape to stay

hidden so that they can ambush their prey.

Exactly. Christina believes that there

are just too many springs in open places where the donkeys

would naturally feel safe, safe, to drink, to graze and trample

to their heart's content. But in response, Erick, in typical

maverick form, has another idea.

One solution to that, of course, would be to

prioritize the protection and recovery of wolves in this area.

Gray wolves can live in a range of habitats if there's prey

available. In the Middle East, they live in the desert —

deserts just as hot and dry as Death Valley, and they could

almost certainly live here, if there were things to hunt. Given

that there's wolves not that far away, you could think maybe

instead of a zero burro policy, we took a really radical and

progressive approach and made Death Valley a wolf sanctuary.

Wouldn't that be wild? Wouldn't that be interesting?

What you'll hear from the majority of

scientists and land managers, however, is much more cautious.

I think the data that that scientists like

Erick Lundgren has collected is valuable and it's something to

consider, but I think we should be careful in how we then tell

that story and interpret that data and extrapolate it out to

the wider desert ecosystem, because I do think there's

limitations to where we're going to see those types of

interactions. You don't assess these impacts in isolation.

Likewise, here's Dr. Vernon Bleich, who

served on the National Wild Horse and Burro advisory board.

I don't dispute any argument that there were

North American horses. They evolved here, and they also

became extinct here. So did wooly mammoths, and, you know,

giant cave bears and other creatures. Extinction is part of

life, if you will. That sounds a little bit dumb, but it is. And

to make the argument that, well, we can go back in time and

re-establish a system that we think existed without

re-establishing it completely is a falsehood. It's a pipe dream.

I think that the vast majority of ecologists across North

America and perhaps in the world, would make the argument

that these are not, quote, unquote a native species. They

had come, been here and gone. I think that taking care of what

we have right now is a much higher priority than trying to

restore what might have existed 12,000 or 15,000 years ago,

And for their part, the Park Service has yet

to be convinced to change their policies. Here again is Abby

Wines, spokesperson for Death Valley National Park.

As a land manager, our job is to manage the land,

and we look at research to do that, but mostly the National

Park Service doesn't do research. We give permits and we

enable research. So we're excited about research done by

folks like Dr. Lundgren that have an alternate point of view.

We'd love to see all of the research continue so that the

impacts of burros are clearly understood. However, our goal is

to continue with what we consider to be the safest path,

which is protecting the native plants and animals in this park

by removing non-native species. It may seem rather arbitrary

when you think about a specific point in time if we say that

we're trying to keep this spot static the way that nature was

before Americans started colonializing this area. But you

have to draw a line somewhere, and the greater purpose behind

all of this is not about keeping time in a bottle. That's not the

point. The point is about preserving the diversity of this

planet, keeping all the special uniqueness that is what's

characteristic of each place.

Well Saxon, this has been a very strange and

delightful tale.

Donks.

Mendel, what do you make of all of this?

Hmm, I'm so fascinated by what Erick was

saying about how we see, what we expect to see in this animal,

and how important it is to challenge those preconceptions,

and what I hear from him is a really interesting proposal for

non intervention

For decades, what we call land management,

which I find a problematic term, has been rooted in this idea

that we can control and fix every solution with poison or a

bullet or a fence. We can control wildness — non-human

organisms. A different paradigm is to try to find a way for

systems to drive themselves, to be self sustaining, to be

dynamic, to be resilient.

And to that end, I hear him advocating for us to

respect the sovereignty of different species, the agency of

different species.

When species can do what they wish, they're going

to go to where they're optimal, and the system is going to

respond dynamically to change. If we control it and try to keep

it in one static place, we're going to be doing that based on

our vision of how it should be, which is not as fast or aware or

cognizant of what's actually happening in the world. Do you

think we can plan a future Earth when the climate is hotter? No,

but wild plants and animals can. They will go where they want to

be, and in doing so, maintain ecosystems. And so I think

wildness is actually the way the world works. I think it's the

core ingredient to ecosystems, to the dynamism and resilience

of ecosystems.

How about you, Adam?

What do I think?

Yeah.

Oh my god.... oh, I feel like this is like so many

other issues that I actually face as a land manager. You have

a situation where you just don't have enough resources to carry

out the kind of management that you think is best. And there are

also doubts. But at the end of the day, I I do sympathize with

the National Park Service. I think they're in a tough

position here. And if it were up to me, I would probably try to

manage this species at least where there was obvious conflict

with the values that the Park Service is trying to uphold.

If I was put in charge of managing feral

burros and deciding how we limit them, you know what information

we use to decide thresholds and end goals, I'd probably quit.

It's an incredibly complicated situation. There's a lot of

political and social pressure, because the reality is, feral

burros, feral horses, this species in general, is a very

smart, charismatic creature. I mean, if you talk to any

biologist, I don't think anyone really wishes harm to these

animals. Thinks that they're evil and should be wiped off the

planet. Honestly, their presence and their impacts here are our

fault. And just leaving this management problem to continue

to grow and become worse and worse, I think is, is where we

failed the species. And I do think that some kind of control

measure is definitely warranted. We've seen the negative impacts,

and I think without substantial natural controls, like predators

on the landscape, it's just going to continue to be a

sustained problem. So now it's up to us to figure out, alright,

we've let these species kind of run amok on the landscape. They

are intelligent creatures. A lot of people care about them. What

do we do?

And what about you, Saxon? You've spent so much

time out in the desert with these scientists, and especially

with Erick, how do you feel about the wild asses of Death

Valley?

I don't know. I can't say that I've landed. I

think there is a place for these animals on this landscape, I

think they have as much of a right to be there as we do. I

also don't think it is so cut and dry as they're positive or

they're negative. To paraphrase Erick, it's not necessarily good

or bad, it's just different.

You know, natural is the other

countercurrent in conservation of what we value — something

natural. But the problem with natural is that everything is

natural. There's no opposite to the natural, except for the

supernatural, and that's just the limit of knowledge and

understanding of familiarity. There's no opposite to natural,

but there is an opposite to wildness, and that's control.

Oh, I love how complicated it is, like we try

to come up with one answer, and it's not possible.

It's not possible. There's no one answer. There's

no right answer. And that's about everything. So many humans

think they know the right way. Lot of people different opinions

about different things, and I'm not one to say which is the best

of which is right.

We just keep learning.

Just keep learnin'

Keep going. There you go. You're getting off the wheel

of the rope... there you go. Really good. You can say easy.

Easy, Tita.

There, now try and stop her. Say easy.

Easy, easy.

Good job. Well done. Good stop. So why do we practice

stopping? It's because when you want to stop, you want it to

work.

Yes.

Alright, so we practice our stopping all the

time when we're building a relationship with a donkey. All

right, let's ask her to go again when you're ready.

Alright, Tita, are you ready? Come on, hup hup. hup

hup!

She's doing good.

Gotta build a relationship with your ass to make memories.

This episode of Future Ecologies was reported by

Saxon Richardson, and produced by Mendel Skulski and Adam

Huggins, with music by Aiden Ayers and our theme by Sunfish

Moon Light. You heard the voices of Abby Wines, Erick Lundgren,

Amy Dumas, Christina Aiello, Laura Cunningham, Bob Beschta

and Vernon Bleich, plus all the pack burro racers, including

Bill Lee, Brad Wann and Cindy Nielsen. Special thanks to Karin

Usko, John Auborn, Amy Kazymerchyk, and Graham Landin.

You can find some of Saxon's incredible photography of Death

Valley, along with citations and a transcript of this episode on

our website — futureecologies.net

And as always, this show is brought to you by our amazing

community of supporting listeners. Become one yourself

and get all the perks at futureecologies.net/join

If you like what we're doing, leave us a rating, a review or a

comment wherever you're listening. Better yet, tell a

friend. You could even drop some donkey knowledge on your next

conversation. Okay, till next time, stay wild.