Capturing Wild Burros

"Valley" on the Arizona bank. The spot, in a rugged creosote desert of amethyst-tinted foothills that cordons the river, lies a mile upriver from Lighthouse Rock, so named by 19th-century explorers for its unusual shape. There are no roads. Captured burros must be ferried downriver on a motor scow.

The government ordered the roundup to reduce the burro population, estimated at 750, in a herd-management area that includes the refuge, a riparian preserve managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for waterfowl but also used by desert bighorn sheep. The burros enjoy federal protection, too, but when their numbers exceed the limited food and water supply, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management thins the herd and offers the captured burros for public adoption.

Summer is the best time to catch burros in Arizona, "when it's dry and the burros are bunched up near the river for water," explains Roger Oyler, BLM wild horse and burro specialist at Yuma. "In winter, when it's cooler, they're spread out, and it's harder to catch them."

The burros along the Colorado bear a distinctive black cross across the withers. They are usually gray with black hash marks on the fetlocks, standing four feet at the shoulders, and lean the feral offspring of donkeys released or lost by Spanish explorers, miners, soldiers and ranchers. They have no natural predators and will chase coyotes, mountain lions and even wild stallions. A 1971 federal law protects them from being captured, harassed or killed.

Oyler chose as the location for the trap a spot where burros had broken through a thick screen of arrowweed and screwbean mesquite to reach the river. "We hope to catch 50 to 65 here," he says. He live-traps burros one or two at a time in the area and knows their habits. He counts on them to flee toward familiar terrain, ahead of the drivers. Cook and Vietnam War chopper pilot Cliff Heaverne of Fallon, Nevada, who partner for these roundups, are old hands at catching wild burros and horses throughout the West for the government. They waste no time today starting after more.

Two miles farther upstream, Heaverne and Chester M. Ugalde, a mechanic and pilot, begin herding another band of seven toward us. The helicopter weaves and pirouettes like a giant dragonfly 30 feet off the desert, dusting the burros with downdraft, driving them into the V-shaped mouth of the trap that leads to the catch pen.

The trap closes, but there's a commotion. A big jack finds a weak point in the catch pen, thrusts his head under a section of railing and lifts it high enough to crawl under and out before the cowboys can stop him. It's like watching money run off. Oyler and Cook pile their weight onto the loose railing, just in time to stop a jenny from following the escaped jack.

Cook mops his brow. "They're the kind that will bite you," he warns the cowboys.

Two years before, during a roundup of 250 burros across the river near Draper Cabin, in California, a jack grabbed one of Cook's cowboys by the leg and hurled him over its back. Then the burro struck again, nearly severing the man's right ear.

Cook recalls: "I said, 'Did he bite you?' And that's when the blood started flowing."

"He wasn't hurt bad," says Cook's wife Karen, who helps with the roundups. "The blood dried and held the ear in place." The cowboy, she says, recovered fully.

The captured burros stand calmly in their pen. But Cook's warning reverberates, and I decide not to join Utah cowboys Rhett Jolly, of Roosevelt; Billy Jackson, of Vernal; and Mark Boren, of Neola, when they climb into the pen to push and shove freshly caught burros down a chute to a loading area on the riverbank.

One of the burros, I notice, is an old campaigner, a jack with the tips of his long ears chewed to tatters and his hide hideously scarred from fighting. He lashes out with a double-barreled kick at a jenny crowding him. "That's right, assert your dominance!" Oyler yells to him. The jack looks like an accident hoping to happen, but, finally, he surrenders..

We built the trap the day before. A 30-foot motorized scow with a drop-bow hauled us 26 miles upriver from the refuge headquarters at Martinez Lake, 7 miles upstream from Imperial Dam.

In sweltering heat, we lifted 50-pound sections of steel corral panels into place, then drove steel fence posts to hang the jute netting. We also brought a pump and fire hose to cool the horses and cowboys after a chase.

Aggressive horseflies attacked everyone. Boatman Ron Knowlton of Yuma stumbled into a hornets' nest. The water in my canteen came out hot. There was almost no shade. Photographer Don B. Stevenson stored his film in an ice chest to prevent heat damage.

We could hear the burros as we worked. They keep in touch by braying loudly, a honk often ending with an inhaled whistle. Miners called them "desert contraltos." They're also known as "desert canaries." In cowboy parlance, they're "donks," short for donkey, the English term for the Spanish "burro."

"The jute won't be hung until tomorrow," Oyler explained. "Otherwise the burros would come down at night, smelling around, and figure out they can go right through it. In the morning," he assured, "they'll think it's a wall." I hoped he was right.

The roundup started early. We chugged upriver in pre-dawn darkness with the aluminum scow settled deep in the turgid lower Colorado under the weight of four saddled cow ponies. Nighthawks circled and dipped over the river at dawn, exacting retribution against the hordes of mosquitoes that had attacked us unseen in the predawn darkness.

The burros were driven into the trap in bands of three to nine. By the time the scow returned 90 minutes after taking the first 13 burros to a holding pen at Martinez Lake, 14 more had been caught. When the first trap reached its limit, the cowboys built another a mile downstream.

Heaverne made a sudden landing in the desert when the engine started making grinding sounds. A big U. S. Marine helicopter, using the opportunity for rescue training, lifted the disabled chopper back to Yuma, where it was repaired and soon back to hazing burros.

The roundup continued, off and on, for two weeks. It got so hot as July gave way to August, that even a hosing-down wasn't enough, and the cowboys cooled off by leaping into the river between catches. Captured burros were trucked to a BLM processing pen at Kingman, then freeze-branded on the neck, assigned approximate ages and vaccinated. Oyler says all were available for adoption within 90 days starting at $125 each. People who adopt a burro receive title after a year.

"A lot of ours go back to the East and Midwest, to New York and Michigan," Oyler reports. "They're shipped from Elm Creek, Nebraska, to adoption centers."

Oyler says tamed burros will protect livestock. "They will challenge large dogs that approach livestock," he explains. "Some people break them to ride, or for pack animals. But most want them for pets." Ranchers will quiet nervous horses by putting a burro in the same corral.

"If we catch 1,200 a year [in the West], the demand across the country will take care of them," he said.

Soon, however, a new chapter may be written for burros in the wildlife refuges along the lower Colorado River. Mitchell R. Ellis, Fish and Wildlife Service manager of the Imperial refuge, says their status on the refuge could change to that of trespasser.

"We protect birds," he says. "We don't consider burros to be wildlife. They are feral animals," and not protected or welcome.

Currently under way is a debate to withdraw wildlife refuges from designated Burro Herd Management Areas established under the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act. "Legally, they would become trespassers," Ellis explains, and they would be removed, as they were from Grand Canyon National Park.

"It creates a dilemma," he continues. "The [Imperial] refuge is in the heart of the state's burro area. They rely on the water."

At the same time, he says, the burros cause so much destruction to the refuge habitat that they endanger indigenous wild species. He is particularly concerned that burros are out-competing desert bighorns for food.

"The vegetation [in the refuge] has been severely impacted; they cause erosion. But the major problem that gets overlooked is the impact the burros have on cultural sites," Ellis says.

Within the Imperial refuge and adjoining Cibola Wildlife Refuge upstream, you'll find dozens of archaeological sites ranging from petroglyphs and ancient trails to dance circles. The burros erase the trails, wear paths through the sites and roll in the dance circles, Ellis says. "We've lost half of the cultural sites already."

For the time being, there is no shortage of burros in the wildlife refuges of the lower Colorado River, although "nobody knows for sure" how many there really are, Mitchell admits.

At the end of a day of trapping, we await the scow's arrival. Clearly visible on a knoll less than 250 yards away, a desert "canary" honks disdainfully at us, then nonchalantly trots away. "We'll catch that donk," Cook promises. AH

THE PINALENOS A Kingdom in the Clouds