PLUSH, Ore. - Some hardy volunteers are working in a remote part of southeast Oregon to make life easier for the four-legged residents of the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge.
For about two decades, people have been working in the summer months on Hart Mountain to remove a few hundred miles of barbed-wire fence - and this weekend, they think they'll finally be done.
The wires and posts are left over from days when cattle grazed in the area, but refuge manager Jeff Mackay says it's been a hazard to antelope.
"They're here on the summer range, so they need to be able to move off the refuge in winter when our conditions up here are just much too harsh for them. We remove the fences to allow these animals to move freely across the refuge, where they want to, for feed and water."
As nimble as antelope are, they don't jump over fences - they go under them, and sometimes get caught.
Mackay says the fence removal also will help people enjoy the area. Hart Mountain is one of the only wildlife refuges that welcomes overnight camping.
For the volunteers, it's hard work in hot weather - but David Eddleston of Bend says he wouldn't miss it. He's helped with the fence-pulls for several years with the Oregon Natural Desert Association. He says the area reminds him of the Serengeti, the east African desert where he spent time as a child.
"Probably 90 percent of the time that we have been doing the work there, we will see herds of pronghorn. It's a wonderful sight to see them, dashing in front of the vehicles doing 60 miles an hour, maybe 30, 40, 50 of them at a time. It's a wonderful sight."
Mackay says the years of fence-pulling seem to have paid off. This spring's antelope count was the highest since the 1950s - and he says there are a couple of other key reasons for that, as well.
"One, we're having a very dry year, so there's a lot more animals on the refuge because of all the water we have here in our creeks and dugouts and playas. But two, we had a wet spring in 2011, spring and summer, and that produced excellent habitat conditions."
The refuge covers about 280,000 rugged acres. Only about 50 of the 160 miles of roads are suitable for a typical passenger car.
Information about the refuge, including directions and camping rules, is online at fws.gov.
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State and federal agencies are collaborating to increase the use of prescribed fires in the Northwest.
Prescribed fire is the controlled use of burns to minimize the larger risks of wildfires and smoke. It is seen as an increasingly important strategy as wildfire seasons pose greater threats to the Northwest.
Casey Sixkiller, Northwest regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said authorities want to work together to maintain forest habitats.
"Prescribed burn is one of the best tools we have for making our forests more resilient against catastrophic wildfires and they help to manage and target hazardous fuels and make for healthier forests," Sixkiller explained.
Sixkiller pointed out the EPA is involved because wildfire smoke poses risks to people's health. The collaboration is between federal agencies, departments in Oregon and Washington, and tribal governments.
Sixkiller noted the collaboration needed a formal agreement to move forward.
"That is what we've been able to do here with this agreement," Sixkiller emphasized. "To get federal land managers and states and us all in the same room, making sure that we're all on the same page about what success looks like."
Sixkiller added the collaboration has another advantage: It helps drive engagement with communities potentially in the path of prescribed burns.
"They have the confidence that the effort that's gone into planning that activity has been thought out from soup to nuts," Sixkiller acknowledged. "And that they have a seat at the table and are being engaged and their concerns are being addressed as we go forward with that activity."
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A new study in the journal Nature Communications by Montana researchers said suppressing small wildfires is leading to larger, more intense and damaging blazes.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, about 98% of wildfires are fully suppressed before they grow to 100 acres; most of them within 72 hours. In Montana, the latest data show crews kept 95% of wildfires in Montana to no more than 10 acres in 2022.
Mark Kreider, a doctoral candidate in forest and conservation science at the University of Montana and co-author of the report, said the strategy leads to what is known as fire "suppression bias."
"Removing more of one type of fire than the other, what we're left with is bias towards the higher intensity fires, these more extreme fires," Kreider explained.
Montana state policy calls for crews to extinguish fires as quickly as possible, even small ones. Kreider pointed out researchers recommend letting low-intensity fires burn where possible to reduce the risk and damage potential for larger, hotter-burning and more catastrophic blazes.
Kreider acknowledged as the population grows along the urban-wildland interface, letting fires burn is not always possible, but argued it might be the best strategy for heading off catastrophic fires later.
"Especially in the western U.S. where people live close to forests, fire suppression is very important and we still must do it," Kreider noted. "But this research helps to show when possible in places where it's safe to do so, we really may benefit from allowing more low and moderate intensity fire to burn."
The National Interagency Fire Center said the number of acres scorched by wildfire has doubled since the 1980s, and the cost to battle the fires has risen to nearly $3 billion a year.
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The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation has awarded $3.1 million for 13 projects to reduce wildfire risk to communities and improve forest health.
The funding money is part of the $15 million Montana Forest Action Plan, which takes a big-picture approach to reducing the risk of wildfires.
Wyatt Frampton, deputy division administrator of forestry and trust lands for the Montana Department of Natural Resources, said the money will be used to foster fire-management cooperation between state and private landowners across 3,200 acres of forest.
"Through a variety of activities, such as prescribed fire, logging, mechanical thinning, hand activities as well as tree planting," Frampton outlined.
The 13 most recent restoration projects are spread across the state, including in Lewis and Clark County, the Bitterroot and the South Swan Valley.
Frampton said the DNR is aiming to create a cohesive fire-reduction plan across Montana's landscape, which has until now been inconsistent because of different sets of land-management practices.
"Right now when we see a patchwork of treatments across some of the landscapes in the state, from a fire-management perspective, it doesn't create a clean or effective barrier for trying to stop the fire in that area," Frampton explained. "Where, if we had a cohesive landscape-level treatment, that would help."
Frampton added having a statewide cohesive fire-management plan would also allow the DNR and other agencies to slow the spread of potentially destructive insects in Montana's forests.
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