"How to Get An Oryx Out of a National Park Horns of a Dilemma:
By JOHN J. FIALKA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WHITE SANDS, N.M. -- In the 1960s, the New Mexico State Game Commission enlivened hunting here by importing from southern Africa 38 oryx, the beefy, long-horned cousin of the African antelope. Hunters savored the 450-pound animals' sweet meat and prized their elegant 40-inch trophy antlers.
Four decades later, these wily and nasty beasts have become a landscape-tramping, flora-devouring menace. They are often involved in car collisions that can total the car.
The herd now numbers more than 4,000 and has resisted years of government effort to limit its size -- and to eliminate it entirely from the White Sands National Monument, the park in southern New Mexico.
They have outfought, outmaneuvered and outlasted all of their predators here, including the human ones. The National Park Service, prohibited from allowing sport hunting on parkland, has used helicopters to airlift them off its property and a 56-mile-long fence to keep them out, but with only limited success. Next door, at the sprawling White Sands Missile Range, the U.S. Army has brought in hundreds of hunters armed with high-powered rifles, but they can't shoot the well-camouflaged creatures fast enough.
[[Oryx]]
The main problem is that to the oryx, this parched desert is an Eden, with a milder climate and double the annual rainfall of its native stomping ground, the oven-like Kalihari Desert in southern Africa. They spend less time migrating here and have more time for leisure activities. One upshot: They mate more frequently, with the average cow producing 1.2 calves a year, pumping up the herd's size by 10% annually.
"We underestimated their reproductive capability," said Patrick Morrow, the missile range's wildlife biologist, as he drove his van down bumpy, desert roads and explained the facts of oryx life.
Mr. Morrow recently tricked a destructive herd of wild horses on the range into submission by luring them into fenced watering holes and then putting them up for adoption. But the oryx don't normally hang around in groups and can't be lured by water because they live happily off the minute amounts of moisture in desert plants they eat. The oryx is a biological wonder that can lower its metabolism to reduce the loss of water from urinating and breathing. It can also endure extreme heat by raising its body temperature to 116 degrees.
Besides, no one would want to adopt an oryx. When cornered, its instinct is to fight. In Africa, the animals have been known to impale lions with their sharp horns. The mountain lions and coyotes here have learned to keep their distance. "These aren't scaredy animals," explains Lee Duff, a retired game warden, referring to the oryx he hunts.
James A. Mack, the superintendent of the White Sands National Monument, illustrates his case against the oryx with a slide show in his office. The pictures show oryx ripping up scarce vegetation and tramping elaborate networks of trails that erode the park's fragile soils. "We need to get these guys out. They can find a home somewhere else," he says.
Federal rules require national parks to be kept as close as possible to their natural state, which in this case means oryx-free. The Park Service's first serious stab at the problem started in the 1980s, when it began work on the 56-mile "game-proof fence" to surround the park. By the time it was finished in the late 1990s, the project had cost $1.4 million, more than the park's annual budget. Then park officials discovered that at least 100 oryx were left grazing inside the fence.
Some Park Service officials wanted to shoot the remaining oryx. But Elisabeth Jennings, executive director of Animal Protection of New Mexico, an animal-rights group in Albuquerque, started a letter-writing campaign and put a stop to that. So the Park Service adopted the plan she favored -- "nonlethal removal."
Moving an oryx against its will is dangerous business, but the Park Service came up with a plan.
Using one of three helicopters rented from the missile range, the Park Service hired Mr. Duff, the retired game warden, to hang outside the chopper in a harness. Skimming over the desert, sometimes barely 15 feet off the ground, he would brace himself, take careful aim and fire a dart into the buttocks of an oryx bounding through the brush below. The dart was loaded with Carfentanil, an opiate said to be 10,000 times as powerful as morphine.
When the woozy oryx dropped, a second chopper would land with what the Park Service called its "mugging team" -- six men who blindfolded and hobbled the beast, slipped protective cloth covers over its deadly horns and carefully hefted their quarry into a specially designed nylon oryx sling.
The second helicopter then airlifted the animal over the fence and onto to the missile range, where a third chopper waited with the "unwrapping team." They would remove the oryx from the sling and inject a drug to wake it up. Then the unwrappers left -- quickly.
[[Map of Oryx Territory]]
"You don't stand around and pat him on the butt as it gets up -- them horns will get you," explains Mr. Morrow, the missile-range biologist, who participated in more than 100 oryx removals.
Once on the missile range, relocated oryx are fair game, because hunting is encouraged there. Mr. Morrow says oryx hunting is necessary to curb oryx-car collisions. Some drivers say oryx actually charge cars, but he disputes that. He also wants to minimize the animal's dangerous habit of strolling around on runways. But hunting relocated oryx created another theoretical hazard -- hunters getting dangerously high on lingering traces of Carfentanil by munching on steaks from recently relocated oryx. That hasn't happened, but people worry about it anyway. So Mr. Morrow's crew spray-painted orange don't-shoot-me markings on the beasts that fade after 90 days, when they are once again safe to consume.
Last February, after a Navy submarine loaded with civilian passengers sank a Japanese ship, the military fired off a rash of orders restricting civilian rides on military vehicles. That temporarily halted the Army from using its vans and helicopters to take hunters out to the oryx. Then the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were followed by tough new security restrictions that required each oryx hunter to have a military escort, sharply cutting into hunting time.
In the park, the Park Service found itself on the horns of a new dilemma early this winter. According to Superintendent Mack, 228 oryx were airlifted -- more than park personnel had thought remained within the fence -- at an average cost of $4,000 each. But as the herd thinned, oryx were harder to find in the 275-square-mile park because of their natural camouflage.
The last oryx slung over the fence, in December, cost $18,000 because it took the crews most of the day to find it. The Park Service figures there are still as many as 20 oryx inside the fence, but the park has a $1.3 million backlog of critical maintenance projects, so airlifting out the marginal oryx was deemed too expensive.
Mr. Mack is awaiting public response to his latest scheme, which is to hire Mr. Duff to hunt and kill the oryx remaining inside the fence. But in December, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Interior Department to take its computer systems off the Internet. The order was aimed at protecting an Indian Trust Fund against hackers, but as usual, the oryx benefited. Under federal regulations, Mr. Mack can't implement his new so-called "direct-reduction method" until the public has had a chance to comment. With the department's computers offline, some e-mailed comments may be trapped "out there in cyberspace," he says, so the plan is on hold.
Ms. Jennings, the Albuquerque animal-rights leader, says she made no comment this time. "This is a very fringe issue for us," she says.
If the park's oryx hunt doesn't start soon, the winds that rise in the spring will make tracking them from the air too dangerous, says Mr. Mack. After that comes the summer heat, when the oryx stop moving and hunker down in the shade, making them almost impossible to find. "Any time we lose here," Mr. Mack says, "is going to be tough."
That's because in the cool desert nights, as Army rockets and laser tests sometimes light up the starry sky, the oryx will be working on their own defensive plan down on the silent moonscape of dunes and dusty gullies. They will be mating, vigorously.
Write to John J. Fialka at john.fialka@wsj.com
Updated January 29, 2002 5:03 a.m. EST |
