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Lyle Lewis
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The surprising history of sagebrush, livestock, cheatgrass, fire, mining, and one remarkably influential predator
One early September morning, I sat high in the Trout Creek Mountains looking across what may be one of the defining landscapes of the American West.
What remains in the foreground can make the landscape look intact. Beyond it, the sagebrush lost in the 2012 Holloway Fire has not returned.
Sagebrush.
It is difficult to think of another plant that so completely represents the interior West. Mule deer browse it. Pronghorn depend on it. Sage-grouse live almost entirely within the world it creates. Hundreds of other species use sagebrush ecosystems during some portion of their lives.
Sagebrush is still widespread enough to feel ordinary. That is part of the deception. What remains is only a fraction of the vast, connected sagebrush landscapes that once stretched across the West. We see what is left and mistake it for abundance. Then we mistake abundance for permanence.
More than sixty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote about western land managers spraying sagebrush to create more grass for livestock. At the time, millions of acres were being treated as though sagebrush itself were an obstacle to productive land. We continued removing it anyway.
Immediately around me, parts of the landscape still looked surprisingly good. Aspen stands broke up the sagebrush across the higher country.
Then I looked beyond them.
For mile after mile, much of the country below had burned in 2012. I could not see sagebrush returning anywhere. What replaced it was simpler, more flammable, and increasingly difficult to undo.
That was what stretched across the background of my photograph. A patch of western habitat in the foreground that, at first glance, looked relatively intact. And behind it, mile after mile of what had been lost.
I’ve spent years ruing this transformation, but fortunately I ran into a hunter. He told me he had hunted this country for years. Deer numbers were down. The only thing wrong with the ecosystem, he explained, was predators. Especially mountain lions.
That was when I realized I had been looking at the whole thing backward. The real problem was obvious. Mountain lions had destroyed the West.
The Mountain Lion Conspiracy
Their operation apparently began more than a century ago. These conniving animals somehow persuaded ranchers to put enormous numbers of livestock onto some of the driest landscapes in North America. They then forced those livestock into stream bottoms, springs, wet meadows, and other places where water, productive vegetation, and wildlife were concentrated.
Caught in the act. Or at least caught on camera. Mountain lions leave evidence. Habitat loss usually doesn’t.
Exactly how mountain lions accomplished this remains unclear. Perhaps cattle were simply terrified of the ridges.
Whatever the mechanism, the manipulative cats achieved remarkable results.
Vegetation disappeared from streambanks. Soils were trampled and washed away. Willows declined. Beaver, fish, and amphibians disappeared as streams became warmer and less dependable. Some of the most productive parts of otherwise arid landscapes were simplified and, in some cases, disappeared entirely.
But these saboteurs were only getting started. They had also recognized another serious obstacle to reducing deer numbers: sagebrush.
So the cats encouraged humans to treat it as something to be removed rather than as the foundation of an ecosystem. Rachel Carson noticed their handiwork as early as 1962 but apparently failed to identify the true perpetrators.
She blamed people. An understandable mistake. Mountain lions are extremely secretive.
They could not, however, have accomplished all of this alone. They needed collaborators. Coyotes were the obvious choice.
The hunter explained that coyotes could smell the afterbirth of a deer from a mile away. This was useful information because it helped clarify how such an animal might also have located Bureau of Land Management offices.
Once inside, they appear to have been remarkably persuasive. These double-agents manipulated managers into spraying sagebrush and removing native vegetation across large areas of the West. Vast areas could be burned, chained, plowed, or otherwise cleared and converted to something simpler. Some were seeded to crested wheatgrass. Others eventually became dominated by cheatgrass and tumbleweed.
The goal was presumably to make life harder for mule deer while ensuring that coyotes themselves would eventually be blamed for the result.
It was an elegant strategy.
Coyotes have always understood the value of being underestimated. For generations they have accepted responsibility for nearly every dead calf, missing fawn, declining game population, and unexplained ecological disappointment in the rural West.
Why ruin a good arrangement?
Scheming mountain lions provided strategic direction. Coyotes handled implementation with their usual cunning. Bobcats, according to the hunter, were apparently involved as well. Arizona reportedly supplied 65,909 bobcats to the conspiracy, but a substantial number were working remotely from Tucson patios. Tragically, Bobby died before the operation was complete. The official population estimate has since been revised to 65,908. Bobby, of course, was unavailable for comment.The precise role of the Arizona bobcats in the conspiracy remains unclear. Their chief qualification seemed to be that they were predators.
The partnership proved devastatingly effective.
The Cheatgrass Conspiracy
Of all the mountain lions’ accomplishments, cheatgrass may be their masterpiece.
Cheatgrass arrived in North America with people. It spread along railroads, roads, agricultural areas, disturbed ground, heavily used rangelands, and across enormous portions of the interior West. But it did not always arrive on equal terms.
Native perennial bunchgrasses compete with cheatgrass for water, nutrients, and space. Where those grasses remain abundant, they help close the gaps cheatgrass needs to establish. Heavy or repeated livestock grazing can weaken those perennial grasses, enlarge the spaces between them, and damage biological soil crusts that provide another layer of resistance to invasion.
Mountain lions, being ecological masterminds, had apparently softened the defenses in advance. Their strategy was remarkably sophisticated: persuade livestock to reduce the plants most capable of resisting cheatgrass, then introduce an annual grass exceptionally well suited to exploiting what remained.
But at some point, cheatgrass appears to have taken control of the operation. Whether this was mutually agreed upon or the mountain lions were duped remains under investigation.
Its ecological genius is simple. It doesn’t have to outlive sagebrush. It only has to burn more often.
Cheatgrass, being an enterprising opportunist, gets an early start. It germinates quickly, takes advantage of moisture before many native plants can, then dries into fine fuel. Once fire removes shrubs and weakens perennial vegetation, cheatgrass moves into the newly opened ground.
Cheatgrass eventually discovered something even more useful than mountain lions and coyotes: humans.
We supplied roads, vehicles, power lines, machinery, campfires, and sparks. Cheatgrass supplied the fuel. Together, they greatly expanded the opportunities for fire. It was an unusually productive partnership.
More cheatgrass creates more continuous fuel. More continuous fuel creates more opportunity for fire. More fire kills more sagebrush. Less sagebrush and fewer native bunchgrasses create more opportunity for cheatgrass.
Repeat often enough and cheatgrass has effectively redesigned the landscape in its own favor.
Historically, fire moved through a much patchier landscape, often leaving substantial areas of sagebrush untouched. Cheatgrass filled many of the spaces that once stopped or weakened those fires, turning scattered fuels into something much more continuous.
And because it is a plant, its machinations went largely unnoticed. No one heard it howl. No one found a deer carcass beneath it. No trail camera ever captured it stalking a fawn.
It simply changed the conditions in its own favor while making life harder for almost everything that had evolved there before.
While humans watched mountain lions, coyotes, and bobcats, cheatgrass quietly altered fuel, fire, competition, and recovery across millions of acres. The predators were amateurs. Cheatgrass had discovered something far more effective than killing animals.
It could change the ecosystem that produced them. By that point, even the mountain lions may simply have been useful idiots.
Once a landscape has crossed far enough toward annual-grass dominance, removing livestock alone may not reverse it. Native perennial grasses do not march back in when the cattle leave. Cheatgrass may already occupy the openings, produce the fuel, and help maintain the fire cycle that keeps the system trapped.
The cats had prepared the battlefield. Cheatgrass figured out how to hold it.
Then it anticipated climate change.
As temperatures rise and drought intensifies, recovering native vegetation has to establish under increasingly difficult conditions. Sagebrush is built for a very different clock. Individual plants can live for many decades, sometimes more than a century, and a mature sagebrush community may take decades to reassemble after fire.
Cheatgrass only needs another year.
Mountain lions may have understood the strategy. Cheatgrass understood the timetable.
The Fires
Then came 2012.
The Holloway Fire burned more than 460,000 acres across this landscape. Standing above the burn more than a decade later, its scale is difficult to comprehend. The burned area extends far beyond anything visible from a single ridge. What appears from a distance to be simply open country represents the disappearance of immense areas of sagebrush habitat.
And Holloway was not unusual enough to remain unusual. That same year, the nearby Long Draw Fire burned more than 550,000 acres. This summer, the Big Grass Fire burned nearly 580,000 acres across southeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho.
We are still experimenting with sagebrush restoration by the acre while losing it by the hundred thousand acres. Cheatgrass understood something the predators did not. Scale matters.
Researchers have seeded hundreds of burned sites and sometimes established young sagebrush. Sometimes the seed germinates. Sometimes seedlings survive. Sometimes they do not. Even where plants become established, rebuilding a mature, self-sustaining sagebrush community can take decades—if it happens at all.
Two fires can erase more than a million acres of sagebrush country. No restoration program can simply put that landscape back. There is not enough seed, money, labor, or time. And even if there were, the climate in which replacement shrubs must grow is changing while we are trying to grow them.
Cheatgrass had found a way to operate at a scale restoration could not match. And, as any good conspirator knows, it left just enough attractive habitat behind to confuse us.
Stand in the right place and there are aspens. There is still some mountain mahogany. There are a few scattered deer. There are sage-grouse in some places.
Enough, apparently, that the state still issues permits to shoot them. Coyotes may have infiltrated the wildlife agency as well.
There are green patches along springs and streams where they haven’t dried up.
Take a landscape photograph in the right direction, don’t look too closely, and everything can appear reasonably intact. Turn the camera slightly and the ecological transformation extends to the horizon.
It is easy to count deer. It is harder to count what a landscape can no longer produce.
The Mountain Lions Strike Back
The mountain lions, however, were apparently not pleased about being outmaneuvered by an annual grass.
They have begun fighting back.
They have entered negotiations with an international mining company.
At the eastern base of the Trout Creek Mountains, HiTech Minerals, a subsidiary of Australian-based Jindalee, is exploring one of the largest lithium deposits in the United States. The approved exploration project includes 168 drill sites and roughly twenty-two miles of new access roads across a 7,200-acre project area.
This is an impressive escalation.
After more than a century of manipulating livestock, land managers, coyotes, bobcats, and assorted government agencies, the mountain lions’ strategy is becoming clear. If cheatgrass can take over sagebrush habitat, the devious cats will simply remove the habitat.
If developed, a large lithium mine would be a remarkable improvement over the tedious business of killing individual deer. Roads, drill pads, industrial infrastructure, and eventually a mine could permanently remove habitat used by mule deer, sage-grouse, pronghorn, and many other species simultaneously.
It may even create places where cheatgrass has difficulty growing.
Checkmate.
What makes the strategy especially elegant is its location. The proposed lithium development lies along the edge of a landscape already transformed by the Holloway Fire, with only limited overlap between the two. The mine would not simply occupy ground the fire had already altered. Much of it would affect some of what remains.
First the sagebrush burns. Then roads arrive. Then drill pads. Then industrial infrastructure. Each disturbance is evaluated separately, but the landscape experiences them together.
The result is not one disturbance replacing another. It is the shrinking of what is left. At some point, it stops being sagebrush country and becomes habitat for horned larks—or, in the footprint of a mine, no habitat at all.
The mountain lions may finally have discovered how to defeat cheatgrass. Make the landscape so thoroughly altered that almost nothing else has much use for it either.
There is one potential flaw in the plan. Roads and disturbed ground are among the ways invasive annual grasses spread across the West. So in their attempt to defeat cheatgrass, the mountain lions may inadvertently create additional opportunities for cheatgrass.
Nobody said these animals were perfect.
Still, one has to admire their persistence. Having failed to completely destroy the West through livestock, they experimented with sagebrush removal. Then came crested wheatgrass, altered streams, roads, fire, and cheatgrass.
Now they appear to be considering lithium.
At some point, even a mountain lion has to wonder why humans make all of this so easy.
Looking Beyond the Deer
There is, of course, nothing absurd about asking how predators affect prey populations. Mountain lions kill mule deer. Under some conditions, predation can influence deer numbers. Ecology rarely offers the comfort of a single explanation.
But that is precisely the problem. A predator can become an extraordinarily convenient explanation for ecological decline because it gives us something visible to blame.
The pattern is hardly unique to mule deer.
When pheasant numbers declined across agricultural Idaho, predators became obvious suspects. Foxes. Skunks. Weasels. Feral cats. They ate eggs, chicks, and hens. They were also much easier to kill than it was to put the habitat back.
Idaho eventually tested predator removal directly. Hen survival and nest success were slightly higher in removal areas. Pheasant populations were not.
The larger problem was the landscape. Hedgerows and weedy margins disappeared. Fields grew larger. Nesting cover and waste grain declined. The untidy pieces of farmland pheasants had depended upon were steadily removed.
Predators were still there. The habitat was not.
Yet a fox standing beside an empty field remained easier to blame than the empty field.
The same idea has been tested directly on mule deer. From 1997 to 2003, researchers reduced mountain lions and coyotes across eight game-management units in southeastern Idaho. Removing mountain lions increased deer survival and fawn ratios. But researchers could not demonstrate a significant change in the long-term trajectory of the deer population. Winter severity had a stronger influence on population growth.
The predators were killing deer. They were not determining whether the landscape could keep producing them.
But predator removal offers something ecosystem restoration rarely does: an immediate and visible action. A mountain lion can be counted. A coyote can be killed. A management action can be reported.
Restoring an ecological system is not possible at the speed and scale at which it is being modified.
Meanwhile, carnivores have the unfortunate habit of continuing to do exactly what evolution designed them to do while humans transform everything around them.
The alternative requires looking at the landscape and the landscape contains history. Livestock grazing. Vegetation conversion. Altered streams. Roads. Fences. Invasive plants. Fire. Climate change. Mining.
More than a century of decisions whose consequences accumulated slowly enough for each generation to inherit them from the one before. No single decision created the landscape I photographed that morning. But neither did a mountain lion.
The photograph captures something deer counts cannot. In the foreground, enough remains to suggest what this country once was. Behind it, stretching for miles, is what much of it is becoming.
Predation helps determine whether an individual deer survives. Habitat helps determine how many deer the landscape can produce in the first place. And once a sagebrush ecosystem crosses into something else, killing predators does not turn it back.
Cheatgrass leaves behind a different ecosystem—one increasingly unable to support the animals that lived there before.
I’ll always be embarrassed by how long it took me to fully appreciate the critical role predators play in destroying western ecosystems.