Hi Tweets, Much has been said on either side of this issue. I won't speak
for Steve, but I do agree with him 100%. My background on this issue
includes spending three months assisting Megan Gahr in her study of the
rabbits at Sagebrush Flat, and the landscape analysis I conducted on the
Columbia Basin for my M.S. My basis for this belief is that since these
rabbits evolved virtually in the absence of grazers for millennia, it
seems unlikely that throwing some grazers in their habitat now is any
manner of saving the last populations in Washington. The research project
WDFW proposes involves grazing the site (as has been done for many years)
at differing levels to see what effect it has. There are two parts of
this that I object to - first is that this population is so small that if
it is shown that grazing is detrimental to the rabbits, hey maybe up to
2/3 of the habitat would be wiped out by then. Too late by that point?
If no grazing is conducted, that's not really a problem. You know the
rabbits have been able to live there for millennia, they'll be fine
without cows now. This is the don't-fix-what-ain't-broke approach. It
would be acceptable to conduct this sort of experiment on a population
which could sustain negative results, such as any of the large populations
outside of Washington, and extrapolate the results here, if grazing is
that important over there. The second part of the project I object to is
that the population is so small, it will be very difficult to get adequate
sample size to tell anything. Megan spent two years trying to get to this
question with a simple grazed/ungrazed setup, and still didn't have enough
data to get statistically significant results. What makes you think
dividing the population even further (into three categories) will help?
It'll just lower the sample size, up the variance, etc. Again, if this
experiment were conducted on a vast population, it would be very
interesting and reveal some useful info. But I don't think Sagebrush
Flats is the place to try it out. Now to answer some specific points made
by folks that I think need addressing:

>Jon Anderson wrote:
>if the grazing pressure on this piece of land is so "abusive" and =
>deleterious to the species, could you please explain why this piece of =
>land harbors the best population of these critters in the State?
Now Jon, that's really poor logic. The presence of an animal in a site
certainly doesn't guarantee that the site is prime real estate for that
species. The reason this spot has the best population left is because of
its *soils*. The large majority of shrub-steppe left in Washington is on
rocky soils. Deep soils such as Sagebrush Flats are incredibly rare, most
of them converted to ag. land. I suppose if you went out to SF and saw
that the place was crawling with Pygmy Rabbits, you might be justified in
your statement. But it's equally likely that the Pygmy Rabbits are there
in *spite* of the grazing, barely hanging on (as the low #s suggest). Now
grazing may not be the cause of decline, or it might be, who knows? But
you can't use the presence of this species as evidence that grazing isn't
deleterious without long-term research. And that isn't feasible without a
larger sample size and experimentation. Again the conundrum presented
above.

Jon Anderson wrote:
>That the cattle "Might" collapse rabbit burrows is =
>merely speculative, and if they do collapse burrows, what 'might' be the
>effect? Extinction of the rabbits? Hasn't happened yet with all these =
No, it isn't speculative, it happens. I've seen burrows collapsed with
cow prints all around. Chances are the burrows were empty (probably 90%
of them are), so this would prove to be a small source of mortality. But
a much greater issue that you've ducked is the effect cows have on these
habitats. Cows are a major vector of introduced plants, and grazing
pressure has been shown to reduce the steppe land's ability to retard
invasion by exotics. The perennial grasses can't compete in the
short-term with cheatgrass and mustards. Many of the grazed areas in
Sagebrush Flats are already Artemisia-cheatgrass dominated. I also want
to know if the WDFW study plans on grazing the formerly ungrazed sites or
sticking to the old areas. The presence of cheatgrass should not be
overlooked as a possible factor in the rabbit's survival/demise.

On Sat, 20 Jul 1996, Herb Curl wrote:
> Sagebrush Flat is one of three sites in the state with Pygmy Rabbits. It
But this is misleading because non-SF sites are tiny in comparison. SF is
the largest population left in WA.

Herb Curl:
> is hardly pristine, having suffered from 100 years of grazing, fire,
> erosion, and farming around its edges. The rabbits have persisted along
> with Sage Grouse, Sage Thrashers and a variety of other shrub steppe
> species. Grazing was permitted under DNR ownership because the law
An aside to the ongoing debate: fire should *not* be considered as a
factor which has degraded this site. Surely a fire here would wipe out
remaining rabbit habitat. But fire is such an integral part of
shrub-steppe ecology, that is should be viewed as a component of the
ecosystem. Fires burn off Artemisia, and open up the areas for
colonization by bunchgrasses. After time, sagebrush grows back, leaving
the climax community of Artemisia and bunchgrasses. Maybe Kelly Cassidy
will launch into a discussion of this for us.

Herb Curl (speaking of WDFW's project):
> counterintuitive, one alternative hypothesis suggests that cows in
> moderation might be beneficial to the rabbits since the cows eat grass that
> competes with sagebrush, the preferred food of the rabbits.
This makes sense intuitively. Cows preferentially choose grass over
sagebrush. The rabbits eat sagebrush. Therefore cows could help rabbits
by providing more food. But as I stated above, this is counterintuitive
to the natural history of this species and this site. Millennia of living
virutally without grazers should not make a species dependent on grazers.
Right? These grazers-and-dependents relationships do exists where species
coevolve (such as the Serengeti), but this coevolution is absent from the
Pygmy Rabbit. And the numbers now are too small to risk further
experimentation.

-------------
Michael R. Smith
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
whimbrel at u.washington.edu
http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike/mike.html