Death Valley Burros Snared in Roundup : Cute but Pesky Animals Lassoed by Hard-Riding Wranglers, Shipped Out

Charging wildly across the rugged desert on horseback, hard-riding wranglers are lassoing the last of the Death Valley wild burros and dragging them into captivity.

Assisted by a helicopter, the ropers have captured more than 4,000 burros in two years and expect to round up the final 2,000 by winter’s end, concluding a $1.2-million effort to rid the monument of the cute but pesky descendants of North African jackasses.

The burros range from Eagle Borax Spring, 280 feet below sea level, to the top of 11,000 foot Telescope Peak. Rangers expect that a few will escape capture by hiding in the most remote, forbidding recesses of the 2-million-acre monument.

The job is made doubly tough because, unlike cattle or horses, burros refuse to be herded. Riding tough desert mustangs captured in the wild and trained especially for this work, four young cowboys and their tough, taciturn boss wrangler, Gene Nunn, must rope the burros one at a time.

The Work Begins

On a recent blustery day, the crew was working in far-off Hidden Valley. A cold wind was blowing as helicopter pilot Delbert Lawson, 59, took off with Nunn riding scout. They flew high up into the canyons and near the peaks, searching out springs where the burros water. They sighted six burros, and the work began.

Using horns, sirens and the pop-popping turbulence of the rotor blades, the pilot drove the fuzzy, black burros out of a gulch and down the mountain into flats where the wranglers waited on their swift horses, ropes ready.

“Its hard to catch them if they’re running downhill, so when they get close, the pilot’s got to turn them, head them up for us,” explained John Hlebica, 23, a cowboy from Northern California who recently signed on with Nunn, getting $8 an hour, a high wage for cowboys.

A walkie-talkie radio tied to the back of Hlebica’s saddle squawked out a warning: “They’re comin’ your way.”

Out of sight in an arroyo, the cowboys waited until the running burros popped up over the ridge and dropped down into the arroyo. The chase was on. Running at breakneck speed, dodging spiny Joshua trees and rocks, lunging up steep banks and down into gulches, the wranglers whirled and threw their ropes, each trying to catch a burro by the neck.

Horse, Rider Fall

It is dangerous work. Only the day before, Paul Valdon’s horse was galloping at full speed when it stepped into a rodent burrow, stumbled and fell, rolling over the young cowboy. Neither the rider nor the horse was injured and both were quickly up and continuing the chase.

On this day, a hard-riding Phil Zamora, 42, had just got his rope on a big burro when the beast ducked around one side of a Joshua tree. Zamora’s horse ran around the other side, hanging up the rope in the tree. Before Zamora could let go, the rope was jerked from the saddle horn, burning a painful welt across his hand.

The burro, free again, but with Zamora’s rope trailing out behind, was roped a second time by Tim Zaun, 28, a snuff-dipping Wyoming cowboy. Zaun got the burro stopped and together he and Zamora threw it to the ground, fashioned a rope bridle and then dragged it two miles to a corral.

After long hours in the saddle, Nunn and his crew had roped 23 burros, loaded them onto trailers and hauled them down to their desert camp corrals a few miles away. It was not a good day. “We usually get 40 or 50,” Nunn said as he unsaddled.

Causes Controversy

The big roundup of Death Valley burros hasn’t been without controversy. Some burros caught last year were put up for adoption, others were auctioned to buyers who agreed not to harm or kill them. But several truckloads were shipped to an Oregon slaughterhouse. Embarrassed federal officials acknowledge that as many as 700 burros may have been killed in violation of the sales agreements.

Closely watched by animal protection groups, federal officials here and elsewhere are keeping a closer watch on the buyers. They are hoping that, as the final bunches of burros are chased down out of the hills, loaded into trucks and hauled away, the half-century-old burro dispute here and elsewhere will finally come to an end.

The controversy hinges on the burro’s romantic image as the grizzled desert prospector’s faithful beast of burden versus the harsh reality that these hardy creatures thrive and multiply rapidly in the American desert, upsetting fragile ecosystems and threatening the existance of the desert big horn sheep.

As the burros populated Death Valley, they ate much of the feed on which the sheep depend and dominated the scarce water holes, driving off the sheep. Rangers estimate that where there were once thousands of desert big horns, there now are only a few hundred left.

Used by Prospectors

Burros were introduced into the West by Spanish explorers, and the little beasts of burden were widely used by prospectors until they were replaced by Model-A Fords in the 1930s. Many a miner simply turned his burros loose on the range.

For years, rangers in Death Valley and Grand Canyon National Park shot burros when the herds became too large. The Bureau of Land Management practiced similar “herd reduction” throughout the West until passage of the Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971 prevented further killing.

National parks were excluded from the act and by 1978 National Parks Director William Whalen decided “to get rid of the burros” because of the environmental damage they were causing. The only question was how.

Shooting was the Park Service’s preferred method, but infuriated animal-protection groups filed suits in federal courts, demanding that a more humane system be worked out. Pressured by the public outcry, the park service finally agreed to let the nonprofit protection groups help round up and evacuate 600 Grand Canyon burros by helicopter in 1980.

Animals Adopted, Sold

Similar roundups were supervised by the Fund for Animals on Navy property at China Lake, just south of Death Valley, and lands managed by the BLM throughout the West. By 1984, more than 20,000 burros had been rounded up, most of them in the California and Arizona deserts. The animals were placed in adoptive homes or sold at auction by the BLM’s wild horse and burro division.

While most burros are being removed from California’s deserts, the BLM has set aside a few areas where it will manage small herds so that these colorful animals so closely associated with the Wild West are still around.

And what will happen to those burros missed in this last roundup? Rangers said animal-protection groups will be given a chance to go after them, but after that any burros seen in Death Valley will be shot.