Environmental Range War Pits Butterflies Against Cattle : Grazing: Status of rare butterfly could have a bearing on grazing rights for 50,000 acres of public land in San Diego County.

A tiny, rare butterfly that exists nowhere on Earth but in San Diego County’s Laguna Mountains has become the center of an effort to stop cattle grazing in the Cleveland National Forest.

Environmentalists have adopted the Laguna Mountains Skipper, one of the county’s seven sensitive and declining species of butterflies, as their mascot as they scrutinize thousands of acres of grazing leases that are up for renewal for the first time in a decade.

Critics of the grazing admit that their agenda is broader than saving the quarter-size insect, which feeds and lays eggs on a plant that cows seem to find particularly tasty, the Cleveland horkelia. They hope to use the brown- and white-flecked butterfly to force federal officials to protect public land from what some call its most damaging foe: cows.

“Cows have no place in any Western state in the U.S. They are the most damning factor of public lands in the West,” said Dave Hogan, a young environmental activist who has petitioned to have the butterfly placed on the federal endangered species list. “We’re really concerned about the entire health of the mountain habitat and meadows. The butterfly is just our tool to get those meadows protected.”

Over the next few months, federal Fish and Wildlife Service officials will be gathering information about Pyrgus ruralis lagunae to determine whether it is eligible for emergency listing as an endangered species. At the same time, forest officials are reviewing the grazing permits on about 50,000 acres of public land.

The stakes are high. If the butterfly qualifies for federal protection, cattle would almost certainly be banned from the meadows where the insect makes its home--a possibility that some ranchers say could put them out of business.

Until then, as the review of U.S. Forest Service leases gets under way, officials say the ranchers have at least one thing on their side: tradition.

“This area has been heavily grazed for over 100 years, even before the Forest Service existed,” said Ronald Woychak, resource officer for the national forest’s southernmost section, the Descanso Ranger District.

More than 59,000 acres of private property are scattered throughout the 215,872-acre district, among them ranches that were homesteaded before the forest was created in the 1890s. For decades, those ranchers have supplemented their own holdings by leasing grazing land from the federal government.

Overall, about 40% of the Cleveland National Forest is leased to ranchers--about 161,800 acres. But only about a third of that--about 58,000 acres--is actually suitable for grazing. On average, about 2,000 head of cattle graze that land each year, some on a seasonal basis, and others year-round.

The ranchers “need that public land. And the Forest Service has supported that because it’s fairly compatible with what we do. We’d rather see that than housing tracts,” Woychak said. “If the Forest Service is going to address protecting ecosystem biodiversity, we need to protect even the smallest insect. But we’re trying to figure out whether something else may be out there lurking before we blame it all on cattle.”

That comes as good news to Bill Tulloch, a rancher whose family has grazed cattle in the Cleveland National Forest for more than 100 years. He is frustrated by the attempt to limit his grazing rights. And he is openly critical of environmentalists, who he believes are latecomers to the issue of preservation--something he says his family has for decades worked for in order to survive.

“We are concerned about the environment because we have to make our living off it,” said Tulloch, who leases thousands of acres from the U.S. Forest Service for his cattle to graze. He says environmentalists are “just looking for a crutch. They don’t care about the environment. They’re trying to put us out of business.”

“I looked in a book,” he added. “There must be 100 (different kinds) of these skippers. . . . It’s just another butterfly. What difference does it make?”

Over the next few months, federal Fish and Wildlife Service officials are determined to answer that question--relying in large part on the expertise of John Brown, a San Diego entomologist who has studied local butterfly populations. Brown says the fate of the butterfly itself is not as important as what its disappearance would indicate about the area as a whole.

“If this butterfly disappears, that ecosystem is not going to collapse,” said Brown, who noted that the Laguna Mountains Skipper was not discovered to be a distinct subspecies until 1981. He calls the dwindling butterfly population “a symptom. There’s something going on here. We’re tweaking the environment and this is just the piece of it that we’re seeing.”

To date, in the absence of extensive study, the case against cattle is largely anecdotal. Scientists know this much: the Laguna Mountains Skipper is indisputably rare.

Brown, who is serving as an adviser to federal officials studying the insect, says that probably fewer than six colonies exist, each of them made up of fewer than 50 butterflies. Over the past 25 years, sightings have become less and less common. In his most recent paper on the subject, he calls the Laguna Mountains Skipper “probably the most sensitive and vulnerable butterfly species in San Diego County.”

The insect feeds and lays its eggs on the Cleveland horkelia, a leafy, flowering plant that grows in the moist meadows in pine forests. During grazing season, hungry cattle can mow the usually fern-like plant to a fine carpet.

But has mere munching caused the butterfly population to decline?

Tulloch, the rancher, says no. On the contrary, he said, cows--and their fertile manure--are good for the environment.

“The cattle and butterflies have coexisted for 100 years. The butterfly is still there and so are many of the plants,” Tulloch said. “It’s the people who are out there trampling that meadow just to death. All you can see is footprints and bicycle tracks.”

But Brown says that, while lack of knowledge about the butterfly makes it difficult to say with certainty whether the cows are the culprits, he suspects that they are.

“I think grazing is probably having a direct negative impact on these things,” he said, noting that, in 1987, a researcher from UC Riverside observed that one group of Skippers seemed to survive only along the edge of a fence where cattle were prevented from grazing.

Hogan, a 21-year-old college student who coordinates an environmental group called the San Diego Biodiversity Project, is more definite. He uses a simple process of elimination--if the cows aren’t to blame, he asks, what is?

“Grazing is the only impact that’s hurting these butterflies’ habitat. There has been no huge-scale development out there,” he said, comparing cattle to living bulldozers that trample stream sites and other plant life. “We have to look at what one or two people’s cows are doing to 3 million San Diegans’ land. We need to put it in balance.”

Woychak says the Forest Service, too, is seeking balance--weighing the ranchers’ livelihood on one side and the preservation of the wilderness on the other. During the next few weeks, he said, he and his colleagues will be meeting with federal Fish and Wildlife officials to determine what further environmental studies must be done before any decisions are made.

“From the information we have now, the cattle do affect the butterfly,” Woychak said. “We do have some impacts. But are they that critical? . . . . We’re in the middle. We’re not going to please everybody.”

Other backcountry residents caution that, even if the cattle are found to be causing significant damage, the alternatives may be worse.

“You don’t want to get too crazy about getting rid of the rancher,” warned Duncan McFetridge, chairman of a Descanso-based group called Save Our Forests and Ranchlands. “So we come along and say, ‘Get your cattle out of there.’ The rancher may say, ‘Fine, I’ll get my cattle out and put in 500 homes.’ ”

In the coming months, Brown said, that trade-off will have to be addressed. He hopes there will be a way to appease both sides--by sending cattle to habitats that are already ruined or by excluding cattle from half the butterfly’s identified habitat. Such solutions, however, will demand further study.

“For me, all of this stuff hinges on compromise,” Brown said. “You can say, ‘By God, we have to get those cows out of here.’ But what does that mean? What dominoes start falling after that?”