Wild horse helicopter roundup in western Colorado ends with 140 horses captured, three mustang deaths

By Jennifer Brown4:00 AM MDT on Sep 19, 2024

from The Colorado Sun

Photo: Wild horses graze in the high desert of the Piceance-East Douglas Herd Management Area, June 21, 2023, near Meeker. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

A weeklong roundup of wild horses in western Colorado ended Wednesday with the capture of about 140 mustangs and three horse deaths, including a mare that broke a leg as the low-flying helicopter was driving horses into a corral.

The mare, 24 years old and underweight, was euthanized by a veterinarian after she broke her leg on the last day of the roundup at Little Book Cliffs near Palisade. Her foal was sent to a “foster family” on a local ranch instead of going with other wild horses to holding pens on prison grounds in Cañon City. 

The other two horses that died were euthanized because of pre-existing conditions — a 2-year-old mare with a knee injury and a 23-year-old mare with a leg injury and “severe” infection, according to federal land managers. 

About 30 to 40 of the horses captured in the rugged canyons and ridges of the Little Book Cliffs will return to the range, keeping the total number of removed mustangs at about 100, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management said. The federal agency is consulting with a local volunteer group, Friends of the Mustangs, to help determine which horses return to the wild and which are sent to Cañon City. 

About 80 horses have already been shipped to Cañon City, where they will receive vaccines and other veterinary care. Many will go up for adoption to local owners in June. 

For the past week, a helicopter buzzed bands of horses throughout the 36,000-acre rangeland, pushing them toward onsite temporary corrals. On some days, wranglers captured as few as seven or nine horses. On the roundup’s most productive day, 71 were pushed into corrals. 

“That was by design,” BLM spokesman Steven Hall said. 

The local volunteer group that names the mustangs and keeps track of bloodlines helped federal land managers develop the roundup strategy, which was to remove a certain number of horses from different parts of the land with a goal of preserving genetic diversity. Bands of horses  — typically a stallion with several mares and foals — stay in specific areas of Little Book Cliffs, separated by canyons. 

Main Canyon is home to dozens of horses, while there were about 30-40 horses living in Monument Rocks. “We can’t really pick out horses by name and facial recognition during a helicopter gather,” Hall said. But, with the help of volunteers, they sort them out in corrals and then decide which mustangs to release. 

The public was allowed to watch the operation, though it wasn’t easy. At 5 a.m. one morning last week, a handful of people met at the fire station in De Beque, then drove two and a half hours along dirt roads into sagebrush country. The roundup stopped operations after about 90 minutes due to high winds, and the observers trekked back to Interstate 70. 

The Little Book Cliffs roundup was the fifth removal of wild horses involving a helicopter in Colorado in the past three years. The federal agency has removed about 2,200 wild horses since 2021 from rangeland in Colorado, which now has about 1,200 mustangs in the wild.

Little Book Cliffs, one of four wild horse management areas in the state, had 215 horses before the roundup, but should have a maximum of about 115 horses, according to the BLM’s calculations. 

The federal agency removed more than 600 horses from Sand Wash with a helicopter three years ago. Other recent helicopter roundups resulted in the removal of about 570 horses on West Douglas rangeland in 2021 and 2023, and about 820 horses from Piceance-East Douglas in 2022.

Though it hasn’t been formally announced, BLM officials have said they expect to schedule another helicopter roundup at Piceance-East Douglas near Meeker in northwestern Colorado. That federal rangeland, shared with cattle and oil and gas wells, has more than 600 horses but should have about 200, the BLM said. 

Gov. Jared Polis and state lawmakers who created the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group last year had asked for a delay of the Little Book Cliffs roundup pending “further analysis” and that the BLM at least use a slow-paced “bait-and-trap” approach, rather than chasing horses with a helicopter. But BLM State Director Doug Vilsack rejected the governor’s request, saying the agency first needs to get the mustang population within reasonable limits and then can attempt to control it with fertility control and smaller, bait-and-trap operations.

 American Wild Horse Conservation, a mustang advocacy group that opposes helicopter roundups, said the Little Book Cliffs operation renewed concerns about transparency and effectiveness of helicopters. 

The organization called the public viewing area “abysmal” during the first few days of the roundup, its placement so far from the corral that it was difficult to see operations. And the BLM has not given in to previous requests from wild horse advocates to put cameras on the helicopters so people could see what is happening as the pilot swoops around canyons and drives horses toward the corrals. 

“Observers were placed 2 miles from the operation and could not see any horses pushed into the trap,” American Wild Horse Conservation said.  

The group had asked the BLM to instead allow volunteers and paid workers to try to control the Little Books population with birth-control vaccines, which are delivered via darts shot at mares’ rumps. 

“Little Book Cliffs demonstrates it is past time to implement a new conservation model and give Colorado’s highly committed darting teams a chance to further prove fertility control at scale,” spokesman Scott Wilson, who observed the roundup, said via email. “There was no emergency in Little Book Cliffs and this latest roundup represents a missed opportunity for real stakeholder collaboration on more humane and affordable outcomes for our state’s beloved wild horses.”

Wilson also decried the horse deaths, calling those results similar to what mustang groups have “consistently witnessed through federal roundup campaigns.”

The mare that broke a leg was walking, not running, toward the corral when she stepped into a hole, according to BLM observers. The foster home is prepared to bottle-feed the foal if needed, the BLM’s Hall said. 

The mare was old for a wild horse and had a body-condition score of 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 9, meaning she was skinny and unhealthy, Hall said.