Early Fall Arrives on the Boise River W M A

By Ed Bottum - Idaho Department of Fish and Game I spent some time outside this morning "taking the pulse" of the vegetation growing on the 33,540-acre Boise River Wildlife Management Area. Sprawling across portions of Ada, Boise and Elmore counties, the Boise River WMA will soon play host to thousands of mule deer migrating to the area. Some of these deer spent the summer in the Sawtooth Mountains above Atlanta; all of them are coming here to spend the winter. This morning, I am checking to see what they will find in the way of forage and cover when they get here. Luckily, we were spared any wildfires on the WMA this year. As I walked in the hills just after daybreak, I noticed how the sunlight has softened now, and things are starting to stand out from their background a little more than during the heat of August. Some of the leaves have fallen, and grass stems are lying over. In places there are signs of elk having fed the night before. I noticed things that I had undoubtedly passed by but never observed earlier in the summer - like the huge bald-faced hornet nest, hanging in a golden currant bush a foot off the ground, just a few steps from my office door. Particularly noticeable today were scats from coyotes filled with grasshopper parts. Dead grasshoppers are everywhere on the ground, turning color just like the leaves - green at first fading through yellow to brown and finally to a nearly black, dark brown sort of greasy smudge. During August and September I had been seeing rush skeleton weed plants (a wildlife-habitat-invading and degrading noxious weed) with their green "skin" eaten off by grasshoppers. The plants have essentially no leaves to begin with. I was pleased to see these weeds being eaten by the hordes of grasshoppers. But this morning, I noticed that this same grasshopper horde had been eating the bark off the native shrubs that are a critical part of high quality wildlife habitat. I was struck by how similar grasshoppers and mice are in their ability to de-bark shrubs. Mice often confound our attempts to establish trees and shrubs when they tunnel under snow and eat the bark off the stems, ultimately killing the plants. Now I see that grasshoppers can do the same thing in late summer when there are enough of them. Just when you think you know all about something along comes some new confounding information that forces one to adapt. It amazes me how much we as people and resource managers know about taking care of our natural resources. It also sometimes amazes me how much more there is to know. That's just one of the things that make the great outdoors so great. There is always something for us to learn. Ed Bottum is a wildlife habitat biologist in the Southwest Region.