BEN DELANEY Out and About
June 24, 2004

Not that you need an excuse to go hiking with a camera, but Forest Guardians wants to give you one — to protect local waterways and their accompanying wildlife.

Forest Guardians is a Santa Febased environmental group formed 15 years ago in response to degradation of public lands by private industry. Recently, the group formed Watershed Guardians to document the effects that private cattle grazing has on streams and rivers in national forest areas.

So here’s where the excuse to go hiking with a camera comes in: Watershed Guardians is assembling volunteers to document changes to waterways in Arizona and New Mexico by digitally photographing them. The photos will be filed by GPS coordinates and posted on the group’s Web site.

Watershed Guardians said the images could help change the grazing policy of the National Forest Service to be more environmentally friendly.

“The volunteers are taught stream monitoring techniques, and complete stream surveys in the field. The information they gather is then collected and entered in to our database , where it is used to establish a visual archive of the watersheds throughout the Southwest,” said Billy Stern, Forest Guardians’ grazing program coordinator. “This archive will help to show how cattle and other factors are harming our streams, and will help in restoring animals such as beaver to our watersheds.”

So what’s the big deal about cattle on public land?

Heavy grazing leads to erosion and water pollution and harms the habitats of wildlife that depend on the river, Stern said.

“Along with providing water for drinking and irrigation, in the arid Southwest our rivers and streams, which make up less than a hundredth of the land area, are the lifeblood for most of our wildlife. The riparian areas that surround rivers and streams provide food and shelter for a host of fish, reptiles, birds and mammals . In most areas, when they are healthy, the banks of our waterways should be lined with deep grass and sedges that stabilize the stream and riverbanks. They should also have willows and cottonwoods that shade the stream and keep it cool for fish and to provide homes for birds and small mammals.”

About 9,000 head of cattle are grazed for at least part of the year on more than 1.5 million acres of the Santa Fe National Forest , Stern said.

“In arid environments, cows tend to stay in the riparian areas where they can reduce the vitality of the plants and trees, affect stream banks and hydrology as they enter the water to drink and stay cool, causing bank shearing and sedimentation,” Stern said.

Ranchers pay the federal government hundreds of thousands of dollars each to keep their cattle on public land.

To affect policy change, Forest Guardians first send comments and appeals to the Forest Service, then sues if necessary. The group uses a few federal laws such as the Clean Water Act, the National Forest Management Act, the National Environmental Policy Act or the Endangered Species Act as the basis for its lawsuits.

“Usually we are only successful when they have done their own monitoring, found problems and not done anything to fix them,” Stern said. “But in a situation where there isn’t any federal monitoring , the courts will look at citizens’ monitoring-and providing such monitoring is one goal of Watershed Guardians .”

The Watershed Guardians program will track areas where livestock have been removed or excluded in addition to areas experiencing continual grazing.

Watershed Guardians will focus initially on streams in the Jemez watershed in the Santa Fe and Carson national forests. The work will be temporarily obstructed by forest closures, but the project is an ongoing, multi-year affair.

The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management lack the personnel to adequately monitor the forests, Stern said.

“We also find that they don’t study areas where cattle have been removed, and the changes can be remarkable over a few years,” he said.

Watershed Guardians is holding a volunteer training session at 9 a.m. Saturday at the Forest Guardians’ office at 312 Montezuma Ave., Suite A. Part of the session will be held outside so bring sunscreen .

The session will include training in basic stream and riparian monitoring techniques as well as basic training with digital cameras and GPS devices. Loaner cameras and GPS units will be available Saturday and throughout the summer.

Information will be available on public grazing — there are 75 parcels totaling 1.5 million acres in the Santa Fe National Forest alone. Bill Fleming, associate professor at The University of New Mexico, will be on hand to talk about surveying techniques. For information contact Stern at (505) 988-9126 ext. 151 or bstern@fguardians .org or visit Forest Guardians’ Web site at http://www.fguardians.org. Every Thursday in Out and About, Santa Fe residents Jill Janov and Ben Delaney provide ideas, tips and commentary about outdoor activities, sports and gear. Delaney’s 2-year-old son enjoyed hiking among dozens of cattle this weekend in the Chama Basin. Contact Janov or Delaney at jjanov@comcast .net or