{"id":9378,"date":"2018-10-26T13:41:26","date_gmt":"2018-10-26T20:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9378"},"modified":"2018-11-18T13:49:21","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T20:49:21","slug":"death-valley-burros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2018\/10\/26\/death-valley-burros\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Valley Burros"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/local\/california\/la-me-death-valley-burros-20181026-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>from The LA Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h1>Love those heehaws and snorts, but Death Valley aims to become a &#8216;no-burro zone&#8217;<\/h1>\n<p>By\u00a0<a class=\"uppercase\" href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/la-bio-louis-sahagun-staff.html#nt=byline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"author noopener\" aria-label=\"Louis Sahagun\">LOUIS SAHAGUN<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VPVYX0MBHNU\" width=\"480\" height=\"292\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>As the sun set on a landscape of scruffy mountains and sweeping plains, 20 wild burros watched Mark Meyers with ears erect.<\/p>\n<p>They had reason to be quizzical: Meyers and his hired hands were building traps around their muddy watering hole.<\/p>\n<p>Amid the clatter of hammers and occasional heehaws and snorts in a remote corner of Death Valley National Park, Meyers called out to the descendants of pack animals used by miners and prospectors more than a century ago.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDon\u2019t worry. You\u2019ll be all right.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Federal officials have charged Meyers with safely capturing the roughly 2,500 to 4,000 wild burros said to be roaming the 3.4-million-acre park as quickly as possible for transport to adoptive homes and sanctuaries across the nation.<\/p>\n<p>As of Oct. 22 \u2014 six days into the campaign \u2014 the team had snared 28.<\/p>\n<p>The image of the burro as the grizzled sourdough\u2019s faithful beast of burden contrasts, officials say, with the reality that they breed prolifically and out-compete native vegetarians \u2014 stately bighorn sheep, tiny kangaroo rats and bulky chuckwalla lizards \u2014 by devouring and trampling available greenery.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBurros are not part of the natural California desert ecosystem,\u201d said Mike Reynolds, superintendent of Death Valley National Park.<\/p>\n<p>Burro roundups are nothing new in Death Valley, where the hardy and remarkably adaptive animals have come to dominate contoured badlands and carpet life-giving seeps and springs with their droppings. The most recent was in 2005.<\/p>\n<p>But officials hope a five-year agreement signed by the National Park Service and Meyers\u2019 nonprofit Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue may amount to the last large-scale roundup conducted in the park, where 20-mule teams once pulled wagons loaded with borax.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/local\/california\/la-me-death-valley-burros-20181026-story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">click to continue reading at LAT<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The LA Times Love those heehaws and snorts, but Death Valley aims to become a &#8216;no-burro zone&#8217; By\u00a0LOUIS SAHAGUN As the sun set on a landscape of scruffy mountains and sweeping plains, 20 wild burros watched Mark Meyers with ears erect. They had reason to be quizzical: Meyers and his hired hands were building [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}