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By David Bowser ENGLE, N.M. — It was standing room only as New Mexico ranchers crowded into an old schoolhouse here to learn about quail. Organizers Dr. Jon Boren with the New Mexico Cooperative Extension Service and Dr. Dale Rollins of Texas Cooperative Extension termed the first Quail Appreciation Day in New Mexico an outstanding success. The Armendaris Ranch, one of media mogul Ted Turner's ranches in the Land of Enchantment, hosted the seminar. Tom Wadell, manager of the Armendaris Ranch, says quail is an important part of the ranch's operation, but livestock pay the way. The high-ceilinged stucco building where the meeting was held was originally built in the late 1800s as a warehouse for the railroad. Wadell says it was later used as a school. "It's currently used as a church for the local community," Wadell says. "We have a visiting preacher who comes by once a month. He's a rancher who lives in the area." It's a very old building, he says, but not as old as the ranch. The Armendaris was established under an old Spanish land grant in 1819. It was patented in 1881. "It was purchased in 1895 by William Bell from the heirs of Pedro Armendaris," Wadell says. In 1903, Victorio Land and Cattle Company bought the ranch. "They were the major owner for the longest period of time," Wadell says. The Armendaris Corporation purchased it in 1968, and Turner bought the ranch in 1994. "It's neat historic place," Wadell says. "There haven't been many people on it. It's been private property since 1819." Camino Real, the King's Highway from Mexico City to Santa Fe, travels through the ranch for some 45 miles, and traces of it are still visible. "It's about 32 feet wide," Wadell says. "It hasn't been disturbed much." It goes through the middle of the vineyard just west of the railroad tracks. "To give you an idea of how old this area is," Wadell says, "the first Europeans walked through here about the time the Pilgrims came to America." The ranch is also home to the fourth largest bat cave in North America. The cave is in the lava flow on the north end of the ranch. "It has anywhere from 300,000 to five million bats," Wadell estimates. Because it always has been privately owned, the public and the scientific community have not been familiar with the property until recently. Scientists weren't aware of the cave until 1982, when biologists on neighboring Bureau of Land Management range saw big clouds of bats coming up, Wadell says. The ranch owners, however, had long known about the cave. "In 1898, they hauled 3000 tons of guano out of there by wagon," Wadell says. "They shipped it to California and on to the sugar cane fields in Hawaii." The ranch is also home to seven towns, three forts and the oldest mine in North America. "It's on top of the San Cristobals," Wadell says of the mine. "It was established in 1658 by the Spanish army." Wadell says the old dugouts they built are still there. Since Turner bought the property, the ranch has opened its doors to researchers. They have completed vegetative and biological inventories of the ranch. "There's a unique opportunity here for research," Wadell says. The grasslands are different than in many other areas in New Mexico. The Ladder Ranch, one of Turner's other New Mexico ranches, is located west of Truth or Consequences. It is in the southern tip of the northern grassland. The Armendaris Ranch, on the east side of Truth or Consequences, is in the northern tip of the Mexican grasslands. "This is entirely different than the Ladder," Wadell says. The ranch management has been working with the New Mexico Game and Fish Department, New Mexico State University, University of New Mexico, the University of Arizona, and Texas A&M University. The ranch has paid for some of the research. For some of it, they've offered the ranch as a laboratory. Part of the research has concerned officially "endangered" species. "We have the silvery minnow on the ranch," Wadell says. "We have the willow flycatcher and the yellow-tailed cuckoo." They have desert big-horned sheep and antelope. "We found out on antelope — nobody had found out in 45 years of research — that the younger the antelope is, the bigger the horns are," Wadell says. "That's something that nobody ever knew." They also have an extensive prairie dog study area on the ranch and have conducted seven or eight research projects. "We've established prairie dogs here," Wadell says. "The prairie dog thing is going great. They don't spread out. You have to mow. If you don't mow the grass, prairie dogs die. They're very easy to keep in control." "We're trying to get Aplomado falcons," Wadell says. "We've done all the research work, all the ground work for re-establishing the Aplomado falcon." They are also doing research on mule deer and antelope. "We're doing research in fire," Wadell adds, "and we have research on range monitoring." The major grass on the ranch is black grama. Troy Sparks, a graduate student from Texas A&M, is completing a two year research project on scaled, or blue, quail on the ranch. "We're learning quite a bit about scaled quail," Wadell says. Wadell says the vision is for the ranch to become a great laboratory for research. There are also tours for school children and tours that are held as fundraisers for various groups. So far this year, they've raised some $12,000. Wadell grins as he says he's just learning how to be a tour guide. Born in Arizona and growing up on a livestock operation there, Wadell went to work for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. After retiring from there, he took over management of the Armendaris. "I was raised in the livestock industry," Wadell says. In fact, he laughs, this is the closest he's ever lived to town. "The road is paved all the way to the house," he says in amazement. Hanging in the back of the room in the church-turned-lecture-hall is a map showing the Republic of Texas in 1845. Along the western edge of the Republic is the Armendaris. "It shows the outline of the Armendaris Ranch on it," Wadell says. "This was part of Texas." There is also a map showing the current boundaries of the 355,600-acre ranch. "Basically," Wadell says, "the northern end of the ranch is Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge." It extends west across Interstate 25 and back down to Truth or Consequences. The eastern edge goes to the White Sands Missile Range. They have hunting programs on the ranch, and that helps pay the bills, Wadell says, but basically the ranch is a livestock operation. They raise bison. Wadell says raising bison has been an educational experience. In the past, ranchers have toyed and experimented with bison, but there have been few large-scale bison operations. Turner has some 35,000 head of bison on his various ranches. About 1200 of them are on the Armendaris. The Ladder, across the Rio Grande to the west, has another 800. "With 35,000 bison, that's not a hobby," Wadell points out. Wadell says there were many myths concerning bison, many of which have been dispelled. "They're easier to gather than cattle," for instance. In general, he says, they are easier to care for. "They take care of themselves on the range," he says. "They don't ball up on you." Black grama grass doesn't really care who eats it, Wadell notes. For the most part, Wadell says they have the same problems with their herds as any livestock operation would have. There are differences, however. "When they're young, because they live so long," Wadell says, "it takes them a long time to mature. When they're immature and you bring in a bunch of heifers, you have a herd of 700 that are scared to death. From a range management point of view, that is a mess." It's like having 700 teenagers, he shrugs. Because it takes them so long to mature, Wadell has had a chance to watch the females develop, not just physically, but socially. The cows will break into maternal groups ranging from 10 to 30 head. "They all have a pecking order, and they all stay separated," Wadell says. "If it rains, the dominant group gets in the corner." The others are forced out on the range. That social pressure keeps them spread out. Wadell says they are careful not to overstock the range's vegetation, and they also are careful not to overstock socially. "People with a lot of grass can overstock socially," Wadell says, "so the normal bison behavior does not evolve. Here, we're seeing what I would guess is normal plains bison behavior." Unlike the nearby Ladder Ranch, where all the internal fencing was taken up when it was changed from cattle to a bison operation, the Armendaris is cross-fenced. The fences are particularly important on the west side of the ranch that borders the river. "We have a problem there," Wadell says. "They swim like fish." Bison cannot just be turned loose, Wadell says. "You do have to manage them, but we're learning how." Bison can't be handled like cattle. "You can lead them anywhere you want them to go," Wadell explains. "You can't push them anywhere." If riders try to push the bison, they spread out. They'll follow a leader or a leading social group, and won't get out ahead of them. It they're pushed, they spread out. "The harder you push them," Wadell says, "the more they spread out." If that front one lies down, that's the end of the drive, he says. The problem in the past was that bison have been treated like cows. "That was a huge mistake," Wadell contends. A feed truck can easily lead bison. Wadell says they learned that by taking a cake wagon out to feed some supplement in a pasture. The gate to the 100,000-acre pasture was next to the corrals. He says they fed the bison three days in a row. The fourth day, the bison had gathered by the gate and were waiting when the cake wagon arrived. "It's how you handle them," Wadell says. It's also how they started gathering the bison. "One year we changed the roundup from November to February," Wadell says. "All the bison came to the corrals in November." It's a matter of working them by social group, he notes. He says the ranch, like most, brings in cowboys for the roundup, but most of the cowboys in the area who help out claim it's boring. "They don't make any noise in the corrals," Wadell says. "We don't bounce them off gates." The bison are worked in squeeze chutes. "If you understand bison behavior, you could probably work them under a tarp over a rope," Wadell says. But, he admits, it took a while to learn how to work bison. "One percent of DNA separates humans from chimpanzees," Wadell says. "Ten percent of the bison DNA separates it from cattle, so we're 10 times closer to monkeys than bison are to cows." There have been people who have had small commercial herds, Wadell says, and there have been large public herds, but nobody has had a large commercial herd. Bison also appear to adapt to their environment more readily than cattle, Wadell says, including adapting to drouths. He says bison convert dry matter much more efficiently than cattle. On the other hand, "They do not convert concentrated feed as well as cattle." Based on fecal analysis looking at protein, bison appear to eat 60 percent more grass in the winter and 60 percent less in the summer. "What really happens is they're that much more efficient in the winter," Wadell says. "When it gets cold and food's short, they drop their metabolic rate, and they kind of hibernate." They don't use as much protein, so they pass more through than cattle. "A cow is using all that in the winter," Wadell says. All the calves go to feedyards. The cull cows, generally about 20 years old, are harvested through hunting. "We just started removing the older cows," Wadell says. They've always removed their dry cows. "Now, with the drouth," Wadell says, "we're dialing down a little bit. We're getting the numbers down to where we don't have to supplement." The ranch offers deer, antelope and bison hunting, but the quail, at least for now, are for the owner of the ranch and his guests. Wadell says one of the things they've found out is that quail need the grazing animals. Quail, like prairie dogs, will avoid high grass. "All those species evolved with grazing animals, whether it's a cow or a bison. Scaled quail will fly from cover to an open area when they're threatened. Wadell says they leave some cover in the pastures for the quail. Wadell says they have to mow around their prairie dog towns. When the bison come in there in the spring, they've learned that’s the first place to go," Wadell says. "That's the first place that greens up." He says the quail researchers on the ranch have found that there is a much higher density of insects around a prairie dog town than in the pasture next to one. "For scaled quail, you need insects," he says. The only disturbance of the soil is by the animals that are there. Wadell says in this part of the country, to try to work it and establish improved pastures would only result in the topsoil blowing away. The ranch is all in native grass, but Wadell says it has the best grasslands between Mexico and Santa Fe. It has been carefully grazed. For a great deal of its history, the ranch has been under corporate ownership, so there has always been the option, particularly during dry periods, of moving cattle off the pastures to other locations. That's something that smaller operations couldn't do. "When it doesn't rain and the drouth comes rolling in, all the cows could be taken to another ranch," Wadell explains. "No one else had that choice. They had to keep those cows there and feed them, and struggle to make it through the winter. Here they always had another option." While the livestock operation pays the bills, Wadell says he can see the day when the hunting side of the operation could be extremely profitable. In addition to antelope and deer, the ranch has a commercial hunting operation in connection with its bison herd. Some of the culls are shipped and slaughtered, Wadell says, but they're worth more as game animals. "We've got a great market here," he says. "Same thing with our older bulls. I think last year we shot 188 cows and 38 bulls." People come from around the world. Wadell says there's a waiting list for bison hunts. They get a lot of families who come out on a hunt. "It's like going out to cut a Christmas tree," he says. "It's a family recreational event to come out, and you've got buffalo meat for a year." As for their quail, Wadell says that someday they may develop a commercial hunting program, but not right now. When Turner first bought the ranch, there were few quail. As they've developed their water system, quail numbers have grown. Still, Wadell says he has to show a profit at the ranch, and it can be tough to pencil out the costs of all the improvements. In the long run, however, he has no doubt they will pay for themselves. "There is a commercial value to quail hunting," Wadell says. "That commercial value is getting to be more and more. We're probably sitting on a gold mine. If you manage for quail cover, probably it'd be good livestock management." After thinking about it for a minute, Wadell says, "Ted doesn't do anything without a potential profit." |
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