Kallin takes the reins at National Elk Refuge

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-When word got out in the national wildlife refuge community that Barry Reiswig was retiring as head of the National Elk Refuge, Steve Kallin was managing the National Bison Range Complex in northwestern Montana.

The national refuge community, especially as far as managers are concerned, is a relatively small group, but one that oversees close to 100 million acres of federally protected habitat nationwide.

Kallin, well aware of the complexities and competing interests involved with the venerated 25,000-acre elk refuge bordering the town of Jackson to the north, threw his name in the hat. He came on three weeks ago to take over one of the most contentious posts in the refuge system.

The issue boils down to a massive feeding program that, according to its detractors – including and most notably an outspoken Reiswig on his way out of office – supports too large a population on too small an area, setting a stage for rampant communicable disease when elk are bunched up unnaturally in the wintertime.

“One of my main concerns is the long-term health of the elk population and the habitat on the refuge,” Kallin said at his office looking out upong the refuge last week. “A major concern is potential for Chronic Wasting Disease to enter the refuge, and then there will be huge problems for the elk.”

A native of Wisconsin and an avid hunter, Kallin has spent his career as a federal wildlife official, managing refuges from the Seney on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the Detroit Lakes Wetland District in northwest Minnesota. He came to the Mountain West in 2004 as a project manager at the bison range, which manages a herd numbering between 300 and 500 bison.

There Kallin inherited a difficult situation after U.S. Fish and Wildlife entered into a controversial contract to hire predominantly local Native Americans to work the refuge’s day-to-day operations. A highly flawed labor and management system installed through the contract led to Fish and Wildlife eventually reneging on the deal.

At the bison range, the herd was tightly managed for size, with excess bison sold off, sent to populate new herds or given to local tribes. At one time, there was a feeding program in place, but officials eventually found it was not a healthy way to manage a herd.

That is a much different story than the National Elk Refuge, where many see any loss of an oversized herd through starvation as something to be prevented through government feed programs and even large donations of hay from private groups in the ranching and sporting communities.

Kallin is stepping into his new post just as the recommendations of a recent environmental impact statement take effect, outlining some new management approaches. The plan calls for the construction of costly irrigation systems across the refuge to grow forage across a wider area to help spread out the herd in winter. It also aims to cut the 13,000-plus elk herd by about a third.

“Given the limitations of the elk/bison EIS, one of the priorities to me will be to manage in a way to try to minimize the potential for disease,” Kallin said. “I’m not sure how effective we can be with that.”

But, though he acknowledged the plan is flawed, Kallin is not at a manager who feels he has entered a no-win situation.

“I’m encouraged that we can make some progress with the EIS,” he said. “Now there is a game plan, and that wasn’t the case for a few years.”

And the new Elk Refuge manager is not without some other helpful tools and ideas at his disposal. He is part of a dialogue now looking to allow brief windows of primitive hunting at the refuge’s southern end as a way to push the elk back north, where there often is still plenty of available forage that they prematurely abandon in early winter. Kallin said primitive hunting on the south end could take effect as soon as the coming elk season beginning in October.

“Certainly there are unique situations at every refuge,” he said, “but in every refuge a manager needs to be able to listen to the communities and the other agencies involved with the resource … and make decisions according to policy of the National Refuge System.”
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Kallin takes the reins at National Elk Refuge | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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