BLM: Aerial census shows 1,141 horses

RENO -- Faced with legal challenges accusing the government of rounding up too many wild horses in the West, federal land managers released a new aerial survey Friday, claiming it confirms that they left as many animals as they intended after a contentious roundup last winter.

Horse protection advocates complained their own surveys had found nowhere near the 900 horses Bureau of Land Management officials said the agency intended to leave on the range when it removed nearly 2,000 of the animals from the Calico mountains about 200 miles north of Reno.

But a new census from an aerial survey the BLM conducted during the last half of June found 1,141 wild horses in the five management areas that make up the Calico complex. The complex covers an area from just north of Gerlach, about 35 miles wide, running 50 miles north to the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge on the Nevada-Oregon line.

The larger overall survey found 4,217 horses in 13 horse management areas in parts of Nevada, California and Oregon.

"We are pleased to get this larger survey because it does reinforce the census and the information we have used in the past to guide our management of these areas," BLM spokeswoman Jo Lynn Worley said.

Worley said the BLM expected to find a minimum of the 600 horses it was required to leave on the range in the Calico complex. A second survey of the same area is planned in the fall.

A number of advocacy groups that have filed lawsuits in the past to try to block roundups that the BLM claims are necessary because the wild horse population is growing so rapidly that the animals are running out of food and damaging the range.

Elsewhere in Nevada, activists with the financial backing of Madeleine Pickens, wife of oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, and others were hoping to buy all 174 horses up for sale at a state-sanctioned auction today to prevent them from going to the slaughterhouse. Nevada Department of Agriculture officials praised the move, saying the estray horses up for auction in Fallon are separate from and not subject to the federal protections afforded wild-roaming horses. The horses are believed to be strays or descendants of horses abandoned by private owners over the years in Pilot Valley north of West Wendover near the Utah line.