BLM says survey confirms the numbers of wild horses

RENO, Nev. — 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, saying it confirms that they left as many mustangs as they intended after a contentious roundup last winter.

Horse protection advocates complained their own surveys had found nowhere near the 900 mustangs the Bureau of Land Management said it 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 mustangs 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 told The Associated Press.

Worley said 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 have filed lawsuits in the past to try to block roundups that the BLM says are necessary because the wild horse population is growing so rapidly that the animals are running out of food and damaging the range.

In Defense of Animals lost a legal bid to block the Calico roundup in federal court earlier this year. Lawyers for that group said last month they intend to sue over a roundup of about 2,000 horses and burros planned later this summer in the Twin Peaks area of northeast California.

On Friday, In Defense of Animals joined ecologist Craig Downer in filing an appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals to try to block a separate roundup the BLM was scheduled to begin by the end of this week in northeast Nevada. The appeal asks for a stay of BLM's plans to remove up to 1,200 wild horses and leave behind 337 mustangs at what it calls the Owyhee complex, three management areas covering 750 square miles north of Elko.