Gettysburg National Military Park (PA)
Driver Hits, Demolishes Civil War Monument
The driver of a Ford Expedition lost control of her vehicle on
West Howard Avenue on the Gettysburg battlefield on the evening of
November 12th, striking and seriously damaging a Civil War monument.
L.M.S. of Gettysburg failed to negotiate a curve in the roadway;
the vehicle she was operating then struck a drainage culvert, overturned
as it left the road, and collided with the 74th Pennsylvania Infantry
Monument located on the south side of the avenue. Veterans and survivors
of the Battle of Gettysburg dedicated the monument on July 2, 1888. The
monument is a large granite sculpture of a color bearer and flag on a
granite pedestal and was severely damaged, breaking into several pieces.
Initial estimates are that it will cost between $15,000 and $20,000 to
repair the monument. L.M.S. was charged with failure to maintain control
of a vehicle. On October 18th, a vehicle operated by a Maryland man
struck and demolished a Civil War cannon carriage and 80 feet of
historic fence in the park, causing more than $10,000 in damage.
[Submitted by Katie Lawhon, Public Affairs ]
Yellowstone National Park (ID,MT,WY)
Reward Offered For Info In Poaching Incident
The park is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the
arrest and conviction of the person or persons involved in the killing
of a mature bull elk inside the park on Saturday, November 8th. The elk
was shot in the back and killed as it was attempting to run to the tree
line during the early morning hours that day. The incident occurred
about 24 miles north of West Yellowstone alongside Highway 191. The
carcass was left intact. Rangers recovered numerous items of evidence at
the scene, including the bullet that killed the elk, which has been sent
to a crime lab for ballistics testing. The poacher(s) face possible
felony charges for violations of the Lacey Act, taking of wildlife, use
of a weapon in the park, and damage to government property, and will
likely have to pay restitution for the animal.
[Submitted by Public
Affairs]
Petroglyph National Monument (NM)
Human Remains Found
Ranger David Tyroler was hiking in the park's Mesa Prieta Unit while
off-duty on November 5th when he came upon human skeletal remains.
Tyroler contacted ranger Matt Fuller, who searched the area with FBI
agents and representatives from the state medical investigator's office.
They found additional remains and fragments of clothing scattered over a
50-yard wide area on steep volcanic rock. The remains were collected for
medical analysis. The identity of the victim and cause of death remain
unknown.
[Submitted by Jeff Budny, Park Ranger]
OPERATIONAL NOTES
Fire and Aviation Management
Memorandum: "Follow Up On 2001 Structural Fire Initiatives"
Memorandum
To: Regional Directors
Attn: Park Superintendents
From: Deputy Director
Subject: Follow Up on 2001 Structural Fire Initiatives
Reply due: December 01, 2003
In January of 2001, then Director Robert Stanton issued a memorandum outlining six action items to be implemented as part of an initiative to bolster our structural fire program (see attachment). As you are aware, this memo was in response to the 2000 GAO Audit, RCED-00-154, PARK SERVICE Agency Not Meeting Its Structural Fire Safety Responsibility.
It is now time to review our accomplishments for the specific action items in the memo, and we need your assistance. The information you provide will be used to complete the accountability reports that we are required to provide to the Department and GAO on a regular basis, and will provide a baseline of data to serve as a measure of our progress.
I am pleased to say that substantial accomplishments have been made toward items five and six of memo. Training courses have been developed and conducted related to firefighter brigade operations; and the inspection, testing and maintenance of fire sprinkler systems. Full-time Structural Fire Management Officers have been hired for each region; and core work requirements have been developed to guide their efforts. Other recent accomplishments include the completion of a draft RM-58 and the development of Fire Protection Condition Assessment and Annual Fire Inspection processes.
The progress made toward addressing the remaining items must be answered at the unit level. These actions are directly related to the inspection, testing and maintenance of fire extinguishers, fire alarm systems, and automatic fire suppression systems; as well as the safety of park fire brigade equipment and operations. I am requesting each National Park Service unit to review the 2001 action items (see attachment) and report on their progress by December 01, 2003. To facilitate data collection, reports will be submitted via the use of an online database. The database and instructions for completing the reports is located at:
http:\\165.83.200.4\CFAPPS\SFIRE\Login.cfm
The site will be available beginning October 31, 2003.
Technical questions should be directed to your Regional Structural Fire Management Officer. Please see the attached contact list.
Each of us bears the responsibility to improve our structural fire program capabilities. We will continue to support the development of a professional structural fire program, to resolve program deficiencies that jeopardize human life, property and the irreplaceable resources we are mandated to protect. As such, the need to evaluate our commitment and progress toward strengthening our structural fire program is only the first of several undertakings you can expect to hear about, or be asked to participate in, during the coming months. Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.
[Submitted by Mike Warren, mike_warren@nps.gov, 208-387-5209] More Information...
NPS History
Rangers and Resource Management: The Early Years
A new book on National Park Service rangers has been published and is now available. The book, entitled National Park Ranger: An American Icon, was written by Butch Farabee and published by Roberts Rinehart Publishers (ISBN 1-57098-392-5, $18.95 in paper).
Through permission of both the author and publisher, excerpts are appearing intermittently in the Morning Report and InsideNPS. Previous installments can be found by searching back issues of either publication for the following dates:
- Part 1 — May 15, 2003.
- Part 2 — May 21, 2003.
- Part 3 — June 3, 2003
- Part 4 — June 11, 2003.
- Part 5 — June 20, 2003.
- Part 6 — July 22, 2003.
- Part 7 — August 4, 2003.
- Part 8 — August 13, 2003.
- Part 9 — August 21, 2003.
- Part 10 — August 26, 2003.
- Part 11 — November 3, 2003.
Predator Control
Among the early resource management efforts by managers of our country's parks and forests, one of the most questionable and least "scientific" (in retrospect) was the intentional, systematic elimination of large predators from the natural scene. Although we now understand the harm caused by this biological tampering, aggressive predator control was a well-accepted resource-management principle during the first half of the twentieth century.
The first parks were valued for their scenery; the prospect of seeing spectacular wildlife also enticed people to visit. The more "charming" animals such as elk, deer, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and antelope were definitely favored over the mammals that preyed on them.
For example, a 1906 military circular authorized non-commissioned officers in charge of Yellowstone soldier stations to kill mountain lions, coyotes, and wolves. Yellowstone's superintendent, Horace M. Albright, reflected the bias against these species when he defined predators as those mammals that preyed on "animals that add so much to the pleasure of park visitors."
Both the army and park rangers hunted and killed these animals with great thoroughness. In 1915, the newly established Bureau of Biological Survey also began an extermination campaign against the meat eaters. Besides the rangers (who often augmented their salaries through the sale of the skins of the animals they killed), hired professional hunters also reduced the predator populations through shooting, trapping, poisoning, and tracking with dogs. These practices were so effective that mountain lions, coyotes, and wolves became extinct in Glacier, Yellowstone, and Rocky Mountain National Parks by the mid-1920s.
Other meat eaters on the hunters' "hit list" included coyotes, lynx, porcupines, bobcat, fox, badger, mink, weasel, fisher, otter, and marten. Not even predators of trout were immune. For a time during the 1920s, Albright's rangers destroyed the eggs of the fish-eating pelican and eliminated lake otters, to protect the trout and improve local fishing.
Steel traps were still being used at the Grand Canyon into the early 1930s, although by that time most of the carnivores were being "merely reduced" and not completely eliminated. On November 12, 1934, after years of watching park habitats increasingly degrade, the highly devastating and regrettable era of predator control in our national parks ended by official order of the director of the National Park Service.
Fish Stocking
The single most extensive manipulation of wildlife undertaken by the National Park Service over the years was its management of fish populations. Artificial stocking of park lakes with fish—both native and non-native species—had begun by 1881, when sportfishing was first enhanced for tourists in Yellowstone. These initial efforts led to other stocking programs that were supported by hatchery operations both inside and outside the park's boundaries.
Between 1894 and 1918, the military stocked the crystal waters of Yellowstone National Park with over nine million game fish. Elsewhere in the parks, similar fishery management was begun. Fourteen years before Crater Lake was set aside as a park (1888), the state of Oregon had initiated fish stocking there. By the mid-1920s, fish hatcheries had been built in Glacier, Mt. Rainier, and Yosemite, and two more were later erected in Yellowstone. In 1922 alone, Yellowstone planted more than one million trout fingerlings and almost 7.4 million fry and eyed eggs. More than 125,000 Loch Leven trout were planted in Bright Angel Creek of the Grand Canyon in 1925, and the next year 3.3 million trout fry, all from the local hatchery, were planted in Glacier.
Despite a resolution in 1921 by the Ecological Society of America to "strictly forbid" the introduction of non-native plants and animals, many of these restricted fish found their way into national park waters. Lugged in metal milk cans on the backs of both men and mules into remote locations, such fish were planted in large numbers even before many areas were set aside as parks. While they did provide improved recreation opportunities for fishermen, they caused eventual consternation for the rangers who understood that ecological disasters were in the making.
In 1936 Director Arno Cammerer issued the agency's first written fish management policy: non-native species were not to be introduced in waters where only native fish existed, and in waters where exotic and native fish both existed, the native species were to be "definitely encouraged." In 1939 the National Park Service established the policy that fishing was acceptable because of its "readily replaceable nature" and because the sport resulted in "recreational benefits far outweighing any possible impairment of natural conditions." That policy is still in effect today, and constitutes the only "taking" of wildlife permitted in the national parks, albeit completely inconsistent with other wildlife policies.
Bison Ranching
There were seventy-five million American bison, commonly called buffalo, when Europeans arrived, as estimated by Naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton. In 1884, the largest single remaining group of wild bison left in the United States was in Yellowstone National Park. With the Yellowstone herd dwindled to about two hundred, and a year after a notorious bison poaching incident and subsequent articles in Forest and Stream, President Grover Cleveland signed a law protecting the species on May 7, 1894. At the time, The Yellowstone Protection Bill finally gave national park officials authority to arrest and prosecute illegal hunters.
But change came too late; in 1895 Seton concluded there were only eight hundred of these majestic animals left in all the world, the vast majority on private ranches and game farms.
In the early years, park management practiced buffalo roundups, winter feeding, shipping surplus animals to zoos and preserves, castrating young bulls, inoculating against disease, and the culling of aged and sick animals. On occasion during the 1920s, honored park guests were even treated to the sight of bison stampedes. Killing buffalo within the park—certainly more controversial today than in the early years—first began in 1925 when National Park Service Director Stephen Mather permitted seventeen of Yellowstone's animals to be shot in conjunction with a local summer celebration.
Yellowstone's first attempt at "corralling" the buffalo began in 1895; it proved unsuccessful. Hoping to avoid extinction of the species, the park began "buffalo ranching" in 1902 with only twenty-two animals counted in the wild population that year. Until 1952, Yellowstone maintained Buffalo Ranch in the Lamar Valley with a chief buffalo keeper, an assistant, two herders, and an irrigator for the five hundred to eight hundred tons of hay being grown on six hundred acres of farmed park land. Animals were allowed to roam "free" during the months when natural forage was available, with many of them then being rounded up and corralled at the ranch during the park's hostile winter. Numbering about twenty-five hundred today, the Yellowstone buffalo herd is the last free-roaming group in the United States.
Next: The Role of Fire in Resource Management
PARKS AND PEOPLE
Saguaro National Park (AZ)
Ranger Jason Smith Honored by MADD
Ranger Jason Smith was honored by the Tucson Chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) last month for his outstanding efforts in DUI enforcement.
The award was given at a ceremony in Tucson. He received a plaque and commendation letters from Senator John Kyl and Governor Janet Napolitano.
Smith's nomination read in part as follows:
"(Ranger Jason Smith) serves as a representative on the Southern Arizona DUI Task Force and has participated in task force and saturation patrol operations resulting in numerous DUI arrests within the park. His criminal investigations and DUI arrests have produced a high rate of convictions in U.S. District Court. His diligence in seeking out impaired drivers and reducing DUI offenses within the park is exemplary. Ranger Smith fosters an excellent professional relationship with both the U.S. Attorney and Pima County Attorney's Office. Ranger Smith continues to take a strong lead in protecting the park and community in reducing drunk driver offenses within Saguaro National Park."
Submission standards for the Morning Report can be found on the left side of the front page of InsideNPS. All reports should be submitted via email to Bill Halainen at Delaware Water Gap NRA, with a copy to your regional office and a copy to Dennis Burnett in Division of Law Enforcement and Emergency Services, WASO.
Prepared by the Division of Law Enforcement and Emergency Services, WASO, with the cooperation and support of Delaware Water Gap NRA.