By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
Over the last 25 years, Glenn Harper has seen a rebirth at Santa Ana Pueblo.
As director of Santa Ana Pueblo’s Range and Wildlife Division, Harper has seen populations of elk, deer and pronghorn rebound on pueblo lands. The increases have come as the pueblo has imposed restrictions on hunting and instituted a rangeland improvement program.
And as game herds on Santa Ana lands have increased, Harper and his colleagues have seen an associated rise in predator populations. They closely monitor mountain lions and other species, tracking their kills and their movements.
“Basically, I manage the range resources and the habitat for livestock grazing but also for wildlife,” Harper said. “We do anything from restoration work, infrastructure development, to wildlife monitoring to vegetation monitoring, surveys for different threatened and endangered species, surveys for big game.”
Harper will give a presentation on the pueblo’s wildlife and rangeland restoration work at 5:30 p.m. April 12, at Marble Brewery’s Northeast Heights Taproom, at 9904 Montgomery Blvd NE, Albuquerque. His talk is the latest in the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Wednesday series. (NOTE: Harper originally had been scheduled to speak in March, but his talk has been postponed for a month.)
In his position, Harper is responsible for Santa Ana’s roughly 142,000 acres of woodland, shrubland and grassland habitat. The pueblo lands lie mainly north of Bernalillo, on the west side of the Rio Grande.
“What we’re doing is everything we can to improve habitat and wildlife populations for the tribe,” said Harper, not a tribal member himself.
Harper said his office works with Santa Ana Pueblo conservation officers to schedule hunts that allow pueblo members to take a sustainable number of game animals. The pueblo does not offer hunting to nonmembers.
Santa Ana Pueblo’s experience of restoring its wildlife populations and improving range conditions could serve as an example to other land managers in the state, Harper said.
“I think that they can learn that you can actually change the quality of your habitat by doing more precise management. I think that’s really key,” Harper responded when asked what others in New Mexico could learn from Santa Ana Pueblo’s example.
Santa Ana Pueblo has removed all feral horses from its lands and monitors cattle grazing by its members, limiting it to only 40 percent of grass production, Harper said.
“We look at some of our cattle and feral horse impacts that we’ve seen in the past, and how we’ve resolved that,” Harper said. “And bring it around to the idea that you really can’t just blow out your habitat with cows and feral horses and expect to have robust wildlife populations.”
Santa Ana Pueblo’s focus on rangeland conditions goes all the way down to the soil-health level, Harper said.
“You see these big droughts, you see 50 percent below average for two consecutive growing seasons, two years, and then even dry winters. Plants have to have deep roots to survive these droughts, and if they don’t, they pretty much die. You see die-offs.” Harper said. “Our focus is really trying to build healthy soils, so that the grasses have deeper roots.”
Studies at New Mexico State University show that grasses can only give up 50 percent of their annual production to grazing without harming their root structure, Harper said.
“In theory, if you manage your grasslands or your habitat right, it should be more productive,” Harper said. “Deeper roots mean taller grasses, heavier biomass, essentially. If you can do that, you get the cycle going of having a healthy environment, or healthy soils that are producing healthy grasses, more productive grasses.”
Santa Ana Pueblo adopted a hunting code in 2005 that prohibited all hunting at first. Wildlife herds had recovered enough to allow limited hunting for pueblo members starting in 2011, Harper said.
Imposing hunting restrictions was a big step for Santa Ana Pueblo, which previously had never had any hunting regulations, Harper said.
“They’ve been going up every year,” Harper said of the wildlife populations since the hunting restrictions went into place. “We’ve had a couple of dips especially when the lions moved in. When we used to fly our aerial surveys, we would fly eight hours and maybe count a bull, and maybe a couple of bulls.”
Santa Ana Pueblo had only 79,000 acres of land when Harper started with the pueblo. In 2016, the pueblo bought the southern half of the old King Ranch, he said, which added 61,000 acres.
Santa Ana Pueblo did a lot of habitat work near the confluence of the Jemez River and the Rio Grande after the Jemez Canyon Dam was drained in about 2000, Harper said.
“Around 2005, they started picking up groups of bucks, groups of does, on their game cameras,” Harper said. “You could tell those animals were finding water. Ordinarily, those numbers would stay low because the animals weren’t protected. But when the code went in, it almost instantly had a vertical climb in the numbers we were counting doing aerial surveys.”
The pueblo started collaring bears and lions when it saw a dip in the population numbers of deer and elk, Harper said. The Pueblo of Santa Ana Department of Natural Resources routinely puts information about its predator tracking program on its Facebook page.
Harper said his agency monitored one particular lion that killed 19 elk over two years, in addition to other prey.
“He got hit by a car and killed on US 550 in June of 2020,” Harper said of the lion. “And I think this year we counted the highest number of elk that we’ve counted. He was taking a lot of calves. He would take adult cows, and he would take young bulls, but he was taking a lot of cows. Essentially, he got culled from the population, that lion did, and we’re starting to see that elk are rebounding again.”
The Pueblo of Santa Ana Department of Natural Resources recently released data on a particular male mountain lion called “Brokenleg.” The pueblo recorded 68 meals over 15 months, finding that the lion had eaten 11 different species. The most common meal for Brokenleg was badgers, totaling 24 of the 68 kills. Next up was elk, with 17 kills and then coyotes, with nine.
Santa Ana Pueblo has shared information with the New Mexico Department of Transportation and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish in developing the state’s Wildlife Corridors Action Plan. The plan, released last year, identified hotspots around the state where action is required to reduce the danger that wildlife crossing roadways poses to motorists.
Among the top areas the plan recommended for action was the “Sandia-Jemez Mountains – Bernalillo Wildlife Corridor,” along US 550 and I-25. Along US 550, the plan calls for constructing four overpasses, two underpass culverts, and 7 miles of fence to tie into existing and future structures. Along I-25, recommendations call for construction of one overpass, one bridge underpass, and 19 miles of wildlife exclusion fence. The work would cost an estimated $50 million. A bill [SB72] pending in the New Mexico State Legislature would create a fund to pay for design and construction of the identified projects.
Harper said it’s been rewarding for him and for pueblo members as well to see wildlife populations rebound.
“At the same time, we were still doing a bunch of habitat work, we knew that we had enough animals that we could offer hunts,” Harper said. “Everybody was excited about that, because nobody was excited about the code going into place initially.
“But when you have tribal elders and kind of a nonhunting contingent of the pueblo talking about how they saw a bunch of pronghorn out by the traditional village, or a herd of bulls walking through the bosque, or something like that, that’s pretty rewarding for a community that’s so closely tied to the natural world in terms of their traditions.” Harper said.
Harper said it was difficult when he first began working at Santa Ana to see that pueblo members were not able to get the animal skins and other parts necessary for their traditional dances on their own pueblo lands.
“All their regalia is animal parts, antlers, or feathers, or skins,” Harper said. “Everything that they use is stuff that should be on their landscape where they live, right?”
This year, Harper said pueblo members were able to draw tags for four pronghorn bucks and take the animals for meat and other traditional purposes. “It was great to see,” he said.