Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 25, 1994 TAG: 9407250077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK DiVINCENZO NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In an effort to reduce the herd, the National Park Service, which runs the seashore, is using a dart rifle to inject mares with a contraceptive drug.
Wild horses, a dying breed throughout the West, are proliferating on coastal islands from Maryland to Georgia. But scientists have determined this is not such a good thing.
The horses are being blamed for disrupting the islands' ecological balance.
The animals can't get enough of at least two tall, broad-leaved grasses that perform important functions, say biologists who study the eating habits of wild horses. The horses feast on dune grass, which protects beaches and dunes from erosion by surging tides. They also are partial to cordgrass, a common East Coast marsh plant that serves as habitat for birds, crabs and small mammals such as mice and foxes.
As more horses than ever devour these grasses, island beaches are eroding, and marshes are stubbier and contain less wildlife.
``They're really causing fundamental changes in the ecology here,'' says Carl Zimmerman, who manages the horse contraception program at Assateague.
The same can be said for coastal islands in North Carolina and Georgia, where university researchers and federal wildlife officials have been studying the behavior of wild horses.
The horses have not been studied at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where as many as 225 horses, owned by the local volunteer fire department, were to be rounded up in preparation for the annual pony swim and auction this week. Refuge officials there have asked for money to do a study.
The National Park Service, meanwhile, is trying to come up with ways to manage the wild horse population on coastal islands throughout the Southeast. There has been no shortage of suggestions:
Drug them. Keep them inside barbed-wire fences. Round them up and sell all or some of them.
But some say the horses have gotten a bum rap and should be left alone.
``We're pretty fed up with all of this talk that the horses are causing problems,'' says Roe Terry, a Chincoteague firefighter who serves on the local Pony Committee. ``It's just not so.''
Terry blames the destruction of grasses at the Chincoteague refuge on snow geese, which are known to eat grasses - roots and all.
Snow geese have presented a problem at the refuge, officials there concede, but not in recent years. For some reason, fewer have been coming to the refuge.
Wild horses are not native to the coastal islands, and their origin is the subject of much debate.
Residents of Chincoteague, for example, say the horses are descendants of Spanish stallions that survived a 16th-century shipwreck. Biologists who have studied the genetic makeup of the horses say they more likely are descendants of 18th- and 19th-century farm horses that were brought to the islands to graze but never were rounded up.
While wild island horses have cloudy pasts, their futures are more certain: There always will be horses on these coastal islands.
The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Department has a permit to graze 150 adult horses at the wildlife refuge there, and there's no talk of revoking it. Horses there are split into two groups: about 50 in a 650-acre tract in the southern part of the refuge and 100 or so in a 3,400-acre tract in the northern part. A barbed-wire fence has been erected around both sections, though the horses occasionally breach the fence.
Once a year, local firefighters round up the horses, then coax them to swim across Assateague Channel toward the town of Chincoteague, where young horses are sold to thin out the herd and to raise money for the fire department. Last year 80 were sold for an average of $683 each, or a total of $54,640. While most of that is used to run the fire department, veterinarians who treat the horses are paid about $10,000 a year, and the refuge charges an annual grazing fee of $1,500.
Marguerite Henry's ``Misty of Chincoteague'' brought nationwide attention to Chincoteague's wild horses. Each year the swim and the auction attract tens of thousands of tourists, some from as far away as California and Canada.
by CNB