A River of Elk Flows Through Heaven

Sabino Rivera’s family has lived on this remote parcel in northern New Mexico for five generations. The land feels the imprint of his feet every morning as he checks fences. The land also holds the family memories. Their daughter remembers a childhood spent running through wooded uplands and playing in the river—the river crossed by a sturdy bridge that Sabino built himself. “You have to be resourceful out here in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “If something breaks you need to fix it yourself.” And the land holds their dreams for the future. Their grown children are both engineers, and their son has lived in many countries in remote villages, helping people build water infrastructure. Sabino and his wife, Doris, couldn’t be more proud. Yet the Riveras take comfort in the fact that their kids both dream of home, of the forested hill overlooking the fields and the ancient ponderosa Sabino calls his favorite tree, next to which they hope their son will build a little cottage to live in one day. They know the land with all its memories will call their children home, after the world has taught them enough.

The Riveras are a farming family on a small land holding. They grow alfalfa in the fields between the hillside and the creek, same as all their neighbors. Canjilon is too small for most outsiders to notice—the entire village is tucked within the boundary of Carson National Forest—so the community takes care of their own. “We’re pretty isolated here,” says Doris. “We have our own way of doing things.” Many of the Riveras’ neighboring property owners are extended family. The land provides, but margins are thin. “Even though we’re all farmers, we all have to supplement with outside jobs as well,” says Doris. “You won’t get rich out of this type of work.” Until three years ago, Sabino was an environmental scientist with the state cleaning up superfund sites. Doris, a lifelong educator, still commutes 50 miles most days to her work at an educational non-profit. The labor of growing hay takes place between salaried jobs, eating, and sleeping. In the last decade or so, though, it seems the elk are trying to put everyone out of business.

“Growing up I don't remember any elk in these parts,” Sabino says. “I remember the first time that I saw one. I must have been a junior in high school, and I didn't know what it was at the time.” And now, it seems, they have become permanent tenants.

At a loss for what to do, the Rivera family sought help within their community. Help came in the form of Kathy McKim, the New Mexico Coordinating Wildlife Biologist with the  IWJV  /  Partnering to Conserve Sagebrush Rangelands  and Pheasants Forever. On a sunny, chilly April morning, McKim stands with Sabino, arms crossed, before the disembodied elk’s leg hanging from fence wire. “I have dug enough elk and deer out of fences,” McKim says grimly. “It really makes you want to change something.” Fences are necessary. Without them, the neighbors’ cows and sheep come in and feast on the hay, same as the elk. This is the Riveras’ profit margin, the product that keeps their homestead intact, They can’t afford to have it eaten away.

One solution? Install wildlife-friendly fences, with top and bottom wires that are smooth, not barbed; with a bottom wire high enough up off the ground for fawns to pass underneath them; with a length of PVC enclosing the top wire that elk can drag themselves over without entanglement, but that livestock find impenetrable. These fences would still deter most of the elk from eating the Riveras out of house and home. The most persistent individuals would, at least, be able to pass by without destroying both the fences and themselves.

The biggest problem, as usual, is money. Fences are expensive: McKim estimates that the local cost of fencing material has doubled in the past few years. And wildlife-friendly fencing is even more costly. “Replacing all of our fences without assistance would cost something like $70,000,” says Sabino. The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish assists landowners through the Elk Private Lands Use System (EPLUS). EPLUS compensates landowners for the ongoing damage elk can cause by allocating hunting licenses, which landowners may then auction off to the highest bidder. However, even though EPLUS is recognized as a  useful game management program , smaller-holding landowners like the Riveras only receive a handful of hunting license authorizations a year—if they receive any at all. As Sabino says, in the small communities of northern New Mexico, people need to get used to solving problems themselves, whether that means building a bridge with their own two hands, or finding the right people to help out. In this case, the person they found was McKim.

McKim is a retired game warden with a gift of gab that gives her an edge when it comes to helping families like the Riveras as part of her position with Pheasants Forever. “My job is to talk to everybody, figure out what's missing, and see if I've talked to somebody else that can fill that hole,” says McKim. “I grease all the connections, I’m a go-between.” The work of federal and state wildlife biologist positions can sometimes be siloed by the mandates of their respective agencies, with funding funneled into specific causes and projects. McKim’s position as a member of the Intermountain West Joint Venture’s  Sage Capacity Team  is intended to help resolve this issue by finding ways to bring different organizations and funding streams together to tackle multifaceted problems. And with historic investments of funding through the  Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Acts , positions like McKim’s can help direct funding within rural communities where it’s most needed. “Ecosystems are permeable independent of what ownership boundaries are on them,” McKim says. “And that’s the role of these Coordinating Wildlife Biologist positions, right? To move across. That’s what they told me: ‘You are to move across agency lines, across land status lines.’” In the case of the Riveras' fencing, McKim was initially able to find funding via  Secretarial Order 3362 , which allocates resources towards habitat improvements, such as wildlife-friendly fences, along wildlife migration corridors. She even persuaded local scientists to confirm for her, with preliminary data, that the Riveras were most likely in an elk migration corridor—a fact that is abundantly clear both to McKim and to the Riveras, but that is not yet formally recognized. With McKim’s persistence, the Riveras were granted enough funding to proceed with installing wildlife-friendly fences around their fields. But then came a new obstacle that seemed insurmountable: McKim and the Riveras discovered that the funding they had been promised had not been allocated properly. Due to nothing more than a clerical error, there was no money left for their project. They would need to find another way.

For a time, McKim and the Riveras were devastated that so much planning, and so much clever work, had come to nothing. “At this point I wasn’t really in a place where I trusted anyone!” confesses McKim. “But I asked Sabino, ‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘I want to push forward,’ and I thought, ‘Okay, that's all I need.’”

As a last-ditch effort, McKim reached out to the  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program  to ask for help. Two biologists with the program, Maceo Martinet and Angel Montoya, drove out to Canjilon to see how they could make the project work. “Above all we want to meet our commitments to landowners,” says Montoya. “So my job when I arrived on the property was to ask, how do we get this project funded? Sabino needs fencing—how do we make that happen for him in a way that fits into the USFWS Partners Program?” From the evidence McKim had helped collect so far, the team knew that the Riveras’ property held extensive habitat benefits for the elk—enough food, water, and shelter to make them year-round residents. But what Martinet and Montoya saw on the Rivera property was a landscape supporting not just elk, but all manner of biodiversity. A brief walkthrough of the property revealed numerous bird species of  conservation concern . Entire flocks of evening grosbeaks clustered at the Riveras’ feeders. Lewis’s woodpeckers claimed holes in standing snags and Clark’s nutcrackers and pinyon jays swarmed in stands of Gambel’s oak and pines. Up the hillside, the Riveras’ fields teemed with pollinators like monarch butterflies and native bumblebees.

Sabino is especially excited about Martinet and Montoya’s idea to seed native flowers and forbs up on the forested hillside near his favorite tree, for the benefit of pollinators. “That’s the part I’m most eager to see in the setup,” says Sabino. “I love pollinators! I see their importance in our fields.” In this way, by taking the diverse landscape of the Rivera’s ranch into account, this small team of wildlife biologists was able to turn the project into a more multifaceted effort. The plan now makes use of multiple funding sources and habitat improvement priorities while still addressing the landowners’ primary concern: securing funding for fence improvements that will enable them to live in better harmony with their resident elk.

Even the most self-sufficient of rural landowners may need support, no matter how dedicated they are to making habitat improvements for the creatures with which they share their land. Because every community is so different, and the process of acquiring federal assistance can be so nebulous and confusing, conservation professionals like McKim can make all the difference in a family’s ability to access resources. “I thank Kathy all the time for talking me off the ledge, because many times I was just ready to throw my hands up and quit!” admits Sabino. “But she was able to talk me through it, and say, ‘This is a worthwhile project.’”

The Riveras hope that other small ranching families in their region and across the West will consider taking a leap of faith to initiate conservation projects with partners like McKim, Martinet, and Montoya who can help them navigate the process. “I think oftentimes a lot of people here in the rural parts of northern New Mexico can have a negative outlook on partnerships with federal and state organizations, just because it’s always been that way,” says Doris. “We want to help shed a positive light on these partnerships to maybe help others build these relationships, for the benefit of people but for the animals too. It’s not about making money; it’s about nurturing the land, and nurturing the animals. To be in relationship with the land, so we all can grow.”

Over coffee in late morning back at the ranch house, McKim and Rivera consider all of the things that had brought them to this moment, this partnership, this project to allow a river of elk to flow through casi cielo. When words finally run out, Kathy shakes her head thoughtfully and pauses, gazing into her coffee mug. “I just want to thank you,” she says to Sabino, “for having faith in me.”