We just returned from a week’s stay in the Death Valley National Park, the largest of the continental United States. The nonstop spectacular scenery everywhere inside the park makes it a photographer’s paradise!
Can you see its wound?
On our way home yesterday morning, we encountered a photographer’s opportunity of another sort. We spotted this little animal up on a hill inside the park, not moving much. As we approaching the little pony like creature, we realized that it was badly injured. It has a fresh open wound on its left lower neck, two deep bloody bite marks on its right back leg, and it was limping slowly away from us. Looks like the poor thing fought off attacks from a pack of carnivores. Mountain lions? Coyotes?
It looked so tired and I didn’t want the poor thing to fear I came to finish the job of its previous attachers. I snapped a few photos and left the little guy alone. Driving on the road, we wondered whether it could survive the night after all its ordeals; it looked like a little donkey just separated from its caring mommy. Or, did mother sacrifice herself for the child’s escape? 
Limp away to keep a safe distance from me
At the very first rest stop where there is internet connection, we did an online search. It is a wild Burro!
Burros are not indigenous to Death Valley. They were taken there beginning in the 1860s by prospectors looking for rich ore veins in the hot, dry valley.
The beasts of burden were often turned loose or wandered off; over a 125-year period, the population of wild burros exploded. As the number of burros increased, other wildlife declined and disappeared. Vegetation and water used by insects, rodents, birds, coyotes, mountain lions, bighorn sheep and other native wildlife were gobbled up by the burros. But the burros did not ask to be put in the Death Valley in the first place.
June 30, 1987 was the deadline set in 1983 for capturing the animals and putting them up for adoption. To make sure wild burros do not return to Death Valley, Park Service rangers beginning July 1, 1987 were authorized to kill any stragglers they encounter while on patrol. It cost the National Park Service $1.4 million (in 1987′s term) to capture, feed, hold and transport the burros to adoption centers set up by the U.S. federal government and animal protection groups. Toward the end of the roundup it was costing as much as $1,200 (again in 1987′s term) to round up a single burro.
Can you make it little guy?
More than 26 years later after the Park Service announced that they had eradicated the wild burros, there it was, a wild burro, though severely wounded, standing on a splendid hill of Death Valley. The very last of the wild burros?
As soon as I could download the burro’s photos to my laptop, we emailed the Wild Burro Rescue and Preservation Project with the wounded burro’s location and the time it was seen.
It’s up to fate now…