4 Plants Used by Sheep on Mountain Range. 



tions provide a large acreage of land unsuited to ordinary agriculture, 

 except in the small area where irrigation water is available, but they 

 furnish a large amount of valuable winter forage easily supplemented by 

 alfalfa hay from the nearby irrigated lands. The dry summers, how- 

 ever, make it impossible to carry any large amount of stock on this 

 range throughout the year. The effective use, therefore, of this vast 

 amount of the raw material out of which human food and clothing are 

 made by range animals is conditioned on the use of other summer range 

 lands during the dry and barren period from June 1 to November 1 . 



Fortunately for the producers and consumers of stock in the state, 

 the sage-brush region is surrounded on all sides by other higher, cooler, 

 and moister regions available for summer range. The bunch-grass hills 

 which immediately surround the sage-brush are almost entirely settled up 

 and fenced and are given over to wheat raising and general farming. 

 They are not available for grazing till when the grain has been threshed 

 and the wheat fields have become stubble fields. But back of and 

 above these in the foothills and in the mountains lie the yellow and the 

 white pine forests. Parts of these forests are cleared and other parts 

 will in the future be cleared and converted into agricultural land, but 

 large areas are valuable only for forest purposes. They are now 

 mostly under the control of the nation, the state or large lumber in- 

 terests and are available for summer range. 



The preservation of these forests and the proper use of them as 

 summer range demands intelligent management. Intelligent manage- 

 ment can only be based on knowledge. There is at the present time in 

 this, as well as in every other branch of science, too great a tendency to 

 draw general conclusions on but few local data. Because the sheep 

 tramp out the grass in one region does not signify that they will in 

 another. Because one plant or one sort of plant is the chief food plant 

 in one region do^s not prove that it is in another. It is therefore very 

 desirable that range data be secured in many different and varied regions. 



To gather data which might represent the conditions in one part 

 of this vast northwestern summer range, the writer spent the month of 

 August, 1911, in a study of the sheep food plants on the summer range 

 in the Mica Mountain region of Latah county, Idaho. Although this 

 region lies outside the state of Washington, it is an easily accessible ex- 

 tension of the Washington vegetative regions and is much used by Wash- 

 ington sheep from the winter ranges in southwestern Whitman and 

 adjacent counties. Again in the latter part of July, 1912, a second 

 visit was made to the region before the sheep reached it to check up the 

 effect of the previous year's grazing. The work resolved itself into a 

 study of the food habits, the range management, and the effect on the 

 range of two well-handled bands of sheep grazed on a leased range 

 which was well supplied with food. 



I am very greatly indebted to McGregor Brothers of Hooper, 

 Washington, whose sheep were the subject of this investigation, and to 



