Winter snow confines game to a slender foothill belt that cheat fires are shrinking

Evidence

To a summer tourist, the burning of a few bushes off the foothills may seem a minor loss. He is unaware that, in winter, snow excludes both livestock and game from the higher mountains. Livestock can be fed on valley ranches, but deer and elk must find food in the foothills or starve. The habitable wintering belt is narrow, and the further north one goes, the greater is the disparity between the area of habitable winter range and the area of summer range. Hence these scattering foothill clumps of bitterbrush, sage, and oak, now fast shrinking under the onslaught of cheat fires, are the key to wildlife survival in the whole region. Besides, these scattered bushes often harbor, under their mechanical protection, remnants of native perennial grasses. When the bushes are burned off, these grass remnants succumb to livestock. While the sportsmen and stockmen wrangle over who should move first in easing the burden on the winter range, cheat grass is leaving less and less winter range to wrangle about. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 554

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors ch18 warning that ‘apparent’ minor damage to scattered clumps is a load-bearing fragility — reads the landscape’s deeper structure. — connects to: Cheat grass both enables the erosion its presence is blamed for preventing — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 557
• SEED: The image of game animals’ whole winter survival turning on scattered brush clumps most people never notice is a strong essay anchor for attentive reading of landscape scale.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source