I figure I'm already ten minutes late. So naturally (or consequently?) the kitchen rug ends up soaked with my coffee mocha, as are the chocolate donuts and muffins that went to the floor with the rest of my lunch.

Oh, joy.

The overcast, blustery, drizzly day doesn't help.

Driving 85 mph down the mine road, and 72 mph down the dirt shortcut... that helps. As a result, the heeler sisters and I arrive at the rendezvous point five minutes early.

Which provides time for a dragrace or two before our habitat biologist shows up.

Our plan for the day is to run a browse transect on one of our pronghorn winter ranges. The Admin folks are in a rush to lease the pasture for winter grazing by domestic sheep, and we two need to decide if:

Is that a good idea?

Whether we think it is or not, if the sheep come, how many should there be, and for how long? (Last year it was 2,000 sheep for the winter, and 4,000 sheep passing through to their regular winter range.)

The concern is, this was the driest summer in 50 years. The feds tell us plant production in neighboring allotments was only half normal.

So just cut the sheep numbers in half, right?

Problem is, we've had a lot of rain since the summer. Been major regrowth of the grasses (which sheep like). And the feds only look at grasses. Since we're concerned about pronghorn, not livestock, grasses are pretty much just weeds.

It's sagebrush we care about.

So. How much lower was sagebrush production this year?

Heh. Well, no one knows. No one looks, around here, unless we do it.

So, here we are.

That's our sagebrush browse transect up there. Put in by me and the previous habitat biologist two years ago. Where we paced out 50 shrub plants and measured the length of the year's new growth on a certain number of twigs.

Now we get to do it again.

I can tell you this... production was poor. As in, we were using just the tip of the ruler, trying to decide if the new growth was two millimeters long, three, or even one.

Most of our sagebrush plants were mature, a little on the downhill side.

And 20 percent were decadent, or at least half dead.

Only two of the 50 were "young".

But two hours later (a process sped up by banishing the heeler sisters to the truck because the masked one tried to dig up the first plant), we finally found the sagebrush plant we'd been looking for:

The last one.

Which yielded a nice tidy table of numbers, which will hopefully guide our decision on the sheep.

Then it was a quick tour of the ~98-square mile winter range. Checking one of the new solar water wells.

Which was being used by pronghorn at the time.

Although, in truth, I think they were actually making use of the new wetland created intentionally by the well's overflow.

We also checked out the reclamation on one of the many new gas wells on the place. By the single pipe wellhead left behind, it looks like it was a dry hole. But I've never seen one with a valve on it before.

So, either there's gas down there, or...

Some welder was bored and didn't know what to do with this spare valve that was left behind.

Then it was north to the mine road, and we went our separate ways.

With one last dragrace for the heelers.