This time of year our inbox explodes with questions ranging from engaging your lawmakers over the spending bill to tracking captives in holding. The most frequent questions we receive concern roundups. This year there is a focus on “how a roundup gets on the schedule” to many of the questions in our inbox.

Over the next few days we will be publishing additional articles to cover the questions coming in.

What “helicopter season” actually is, what an “EA” really means, and the long road a herd travels before the helicopter ever flies

Roundups that make the schedule beginning July 1 run through September 30 are the second half of the fiscal year schedule, not the end of helicopter roundups for the year. September 30 is the end of the federal fiscal year, not the calendar year. The fall and winter 2027 schedule begins the very next day, on October 1, and it will be funded out of the Appropriations (funding) bill Congress is debating right now. 

The prohibition against using helicopters lands from March 1 through June 30 (marking what BLM calls “foaling season”). There is no prohibition against bait trapping any time of the year and there is no “helicopter prohibition” at any time of the year for burros.

You can access the schedule through the BLM portal here.

The schedule changes all the time. In fact, the latest version that was published on May 15 is already changing. If you plan on going to a roundup it is not like buying tickets to an event with a set date and time. Only after the press release is published are the dates “set.” So create flexible plans (and let us know if you are going and want to volunteer).

Two helicopters in action. If you are going to a roundup, keep in mind we often have to use very long lenses to capture images we publish

First, what an “EA” is (and what it is not)

You will hear the word “EA” constantly during this season, usually as if it were self-explanatory. It is not. “EA” stands for Environmental Assessment, and to most people those words sound like a deep, landscape-level study of a herd, its habitat, and everything that lives there. That is almost never what it is.

“EA” is a label that describes the level of analysis required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — nothing more. NEPA requires federal agencies to look at the environmental consequences of their actions before they act, and it sorts those actions into levels based on how significant the impacts might be. From least to most intensive, those levels are:

• Categorical Exclusion (CX or CE) — A category of actions BLM has decided have no potential for significant environmental impact, so they can be excluded from deeper analysis altogether. BLM has used CXs to authorize some “nuisance” burro and horse removals or emergency operations (516 DM 11.9; 43 CFR 46.210).
• Determination of NEPA Adequacy (DNA) — Not a fresh analysis at all. It is a worksheet BLM uses to claim that an existing NEPA document already covers a proposed action, so no new analysis is needed. BLM has repeatedly used DNAs to recycle old gather plans for new roundups years later. At Saylor Creek BLM is using a DNA. BLM Nevada rarely even does a DNA, they just put it on the schedule knowing they need to do one but litigation is expensive.
• Environmental Assessment (EA) — A mid-level, site-specific analysis. If it concludes there is no significant impact, BLM issues a “Finding of No Significant Impact” (FONSI) and proceeds without the next step (40 CFR 1508.13). This is the level all BLM “population growth suppression” plans are done.
• Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) — The most intensive level: the deep, landscape-scale, hard-look analysis that most people picture when they hear “environmental assessment.” This is the document that genuinely examines an entire system. It is never what BLM prepares for wild horses and burros.

BLM rarely explains and that the media routinely gets wrong: the words that come before the label tell you what was actually analyzed. “EA,” “EIS,” “CX,” and “DNA” describe how deep the look was.

BLM has a habit of shorthanding a roundup EA by calling it, simply, “the Environmental Assessment.” That shorthand has led the press and the public to believe BLM completed a full review of the horses, burros, and their habitat when, in reality, it is doing the paperwork simply to create the legal channel to do a roundup. The label is the process. The words before the label are the substance.

It is worth saying plainly: the EAs BLM is approving for “wild horses and burros” are, across the board, population growth suppression plans — gathers plus infertility methods. Whatever the front-word, the action being authorized is the same: capture, remove, and suppress reproduction.

The EA is the public involvement phase for a herd-specific plan — and then the door closes

The EA stage is the public involvement phase. It is the window when the agency is legally required to take public comment, when your data, your observations, and your legal arguments go directly into the record, and when an EA can still be changed before it is finalized. BLM rarely takes into account what the public provides because most EAs are written with a predetermined outcome (and we will be publishing an article covering predetermination).

When BLM releases a draft (often called a “preliminary EA”) for a herd, it opens a comment period — frequently 30 days. After comments, BLM issues a final EA, a FONSI, and a Decision Record. Once that plan is finalized, the comment door is closed. From that point forward, the only door left open is litigation — and that is a different process with its own deadlines and rules that we cover in separate articles.

This spring, BLM released an unusually large number of new gather EAs for comment. That is one reason this time of year feels chaotic: the public-comment windows on a wave of new plans were open at the same moment while active litigation over other herds hit intense briefing schedules and hearing dates — all while the appropriations debate for the next fiscal year was reaching its annual fever pitch.

OPEN COMMENTS:

For the first time, BLM has also released a National Gather EA. BLM is building a shortcut in order to further limit site-specific analysis related to removals. BLM does not like p\paperwork, even skipping actual herd Management Area Plans for decades until forced to do them through our litigation. So now BLM is trying to figure out how to get around a path that might push them from the more superficial “EA” into the “EIS” track when they want to do a roundup. If they can just add a line that says everything gather related was analyzed in a national EA they cut the page numbers and never have to do the in-depth work in the EIS track. Just our opinion.

PLEASE take time to comment on the draft. Comments are due July 2. 

Capture during heat event and dangerous air quality from wildfire smoke, Blue Wing.

A finalized plan does not put a herd on the schedule

A final, approved gather plan does not automatically place a herd on the roundup schedule. Approval creates the authority to remove and treat wild horses and/or burros in that area. It does not, by itself, schedule anything, fund anything, or send a helicopter anywhere. Many herds have approved plans sitting on a shelf, fully authorized, waiting for years.

Getting from “approved plan” to “on the schedule” is an entirely separate, internal, year-by-year process that runs on funding and field-office priorities — not on the EA.

How the schedule is actually built: from the field office to D.C. and back

Each year, BLM builds its gather and fertility-control schedule through a bottom-up-then-top-down loop:

1. Field offices make requests. Local BLM field and district offices identify the areas they want to gather and treat in the coming fiscal year and create requests for “gathers/fertility control.”

2. The state office assembles a list. Those requests go up to the State BLM Office. At the state level, the district managers and the state director work through the requests together and the state builds a single prioritized list.

3. The states send their lists to D.C. This statewide priority list is the document that, for years, was known internally as the “escalating issues” report. That report has been renamed so many times in recent years that the name itself has become a moving target — but the function is the same: it is how each state tells the national office what it wants funded.

4. The national office allocates the money Congress provided. The national (Washington) office gathers all the state requests, then figures out — based on how much funding it received from Congress through the appropriations process — how much each state office will get. The national office is where approval happens and where funding is distributed to the states. This is the step that ties the entire schedule directly to the Appropriations bill being debated right now: no money, no schedule.

5. States divvy the funding to the district level. Once the national office gives final approval to a gather schedule and pushes funding down, each state distributes its share to the district level to actually carry the operations out.

This is also why the published schedule is never final and never complete. It is a living document that changes throughout the year. The first version tends to focus on the winter slots with a few July-through-September operations merely “penciled in,” and it shifts constantly as funding, litigation, political priorities and conditions change.

More info: The Population Statistics Report is NOT used to show “what will be on the schedule” or a priority list. That report is used to get money from Congress each year and it is a severely flawed document. You can read our assessment report HERE.

From “approved for a gather” to a helicopter in the air

Even after an area is funded and approved on the schedule, the helicopter still does not fly right away. A few more steps stand in between:

Contract solicitation. Each funded area goes through contract solicitation. BLM circulates a basic plan of operations — what the agency calls the gather plan — so that prospective contractors can estimate their costs and submit bids. Importantly, this gather plan is not a public document. It is the operational blueprint contractors price against, and the public does not get to see it.

Contracts are awarded. The Contracting Officer (CO) — who holds overall responsibility for contract solicitation, award, and modification — awards the contract to a gather contractor.

The press release goes out after dates are firmly fixed, the temporary corrals are built on the range, and the helicopter flies.

Where public involvement actually lives — and where the fight goes from here

Step back and the structure becomes clear.

Congress sets the frame. Through the appropriations process, it programmatically decides how much money flows into wild horse and burro “management” each year and any directives for how that funding should or should not be spent. That funding frame is what makes any roundup possible in the first place.

Public comment sits in the site-specific plan. The EA is the one window where the public should be allowed to directly shape what a particular operation will actually do within the frame Congress has set.

Once that EA is final, litigation is the only avenue left to change how the frame Congress built is carried out for a given herd. The time BLM listens to public input is over. Now the only person BLM will listen to is a federal judge. This is the time that the words “defending a specific herd” can only mean one thing, you have filed litigation.

Moving so fast to “get numbers,” trailer doors were not secured

Being on the ground matters.

Documenting and engaging in the moment is how we hold the line on welfare in real time — and how we build the record that any welfare-related litigation depends on.

Litigation is what forced the creation of the Comprehensive Animal Welfare Program (CAWP) in the first place.

Yet CAWP, as it stands, still does not carry enforceable welfare standards — CAWP is a program that has not completed formalization of the actual welfare standards the program contains. BLM has still not formalized welfare standards and a place Congress can step in. Litigation can still step in when events become so egregious that the premise of “humane management” promised in the 1971 law is violated (like hitting a horse with a helicopter) and our work in the courts can shut a roundup down.

Meanwhile, Congress keeps appropriating millions of dollars each year for fertility control and removals, and largely treats writing that check as proof of “humane management” — as if funding the operation were the same thing as guaranteeing it is carried out humanely. It is not. (You can still take action on Appropriations by reaching out to your lawmakers HERE)

On the ground, we can document, we can engage, and we can litigate.

In the next article in this Inbox series, we turn to what happens once the helicopter is in the air: who is legally responsible for what happens at a roundup and what independent oversight is.

Every court case we bring, every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support.

With our deepest gratitude for helping to keep the fight moving forward.