Day 12:
Another baby has died.
Another baby whose death is “unexplained.”
Another baby whose death BLM is counting as “unrelated” to the roundup and a “chronic” condition.
You can read more about the foals and this roundup HERE.
Below: Access has been absolutely abysmal (we will cover this in another article).
More than half the deaths at this roundup are babies. If BLM actually monitored the South Shoshone Herd Management Area (HMA) they would know foaling season extends into July. Foaling season extends into July in a lot of HMAs in the West like Kiger in OR, Pancake and Triple B in NV. BLM keeps no data base at all on foaling season. Foal deaths at this time of year, in this heat, mares stressed, separation of mares and foals for any length of time, the chaos of holding, etc. is more than predictable and roundups in July should simply cease all together if BLM refuses to keep any statistics on when foaling season actually begins and ends.
There is a prohibition against doing helicopter drive-trapping during foaling season. A meaningless statement: if there is no data BLM can just do whatever they want. (Just like in the rest of the program. We go into this subject more in depth HERE in an article centered on comments for Red Desert and Eagle. Red Desert comments are now closed. Eagle is still open and more info HERE.)
BLM ignoring really important issues surrounding foals is one of the reasons we are pushing so hard for the formalization of welfare standards within the Comprehensive Animal Welfare Program (CAWP) BLM only created after years of relentless litigation. Complying with their program is basically BLM telling themselves it is all “ok.”
Please take action today! CLICK HERE TO TAKE ACTION
We are uploading our day 13 report. BLM reports the official capture number from South Shoshone as 1869. Another 2 have died.
Our team is still onsite and that full report will be loaded shortly.
A lot is happening behind the scenes.
We need to talk about mining.
We need to tell you about the new plan open for comment that will impact these wild horses.
On July 20, 2026 — ten days into the “Callaghan Complex” roundup — the Bureau of Land Management quietly opened a 30‑day public comment period on yet another expansion of Nevada Gold Mines’ Cortez operation in Crescent Valley. The timing is not a coincidence. It is the pattern.
Another mining project on the table
Wild Horses and burros are overlooked in every mining project that overlaps, abuts, impacts, their legally designated territory. This one is no exception.
The Cortez Pit Expansion Project (NEPA number DOI‑BLM‑NV‑B010‑2026‑0021‑DNA) is under review by the BLM Mount Lewis Field Office, Battle Mountain District, in Eureka and Lander Counties. Nevada Gold Mines LLC — the Barrick (61.5%) / Newmont (38.5%) joint venture — submitted a Plan of Operations that the BLM posted on July 20, 2026, with comments due by August 19, 2026 (BLM ePlanning).
According to the Proposed Action Document, NGM would expand and deepen the Cortez Pit, create new waste‑rock facilities (East and West Airport WRFs, Cortez Pits WRF East), reclassify roughly 580 acres of already‑authorized disturbance, add about two acres of new disturbance inside the existing Plan boundary, and — the line that matters most for wild horses and every other living thing in this valley — “add dewatering wells and pipeline.” BLM notes dewatering “will not exceed the currently permitted limits of 36,100 gallons per minute” and that operations would begin September 2026 for three years, within the Cortez District mine life of 2032 (BLM ePlanning). Yes, that is not a typo… 36,100 gallons of water per minute.
The mine actively (currently) pumps 22,000 to 27,000 gallons per minute to keep its pits dry. While roughly 80% to 85% is routed to rapid infiltration basins (RIBs), a massive portion vanishes permanently. 15% is over 400 gallons lost forever… per minute. With the expansion we are talking about over 500 gallons per minute simply lost. (Perspective, this is not a small amount of water: A mine losing 500 gallons of water per minute loses 720,000 gallons per day, which is enough to sustain 90,000 adult horses, or 48,000 cows, or about 110,000 deer, on an average day. This pumping draws down water tables.)
Approximate map created with information and points available online
Note the vehicle (the level of NEPA): this is a Determination of NEPA Adequacy (DNA) — not a fresh Environmental Impact Statement, not even an Environmental Assessment. BLM is treating older analyses as good enough to authorize more pit, more waste rock, and more pumping. Comments here are formally limited to the Plan of Operations requirements under 43 CFR 3809.401–3809.424, but that regulation still requires BLM to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation of the public land — including its water and its wildlife (43 CFR 3809). The expansion is being advanced under Executive Order 14241, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production” (BLM announcement, May 18, 2026).
This is not a “Callaghan Complex” roundup. It is a South Shoshone clearance.
If BLM estimated the population in the HMA at around 2400, there is a 22% error rate downward. BLM pads upwards and never takes into account the downward error rate. At Saylor Creek, the error rate was 24% and the target for the roundup was adjusted downward after a pre-operation census. No pre-operation census was done at Callaghan. Taking into account the error rate, the estimated population could be more like 1872. BLM may have already reached beyond numbers in their plan. At this time, there is no post gather census planned. BLM NV rarely, if ever, does them.
The document BLM approved is not an HMAP. It is a rushed gather plan.
This is the heart of Wild Horse Education’s active litigation. What BLM approved in February 2026 for the Callaghan Complex is styled as a “Herd Management Area Plan and Gather Plan,” but it is not a real HMAP. It is a gather plan wearing an HMAP’s label — assembled quickly to empty South Shoshone.
Under BLM’s own Wild Horses and Burros Management Handbook (H‑4700‑1), an HMAP is the site‑specific management document for a herd. It is where BLM is supposed to set data‑based objectives for the herd and its habitat, evaluate the actual condition of the range, address genetics and herd health, and — critically — identify the foreseeable impacts to wild horses from other uses of that same public land and the mitigation measures to address them. A genuine HMAP is the place where impacts from mining, livestock grazing, roads, fences, and water development are supposed to be analyzed and mitigated for the horses (BLM H‑4700‑1).
The agency said it had a “page limit” and could not perform the full analysis the HMAP requires — it would get to it “someday” (Wild Horse Education, July 11, 2026). A document that skips the analysis is not a plan. It is simply a permission slip to remove horses. This is the heart of litigation.
Why the missing HMAP is the whole game
Here is why this matters for the mine — and why the timing is the tell. The Cortez‑district mining DNA work was in play long before BLM rushed the Callaghan gather plan. The Robertson Mine EIS scoping opened in August 2023; BLM issued the Deep South Cortez expansion Record of Decision and the Robertson Final EIS in 2024 (Federal Register, Robertson EIS; Mining Engineering). Only after the mine expansions were moving did BLM release the Callaghan “HMAP/Gather Plan” EA for comment (August 2025) and approve it (February 2026), with the roundup beginning July 2026. (And an appeal filed at Robertson stating the BLM had failed to create an HMAP)
That sequence matters because of what an HMAP is for. Without a real HMAP, there is no document that can require mitigation for foreseeable impacts to the herds — not from the Cortez Pit Expansion’s dewatering, not from the widened haul roads between Cortez and Goldrush, not from livestock, not from fences that cut horses off water. There is no baseline, no herd‑habitat objective, no mitigation trigger. So when the mine’s dewatering dries a spring or a haul road bisects a movement corridor, there is nothing on the wild‑horse side of the ledger to demand mitigation. The horses were simply suffer and are removed.
Put bluntly: if there is no real HMAP, BLM cannot secure meaningful mitigation for the horses from any foreseeable impact on that range — mining, livestock, roads, fences, water development, or anything. The rushed gather plan does not fill that gap. It papers over it, and it empties the range in the meantime.
The Bald Mountain horses that “disappeared”
The clearing did not start in 2026. On the west side of this same complex in 2024 — with no authorized gather and no operative Environmental Assessment for Callaghan or Bald Mountain — BLM’s own numbers show Bald Mountain falling 78%, from 940 to 205 horses in a single year, and Callaghan falling 31%, from 1,147 to 787. Together, roughly 1,100 horses vanished from the range with no gather to explain it (Wild Horse Education, “Callaghan: The Math That Does Not ‘Math,'” July 2, 2026).
A herd does not lose 78% of its animals in twelve months to natural causes. And those horses did not reappear in another HMA in the complex or in any survey — BLM’s population files show no offsetting increase anywhere else. This is not new. BLM’s own decision documents state that “the Bald Mountain and South Shoshone HMAs are the only HMAs in the Shoshone‑Eureka Planning area that exhibit a low or negative growth rate that cannot be explained by gather activities, fertility control or inherent movement patterns” — an admission the agency has never reconciled (Wild Horse Education, July 2, 2026). When BLM cannot account for its own numbers, those numbers cannot be a lawful basis for removals.
The other mines in the area
The Cortez Pit Expansion is one project inside one of the densest gold‑mining districts on Earth — the Cortez trend of the Battle Mountain–Eureka belt. Within a short radius of the Callaghan Complex HMAs:
This is the part BLM’s DNA does not want the public to dwell on. Gold mining in the Cortez district reaches hundreds of feet below the water table, so the pits must be dewatered — groundwater is pumped out continuously to keep the mine dry.
- Cortez mine cluster (Pipeline, Cortez, Mt. Tenabo): has pumped the third‑highest cumulative volume in the Humboldt River Basin — more than 620,000 acre‑feet (Nevada Legislature, Hydrogeology of the Humboldt River Basin).
- Cortez Pit Expansion (2026): permitted to dewater up to 36,100 gallons per minute. Run continuously, that is on the order of ~58,000 acre‑feet per year — roughly the annual household water use of a mid‑sized city, pumped out of the ground to mine gold (BLM ePlanning).
- Cortez Hills historic dewatering: roughly 22,000–27,000 gpm, with a peak permitted rate of 34,500 gpm from deep bedrock wells averaging ~950 feet deep (Cyanide Code audit, Cortez).
- District‑wide context: in the middle Humboldt River Basin, mining accounted for ~78% of all groundwater pumped — about 233,000 acre‑feet in a single year, the vast majority for dewatering (USGS WRI 03‑4227). Statewide, most mine‑water withdrawals occur in this basin (Nevada State Water Plan).
- Springs and long‑term drawdown: the Cortez Hills EIS itself concluded that a culturally important spring at the base of Mt. Tenabo would dry up from deep dewatering and was not expected to recover within the 100‑year analysis window (Great Basin Resource Watch).
A lack of water is always a primary reason BLM removes wild horses. Not one of these mines repaired an existing water source or dropped a single well as mitigation for wild horses. Any water mitigation is usually limited to pipelines for livestock (turned off when cattle go home) or guzzlers for wildlife fenced so horses (or cows) cannot get in with no seeps installed for horses. Even when a seep for an exclosure is, on paper, part of the plan, too often they actually never install the portion of the project that would allow horses to drink.
If you want to comment on the mining DNA for Cortez, click here for more info.
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