BAKER CITY, Ore. — Mud proved a formidable obstacle at times, but an experiment designed to reduce the number of rotting cattle carcasses in parts of eastern Baker County, which can attract wolves that threaten livestock as well as ravens that eat sage grouse eggs, has shown promise.

“There were some growing pains, but it went pretty smooth,” said Eli Witham, who collected 68 carcasses — one horse and the rest cattle — during 2024, most of those in the first half of the year.

Witham works for a federal agency, USDA Wildlife Services.

Although Wildlife Services employees sometimes kill predators such as wolves, Witham’s job is to avoid the need for “lethal control.”

His job title is wolf conflict prevention specialist.

Witham, who’s from Baker City, works across Eastern Oregon to try to deter wolves from attacking livestock.

Some of his tasks have become familiar in a region where wolves have threatened, and in some cases injured and killed, livestock occasionally since the spring of 2009, when wolves killed 23 lambs on the Jacob ranch in Keating Valley.

That was the first confirmed instance of wolves killing livestock in Oregon since the predators, which were extirpated from the state about 1946, returned in 1999, crossing the border from Idaho, where the federal government transplanted wolves earlier in that decade.

Since then, Oregon’s wolf population has grown to at least 178. That’s how many wolves the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife counted in the state at the end of 2023, with about 85% of those in the northeast corner of the state, including Baker County.

There are almost certainly more wolves within the state’s borders, however, as ODFW acknowledges its annual survey can’t tally every wolf.

Witham said he spends much of his time working with ranchers, installing fladry — bright flags attached to fences, designed to deter wolves — putting up lights that serve the same purpose, and flying a drone that’s also intended to frighten wolves that get close to livestock.

But starting in February 2024, Witham took on a quite different duty.

He picked up dead cattle.

The carcasses, collected in the eastern part of the county, primarily in the Keating, Eagle and Pine valleys, were loaded in a trailer that Baker County bought with money from the state wolf depredation compensation program. Witham drove the carcasses to Baker Sanitary Service’s landfill near Baker City, where muddy roads during a mid-winter thaw left the truck and trailer stuck several times.

Some of the animals were turned into compost. The rest were buried in the landfill.

Witham shopes to resume the carcass removal project soon. There is no charge to ranchers.

“All of the producers who participated in the program were very thankful for the service and were easy to work with overall,” Witham wrote in a progress report on the program. “Two producers stated they would have had carcass pits on their property had we not started this program, and one of the objectives was to reduce the number of carcass pits as much as possible. This program is a net benefit to producers and should continue in the future.”

The program was designed to operate during calving season, which has started in parts of Baker County and will continue through the spring.

Witham said many of the carcasses he collected last year were stillborn calves or heifers that died while giving birth or soon after.

The purpose

The concept is simple.

Unburied animal carcasses can attract predators. But burying carcasses can be a challenge, especially if the ground is frozen

The list of animals that feed on carrion include wolves and ravens.

The former pose a threat to cattle and other livestock.

For sage grouse, the risk comes from ravens, according to wildlife biologists.

Research has shown that ravens can be a significant predator of sage grouse eggs and chicks — eggs being especially vulnerable.

Sage grouse tend to stay in relatively small areas, and if ravens concentrate in those same areas, in part because they’re attracted by carcasses, the proximity can put sage grouse eggs and chicks in peril.

A survey in the spring of 2016 in some of Baker County’s best sage grouse habitat, mainly east of Baker City in the Keating and Virtue Flat areas, showed raven populations were high enough to potentially pose a threat to sage grouse.

That risk prompted a four-year project, launched by ODFW, to reduce raven populations in the Baker Priority Area of Conservation — PAC — for sage grouse. It covers about 336,000 acres, all east of Interstate 84. The PAC extends north to near Thief Valley Reservoir, east to the Love Reservoir area about 20 miles east of Baker City, and southeast to near Durkee.

The state agency needed a permit allowing it to kill ravens because the birds are protected by the 1918 Migratory Bird Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency, granted ODFW the permit in 2021, despite objections from some conservation groups.

ODFW enlisted Wildlife Services — the agency Witham works for — to target ravens. The federal agency used poisoned chicken eggs and also shot ravens.

At the landfill

Stephen Henry, president of Baker Sanitary Service, which owns the landfill, said he was happy to participate in the carcass removal program.

He said he would prefer to turn carcasses into compost, mixing the remains with wood chips made from yard debris that residents bring to the landfill.

Composting carcasses preserves space in the landfill, Henry said.

However, Henry and Witham said they learned, about two weeks after the program started in February 2024, that the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality does not allow cattle 30 months or older to be composted unless the animal’s head and spinal column is removed.

The reason is to prevent the possible spread of bovine diseases such as mad cow, Henry said.

Because the landfill staff isn’t equipped to remove the head and spinal column from carcasses, Henry said they buried, rather than composted, cattle that were older than 30 months (or that appeared to be so, in cases when there wasn’t sufficient documentation of the animal’s age).

Henry said the landfill, in addition to taking the carcasses that Witham brought, also accepts carcasses that ranchers bring in, offering them a discount on the disposal fee thanks to a subsidy from the county’s wolf compensation committee. He said Baker Sanitary often is called to a ranch to load the carcass.

The county spent $100,000 to build the composting station at the landfill. That money was part of the six-year, $6.1 million grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board that Baker County received in 2019 to protect sage grouse and the bird’s habitat. The money is from Oregon Lottery revenue.

In past years, Henry said, Baker Sanitary had to bury in the landfill all animal carcasses, including ones killed by vehicles on local highways.

Henry estimated that the landfill accepted, in rancher-delivered livestock and ones that Baker Sanitary picked up, about twice as many as the 68 carcasses that Witham delivered in 2024.

Henry said the landfill has capacity to take even more carcasses.

He said he would like to eventually sell the compost. However, Henry said some potential buyers are leery about using compost that contains animal remnants as well as yard debris.

If there isn’t a market for the compost, Henry said Baker Sanitary could add it to the soil at the landfill. For now he said there isn’t a large stockpile of compost, and workers continue to add finished compost to fresh carcasses and yard debris to keep producing compost, a process that takes weeks.