More than 50 percent of the bird species that live in North America can be found here. This richness in wildlife translates into economic richness for New Mexico. Richness in diversity doesn't guarantee abundance, however. Fishery and wildlife managers in New Mexico, like their counterparts across the nation, are finding themselves in the midst of a numbers game. Either we have too many or too few, or nobody worries.
Conflicts arise when people disagree about the numbers.
Elk are a good example. Urban folks have an idea of how many they'd like to see for recreational purposes when they visit the national forest. Then, of course, livestock producers have their own number in mind, because the elk diet may overlap with that of cattle. It's hard to please everyone. We need to collect data on how many elk are out there, and also determine their impact on our natu-ral resources.