Isn’t Nature Grand?

A herd of about 140 wild horses is literally eating itself out of house and home. Many people are aware of the Assateague Island wild horses because of the annual Chincoteague pony penning. Each year, the horses on the part of the island that belongs to Virginia are rounded up and part of the herd is sold off. But on the Maryland side of the island, there is no such event and the horses are destroying the island.

ASSATEAGUE ISLAND, Md. — What do you do when one of your natural treasures starts eating all the others?

That's the National Park Service's dilemma on this storied barrier island. Proof of its problem can be found on a spongy stretch of salt marsh, where one section is fenced off by barbed wire.

Inside the fence, the island's native smooth cordgrass is growing thickly, a foot tall. Outside it, the grass is cropped nearly to the roots.

"Inside. Outside. A lot different," said Mark Sturm, a Park Service ecologist, gesturing at the denuded muck. The culprit is obvious: There's only one animal on Assateague that can't get through the fence.

"This is all horses," Sturm said.

Yes. Those horses. About 140 wild ponies live on the Maryland half of the island — less famous than their cousins in Virginia, who star in the annual Chincoteague pony penning, but still a major part of the Assateague mystique.

Now, Park Service officials say, the horse population is eating away at the plants that underpin rare coastal ecosystems here. They're considering a radical solution: selling or relocating as much as a third of the Maryland herd.

"There is no doubt in my mind," Sturm said, "that in the absence of action, things are only going to get worse."

There is the mandatory reflexive argument from the animal rights folks about getting the horse herd under control. The problem is that without the grass, there is nothing to hold the sand. Without the sand, the island will simply disappear. What's more important? They have a program to use contraceptives on the horses, but that has had the unintended consequence of allowing the female horses to live longer.