January/February 2019Vol. 13 No. 1

Wildlife-Friendly Solar Facilities

Revisiting the North American Model

The Wildlife Confessional

Editing the EcosystemWill Genetic Engineering

Revolutionize Conservation?

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2 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

January/February 2019 Vol. 13 No. 1

The Wildlife Professional is the flagship publication of The Wildlife Society and a benefit of membership. The magazine — published six times annually — presents timely research, news and analysis of trends in the wildlife profession.

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ABOUTThe Wildlife Society, founded in 1937, is an international non-profit scientific and educational association dedicated to excellence in wildlife stewardship through science and education. Our mission is to enhance the ability of wildlife professionals to conserve diversity, sustain productivity, and ensure responsible use of wildlife resources for the benefit of society. We encourage professional growth through certification, peer-reviewed publications, conferences and working groups. For more information, visit us at www.wildlife.org.

BECOME A MEMBERMembership is open to wildlife professionals, students and anyone who is interested in wildlife science, management and conservation. To learn about the benefits of TWS membership or to join, go to www.wildlife.org > join.

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COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of any article published by The Wildlife Society for limited personal or educational use within one’s home institution is hereby granted without fee, provided that the first page or initial screen of a display includes the notice “Copyright © 2019 by The Wildlife Society,” along with the full citation, including the name(s) of the author(s). Copyright for components of this work owned by persons or organizations other than TWS must be honored. Instructors may use articles for educational purposes only. Copying, republishing in part or whole, posting on an Internet website or using it for commercial or promotional purposes is prohibited under copyright laws and requires permission of the publisher. For permission, please contact editor@wildlife.org.

TWS STAFFEd Thompson Chief Executive Officer

Publications and Communications

Nancy Sasavage Editor-in-Chief

Integrated Communications

David Frey Managing Editor

Carson Maness Creative Manager

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Wildlife Policy and Programs

Keith Norris Director

Chuck Shively Business Relations Manager

Jamila Blake Professional Development Coordinator

Caroline Murphy Government Relations Program Coordinator

Operations

Cameron Kovach General Manager

Aniket Gajare Software Developer

Nick Wesdock Membership and Conferences Manager

Lilliam Matheson Member Services Coordinator

Mariah Simmons Unit Services Coordinator

TWS GOVERNING COUNCILDarren A. Miller President

Gary White President-Elect

Carol Chambers Vice President

John McDonald Past President

Evelyn Merrill Canadian Section

James Ramakka Southwest Section

Harriet Allen Northwest Section

John J. Moriarty North Central Section

Paul R. Johansen Northeast Section

Mike Conner Southeastern Section

Bob Lanka Central Mountains and Plains Section

Cynthia Graves Perrine Western Section

Colleen Hartel Student Liaison

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARDGordon R. Batcheller, chair NEAFWA

Adam Ahlers Kansas State University

Matthew P. Bettelheim URS Corporation

Robert Brown N.C. State University, retired

Claire Crow Bureau of Land Management

Shannon Farrell SUNY-ESF

Elmer Finck Fort Hays State University

Mike Gillingham University of Northern British Columbia

Barb Hill Bureau of Land Management, retired

Zachary Lowe Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation

Martin Lowney USDA APHIS Wildlife Services

Brian MacGowan Purdue University

Erin McCance University of Manitoba

Joe McGlincy The Wildlife Company

Maureen Murray National Park Service

Colleen Olfenbuttel N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission

Natalie Sexton U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Mark Smith Auburn University

Misty Sumner Texas Parks & Wildlife Dept., retired

Lowell Suring Northern Ecologic LLC

Michelle Verant National Park Service

Scott Williams Conn. Agricultural Experiment Station

Brian Zinke Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife

Graphic design by Lynn Riley Design.

Credit: Reina Heinz/Island Conservation

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COVER STORY >>

Contents January/February 2019 Vol. 13 No. 1

Credit: Steve Uffman

>> Log On for MoreThis publication is available online to TWS members on wildlife.org. References printed in blue indicate links in the online version of the magazine.

FEATURES26 Holes in the Model Is it Time to Revisit the North American Model? By Chris Madson

30 Our Precious Wildlife Resources Further Thoughts on the North American Model By John F. Organ, Shane P. Mahoney and Valerius Geist

34 10 Years After the Miracle on the Hudson Improvements in Wildlife Strike Management By Jenny Washburn

39 Protecting Connectivity for Western Big Game Wyoming Starts Implementation of Secretarial Order

on Migration Corridors By David Frey

43 Oh my Aching Neck! The Northeast Regional Mast Survey Offers Acorn Abundance Data By Gary W. Norman

46 Can Solar Farms Be Wildlife Friendly? A Facility in the Southwest Hopes to Find the Answer By Jennifer Wilkening and Kurt Rautenstrauch

51 The Conservation Affairs Network in Action Coordinating Wildlife Policy Issues Across TWS Sections and Chapters By Caroline E. Murphy, Kelly Holland and James Ramakka

54 The Wildlife Confessional Oral Histories, Memories and Experiences of Wildlife Professionals By Matthew Bettelheim

Credit: Kristin Mettke/Valley Electric Association, Inc.

46

Credit: Mark Thonhoff/BLM Wyoming

39

Credit: Jenny Washburn/Wildlife Services

18

Departments 6 Editor’s Note 7 Leadership Letter 8 Science in Short 12 State of Wildlife

16 Today’s Wildlife Professional58 In Memory59 Field Notes60 Gotcha!

Editing the EcosystemWill Genetic Engineering Revolutionize Conservation? By David Frey

6 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

The Wildlife Society wishes to thank the following organizations for their

financial support of The Wildlife Professional.

Pondering the Future

As one year ends and another one begins, it’s a good time to put the past behind us and think about the future. I think you will find that this first issue of The Wildlife Professional for 2019 offers plenty of food for thought.

Our cover story, Editing the Ecosystem, describes genetic techniques that could change how biologists manage island ecosystems that are threatened by invasive rats and mice. Today, toxicants, which are not species specific and are potentially dangerous to humans, are frequently used to eradicate such pests. But a highly specific and controversial alternative — gene drive technology — could be a game changer in the future. Scientists are already developing strains of genetically engineered wild mice that when introduced into an island ecosystem could wipe out the species or disrupt the life cycle of ticks that carry Lyme disease. Meanwhile the debate about the social, ethical and regulatory implications is taking place, and it’s one that wildlife professionals need to be a part of.

Another technology gaining momentum is solar energy. These facilities can bring welcome relief from our dependence on fossil fuels. Yet as more are built, concerns about how to make them wildlife friendly have grown. Habitat loss and fragmentation, leading to reduced biodiversity and ecosystem resilience, are particularly detrimental to land in the southwestern United States, a region with sensitive environments and wildlife. A contributed article on page 46, Can Solar Farms Be Wildlife Friendly?, describes efforts to learn more about the impacts on the federally threatened Mojave Desert tortoise.

Also in this issue, we present two commentaries on the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Its seven principles form a foundation for key conservation laws and programs in Canada and the United States. But will they stand the test of the future? I think you will find the questions raised by Chris Madson on page 26 in his commentary, Holes in the Model, and the further thoughts presented by John Organ, Shane Mahoney and Valerius Geist on page 30 give you plenty to ponder as you start 2019.

Happy New Year!

Nancy SasavageEditor-in-Chiefeditor@wildlife.org

Editor’s Note

7www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Mission ControlWORKING TOGETHER TO ENSURE TWS FULFILLS ITS MISSION

By Darren A. Miller

“To inspire, empower and enable wildlife professionals to sustain wildlife populations and habitat through science-based management and conservation.”

I hope you recognize this phrase — it’s the mission statement of The Wildlife Society. As a member, this is the mission you support

through your dues and TWS-related activities.

But how do we ensure that we achieve our mission?

TWS has a five-year strategic plan that is supported by annual operational plans approved by Council and executed by TWS staff. These plans provide the blueprint for achieving the goals derived from our mission.

This certainly seems simple enough; however, it’s very easy to lose sight of the big picture while concentrating on the daily details of meeting specific objectives. I believe this is particularly true for a member-driven organization such as TWS because much of our critical work is accomplished through volunteers. These volunteers — you, the members of TWS — have paying jobs or demanding academic schedules (or both!), family obligations and all the entrapments of daily living to occupy your time. It’s easy to lose track of where TWS is going.

Within the Society, we have a variety of working groups, committees and other organizational units that are focused on particular aspects of science-based wildlife conservation and management. And, we don’t always agree on the best course of action on specific topics! It’s worth it, however, for every member to occasionally step back and think more strategically about how we can all pull together to work toward our mission. By encompassing the different values and perspectives of our membership, together we can keep steering toward our organizational goals as a Society.

If you take the time to dissect the mission statement, you will see it is actually composed of two parts. The

second part is what I think many of our members associate with TWS — application of science to manage and conserve our wildlife resources. TWS meets this need through a variety of publications, online resources, working groups focused on particular aspects of wildlife conservation and management, policy deliverables based on sound science, and keeping members informed about the current state of wildlife science.

However, we cannot afford to lose sight of the first part of our mission statement — the human element. We must have a well-trained, diverse professional membership to inspire, empower and enable wildlife biologists to meet the science part of our mission.

I am sure all of us can point to several people who have inspired us during our careers. You don’t have to be a great orator or a prominent conservation leader to inspire others. Sometimes, this inspiration can come simply from serving as a role model and demonstrating adherence to ethical behavior in word and deed. You never know what seemingly simple or routine task may be inspirational to others. Empowering others — especially those that may have trouble finding their voice in our profession — is critically important to the future of the wildlife profession.

It’s not enough to promote diversity and inclusion today. We must actively engage people who may need that extra push to feel welcomed and valued. Every one of us can do that. Allowing others to take charge of tasks, offering encouragement and recognizing a job well done are critical to empowering the next generation of wildlifers. As TWS members, we should also promote a welcoming, harassment-free work environment for all wildlifers.

We will truly meet our mission statement and succeed in conserving our wildlife resources for generations to come only when every member, and potential member, feels included and part of the big picture.

Leadership Letter

Darren A. Miller, PhD, CWB® and TWS Fellow, is TWS president and vice president of forestry programs for the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement.

8 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

When elk (Cervus canadensis) were translocated to Missouri’s Ozark Mountains, wildlife managers wanted to get a sense of how they would respond to the new landscape. Using GPS collars, researchers tracked the elk and found they particularly chose open lands, including glades, pastures and forage openings maintained for other species.

“Open lands appear to be quite essential to elk in these forested landscapes,” said Colter Chitwood, a post-doctorate fellow at the University of Montana and a co-author of a study on the Missouri elk published in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

Researchers, led by University of Montana graduate student Trent Smith, wanted to know what led to better site fidelity for the translocated elk in an effort to keep them from wandering away and causing conflicts with nearby landowners. They found a “soft release” of the elk — holding them in pens at the release site for a while before letting them into the wild — seemed to help keep them from bolting away.

Once released, the elk selected open areas for foraging, whether they were natural glades that occur throughout the Ozarks or areas managed to benefit white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo).

The study should help managers in other Eastern states where elk are being reintroduced, Colter said, but it also shows the benefits of monitoring elk after they’re released.

“That allows us to be adaptive when it comes to planning future translocations or conducting habitat management,” he said.

Science in Short

Recent papers from wildlife conservation and management journals

Missouri elk seek open spaces

Credit: David Hasenbeck

Researchers tracked translocated elk wearing GPS collars in the Missouri Ozarks to monitor their land usage.

Credit: Randy Larsen

Pipeline impacts pygmy rabbits

When crews built an oil and gas pipeline across Utah, wildlife managers seized the opportunity to gauge its impact on pygmy rabbits (Brachylagus idahoensis). While the construction didn’t affect the rabbits’ survival, it dramatically affected their activity.

The Ruby Pipeline “went right through a very active area of pygmy rabbits,” said TWS member Randy Larsen, co-author on the study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. Occurring only on sagebrush landscapes, North America’s smallest lagomorph is protected in Utah and elsewhere. “It’s a species that we’re all very concerned about,” Larsen said.

Researchers compared radio-collared rabbits before and after construction with those in a control area. The construction activity destroyed many burrows, Larsen said, but “there was not even a single case of animals being killed.”

Home ranges and core areas shrunk, however, and rabbits avoided the right of way even after construction finished. Because they select for mature sagebrush, Larsen said, their habitat could “be fragmented for a number of decades.”

Pygmy rabbits avoided an oil and gas pipeline long after construction.

9www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Eastern box turtles prove elusive after fires

To maintain tallgrass prairies and oak savannahs, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources relies on prescribed burns. But after noticing injuries and mortalities to the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina), a Michigan species of special concern, DNR officials wanted better answers as to how fires affect them. As part of her master’s thesis at Michigan State University, TWS member Tracy Melvin set out to see how well fire personnel could find dead or injured box turtles after a burn.

“Most folks would think box turtles would be easy to see after a fire,” said Melvin, lead author on the study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. People assume their rounded carapaces and bright colors stick out on the scorched landscape, she said, but that wasn’t the case.

Tracy worked with firefighters as they set controlled burns in May, when turtles are active, and had technicians comb the area in search of seven fitted with radio transmitters. It wasn’t easy, Melvin found. Detection probability was low and varied greatly among technicians — even in blackened areas where turtles should be most visible.

“It’s their behavior during a fire that partly makes them harder to find after a fire,” she said. The turtles buried themselves for up to 12 hours to avoid flames, then bolted to unburned areas. Affected turtles went to soak in wetlands.

Managers try to set fires earlier in the season when turtles are underground, Melvin said, but if the timing coincides with them becoming active, “it might turn into a deadly combination.”

Credit: Tracy Melvin

Eastern box turtles’ behavior makes them hard to find after prescribed fires.

Where do reddish egrets prefer to nest?

To inform conservation and management of North America’s rarest herons — reddish egrets (Egretta rufescens) — researchers set out to learn more about their nesting habitat preferences.

“We need to know about distribution and population status of the bird,” said TWS member Andrew Cox, an avian researcher for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who led the study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

Cox and his colleagues combined surveys in more than 300 coastal islands, looking at spots likely to have reddish egrets, a species of conservation concern that is state-listed in Florida. The birds were more abundant at sites with good forage and where other nesting water birds were present.

That’s good news for managers, Cox said, because actions that benefit Florida’s largest coastal wading bird colonies are likely to also benefit reddish egrets.

“It’s a nice thing to know there’s a holistic management for these species,” he said.

Reddish egrets prefer to nest in areas with plenty of forage. Credit: Derek Bakken/Flickr

10 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

Science in Short

What made the brown treesnake (Boiga irregularis) such a devastating invasive species in Guam? It was partly its venom, said Bryan Fry, associate professor at the University of Queensland, but it was also “the luck of the draw.”

The brown treesnake isn’t dangerous to humans, but its venom — a combination of two smaller toxins joined together — is 100 times more toxic to birds than to mammals, said Fry, co-author of a study of the snake’s toxin published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. Since the snake “hitchhiked” on troop carriers from Oceania to Guam during World War II, it has driven multiple native bird species to extinction. Only three bird species remain on Guam, Fry said.

Previous research suggested that the snake was alone in possessing this toxic combination, Fry said, but his team found that every other snake in the genus, known as cat-eyed snakes, has similar venom. The brown treesnake just “happened to be the one,” he said. “We hypothesized that any of them would have had the same effect. It was the right snake at the wrong place. Or the wrong snake at the right place.”

By understanding why animals are more likely to be successful invaders, he said, managers can better predict where they’ll invade. He worries about brown treesnakes hitching a ride again, this time on military flights to Hawaii, despite the military’s efforts to keep them out. “They need to succeed all the time,” Fry said. “The snakes only need to succeed once.”

Venom alone doesn’t explain brown treesnake’s success

Recent Most-Read Articles on wildlife.org.

• Mosquito repellent kills salamander larvae

• Ocelots populations appear stable in Belize

• What’s killing desert bighorn lambs?

Contributed by David Frey and Dana Kobilinsky.

Credit: Chris Collins/Heritage Expeditions

Whale carcasses unlikely to save polar bears from climate change

Washed-up whales likely helped polar bears (Ursus maritimus) survive periods of low Arctic sea ice during interglacial periods, but they won’t be enough to sustain them in a future warming Arctic, researchers predict.

An international team tried to anticipate future conditions by looking at how whale strandings supported polar bears when seals — their primary prey — weren’t accessible.

A single bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) can provide the nutritional equivalent of about 13,000 ringed seals (Pusa hispida) — enough food to last for months or even years, said Kristin Laidre, principle scientist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center and lead author of the study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. But today, commercial whaling leaves fewer stranded carcasses, human activity precludes bears from accessing them and sea ice is melting far faster.

Whale carcasses are “not going to save polar bears from climate change,” Laidre said. “The only way to conserve polar bears is to slow climate change.”

Scavenging on the carcasses of whales that wash ashore may not buffer polar bears against sea ice loss.

Credit: Troy Bell/Flickr

The brown treesnake’s venom is highly toxic to birds.

12 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

State of Wildlife

NORTHEAST

Maine ramps up CWD protection

Detection of chronic wasting disease in a captive red deer (Cervus elaphus) in Quebec last fall pushed the Maine Depart-ment of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to ramp up monitoring and prevention efforts. New emergency rules forbid hunters from bringing white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and moose (Alces alces) car-casses from Canada into Maine and urge hunters in the state to report deer that ap-pear sick or weak. Maine wildlife officials also increased sampling efforts along the border with Quebec to test for CWD, said Nathan Bieber, deer specialist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Bieber said the department cur-rently tests samples from about 500 deer, including hunted animals and roadkill, as well as moose and some captive cervids. While hunters can’t bring in full carcasses from Canada under the new rules, Bieber said, they can bring in boned-out meat and taxidermy mounts and certain animal parts without infectious tissue. Hunters can still bring full carcasses from New Hampshire, which is CWD-free, but “we’ll look at the New Hampshire exemption in the future,” he said. Maine is also working on drafting a CWD response plan based on what other states have done and CWD best manage-ment practices drafted by the Association

of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. “Thankfully, we’ve got a 200-mile buffer between a positive case,” Bieber said. “We’re still good in Maine, but we’re preparing in case it shows up.” Source: Maine Department of

Inland Fisheries

SOUTHEAST

N.C. voters pass right-to-hunt amendment

North Carolina became the 22nd state to protect hunting and fishing as a right after voters in November approved a new amendment to the state constitution. The amendment, which passed with 57 percent of the vote, limits the state’s ability to regulate hunting and establishes hunting as the “preferred” means of managing wildlife. “The right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife is a valued part of the State’s heritage and shall be for-ever preserved for the public good,” the amendment says. That right is subject only to state rules and regulations to “promote wildlife conservation and management” and “preserve the future of hunting and fish-ing.” Supporters included the National Rifle Association and the Congressional Sports-men’s Foundation, both of which testified in support of the legislation before the state

legislature. “Constitutionally safeguarding the right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife is critical to the future of North Carolina’s outdoor heritage,” the CSF wrote in a letter of support to legislators. Critics said the amendment was unnecessary and could jeopardize efforts to regulate hunting and fishing. Source: North Carolina General Assembly

SOUTHWEST

Mount Graham red squirrel numbers nearly double

Mount Graham red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus grahamensis) numbers are on the rise after a 2017 wildfire left them on the brink of extinction. “We’re hope-ful, I would say,” said Marit Alanen, fish and wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In the wake of the Frye Fire, biologists counted just 35 Mount Graham red squirrels, an endangered red squirrel subspecies that exists only in southeastern Arizona’s Pinaleño Mountains. The most conservative estimate from the 2018 survey put their numbers at 67 — almost twice that of the previous year but still well below the 252 squirrels estimated in 2016. “There has been some breeding,” Alanen said, but the higher numbers may also be due to more detailed surveying. U.S. Forest Service

Regional news from The Wildlife Society’s Sections

Maine has increased its monitoring and detection efforts for chronic wasting disease.

Credit: Larry Smith

North Carolina became the latest state to protect hunting and fishing as a right.

Credit: Frank Kehren

13www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

staffers combed their range and found red squirrel middens that appeared to be occupied that hadn’t been counted before, she said. “We were able to incorporate those into our annual survey,” Alanen said. A group of partners, including the USFWS, USFS, Arizona Game and Fish and the Phoe-nix Zoo, has been collaborating to help the squirrels rebound, by implementing supple-mental feeding and captive breeding efforts. “They’ve survived high-severity, large-scale fires in the past,” Alanen said. “Of course, today we have other stressors, like climate change and drought.” The species was de-clared endangered in 1987. Source: USFWS

Horned lizards released in Texas

Texas horned lizards (Phrynosoma cornu-tum) are an iconic species in Texas, but for decades they’ve been on the wane. Now, however, a captive breeding program is working to bring them back to Texas land-scapes. “We call them horny toads,” said Nathan Rains, a wildlife diversity biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife. “People have kind of an emotional attachment to that spe-cies. They grew up with them, and they just don’t see them anymore.” Last fall, biolo-gists released some 130 hatchlings, born in captivity in a partnership with zoos in Dallas and Fort Worth, to Mason Mountain Wildlife Management Area in central Texas. Their plan is to release about 500 hatchlings at Mason Mountain. If the project is successful, they may take it to other wildlife manage-ment areas. “I don’t know that we’re ever going to be able to really establish popula-

tions statewide,” said Devin Erxleben, a Texas Parks and Wildlife natural resources specialist, “but if we can get a couple popu-lations on our wildlife management areas, people can get out and see and interact with them.” Historically, horned lizards occupied most of Texas, but their range has gradually contracted to primarily West Texas, the panhandle and South Texas, due mostly to habitat loss. Over the past decade, state biologists have been working with zoos and Texas Christian University to study the lizards, capture them in the wild, release them elsewhere and monitor them using tiny transmitters. The challenge has been predators, which can claim 60 percent or more of the population a year. “It’s tough to overcome that huge amount of preda-tion,” Erxleben said. “We think the hatchling effort will definitely help us out.” Source:

Texas Parks and Wildlife

WEST

Air Force to expand test range into Nevada refuge

The U.S. Air Force plans to expand a training site into about 300,000 acres of a Nevada wildlife refuge. In a final legislative envi-ronmental impact statement released in October, the Air Force detailed its plans to expand the 2.9 million-acre Nevada Test and Training Range into the Desert National Wildlife Refuge. Air Force officials said the additional land will allow them to expand training and hold more realistic combat exercises. The expansion would primarily

impact the Sheep Mountains, which were set aside for desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) in 1936. “The range and its infrastructure are quickly becoming out-dated as rates of technological development of new weapons systems and electronic warfare systems accelerate,” the Air Force announced in its LEIS. The expansion has met with opposition from environmental-ists, hunters, off-road enthusiasts and tribal groups. Officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has recommended much of the higher elevations for wilderness protection, also have raised concerns. The Desert National Wildlife Refuge is part of a 1.6 million-acre refuge complex that is one of the largest in the country. About half of the refuge is already under military use, but it continues to result in “significant restric-tions on Air Force activities,” the LEIS says. Expanding the test range would enhance “range capability for improved training and testing,” it says. Congress is expected to vote on the proposal before November 2021, when the deal for the existing range expires. Source: Nellis Air Force Base

NORTH CENTRAL

Milwaukee arena built with birds in mind

The new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks National Basketball Association team is set to be the first bird-friendly sports and entertainment arena. The 17,500-seat Fiserv Forum was designed to achieve the U.S.

Part of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge is set aside for desert bighorns.

Credit: USFWS

Efforts are underway to help the Mount Graham red squirrel recover from near extinction.

Credit: Marit Alanen/USFWS

Biologists used tiny transmitters to track Texas horned lizards after releasing them.

Credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife

14 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

State of Wildlife

Green Building Council’s bird collision deterrence credit as part of LEED Silver cer-tification. Qualifying buildings must address issues involving reflective and see-through glass as well as lighting, which can disorient birds at night during spring and fall migra-tions. “I think it’s huge,” said Bryan Lenz, collisions campaign manager for the Ameri-can Bird Conservancy. “If a professional sports team can design an arena this way, anybody can do this. It doesn’t add any cost to the building, and you’re not going to lose any fans by designing a building that’s good for birds.” The ABC, which helped create the collision deterrence credit, estimates that up to 1 billion birds die each year in the United States after colliding with glass, con-tributing to ongoing population declines. Source: American Bird Conservancy

Ontario wolves introduced to Isle Royale

Isle Royale National Park officials and their partners plan to add four to six more wolves from Ontario to the Michigan national park. This step, which will likely take place in January, is the next in a plan to increase the wolf population on the island to help keep the moose population in check. A recent reintroduction of four additional wolves during the fall has been successful, although there was one male wolf mortality, said park spokeswoman Liz Valencia. “We’re still moving forward with the project,” she said. “We will add four to six wolves from the province of Ontario probably in January as part of the three-year process to have 20 to 30 wolves in the final decision plan.” Ontario offered to share from its large population of wolves, she said. The Ontario wolves will also help add genetic diversity to the population and have had experience tak-ing down moose. “The plan and the hope of the whole process is that it will restore predation on the island,” Valencia said. “They will form packs and then would be efficient at hunting moose. Certainly, all the scientists involved in the wolf-moose project that we talk to believe this is possible and that it will work over time.” Source: Isle Royale National Park

NORTHWEST

Rat prompts action on Alaskan islandFor years, Alaska’s Aleut Community of St. Paul Island was successfully keeping rats that come through shipping ports off the island. “It has been a colossal effort with federal agencies, local government and trib-al efforts to keep it that way,” said Lauren Divine, co-director of the island’s ecosys-tem conservation office. But after a rat was spotted in a processing plant last August, wildlife managers and others haven’t been able to find it, and they worry there may be more. An intergovernmental team put out traps and wildlife cameras but had no luck. Then in late October, Divine got word that a plant worker caught it — and dropped it. Since the rat has plenty of food at the plant, officials are looking for other ways to lure it and trap it, as well as any others that may be around. They plan to put out dead rats to attract live ones. “We think perhaps the smell and scent of other rats in the vicinity will draw the rats out and they will be curious enough to go and investigate,” Divine said. She worries if a rat population establishes itself on the island it could dev-astate shorebirds such as the threatened red-legged kittiwake (Rissa brevirostris) and the black-legged kittiwake (R. tridactyla), both of which are important to the island’s indigenous community. “We’re hoping that it’s just one rat,” she said. “But we have to assume if you have one, you have more. And if you have more, you assume they are breeding. If there’s an established popula-tion, we would be so devastated.” Source:

Ecosystem Conservation Office for the Aleut Com-

munity of St. Paul Island

Oregon moves to mobile app for hunting licenses and tags

Following the lead of states such as Georgia, Florida and Ohio, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is making the move to using smartphone mobile apps to provide hunting and fishing licenses and tags. “We certainly had customers asking for the ability to carry tags on smartphones,” said Michelle Dennehy, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Fish and

Credit: Jim Peaco/NPS

The new Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee was designed to reduce bird collisions.

Credit: Populous

National Park Service staff carry a previously relocated wolf to its release site on Isle Royal.

15www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Contributed by David Frey and Dana Kobilinsky.

Wildlife. “We all know this is the way things have gone.” With the new system, which launched Dec. 1, hunters and anglers can buy their licenses online or on their app and use them immediately instead of having to wait for them to be mailed. People who want to continue to use paper tags can do so as well, by printing them out for immediate use. Customers will also be able to continue to buy from license sale agents and at ODFW offices. “We’re trying to remove barriers to hunting and fishing,” Dennehy said. “It is time to move on to a more modernized ap-proach using smart phones.” Source: Oregon

Department of Fish and Wildlife

CANADA

Canada invests in educating children about wildlife

The Canadian government plans to invest $2.25 million over three years for a new project designed to boost young people’s interest in wildlife conservation. “Canada is protecting its natural heritage, wildlife and biodiversity by engaging the next generation of environmental stew-ards across the country about species at risk,” said government spokeswoman Veronica Petro. The Engaging Canadian Children in Wildlife Conservation funding program will help support the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and the Earth Rangers Foundation, which educate children about the importance of protect-ing nature and threats to Canada’s wildlife.

“This initiative will inspire and enable Ca-nadian children to take an active role in the protection of wildlife, including species at risk, and their habitat,” Petro said. Minis-ter of Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna said the funding will also help Canada reach its 2020 Biodi-versity Goals and Targets, which include getting more Canadians out into nature. “Educating and engaging children in protecting nature are important to ensure a healthy and prosperous future for our country,” Mckenna said in a press release. “Our partnership with the Earth Rangers Foundation and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to educate and en-gage children in conservation will inspire the next generation to take action to con-serve our national natural heritage, protect the environment and grow the economy.” Source: Government of Canada

CENTRAL MOUNTAINS & PLAINS

Durango invests in bear-resistant trashcans for residents

To help reduce human-bear conflict, the city of Durango, Colo., is investing in bear-resistant trashcans for city residents. Colorado Parks and Wildlife helped provide bear-resistant trashcans in certain areas as part of a five-year study, but Durango plans to expand the program by purchasing 400 bear cans to make them available for sale in an area where bears are frequently seen. Residents would pay a $100 delivery fee and $4 a month. Studies by Colorado Parks and Wildlife showed bear-resistant

garbage cans were effective in reducing human-bear conflict, said Matt Thorpe, area wildlife manager with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Cans deployed in Durango reduced trash-related bear conflicts by 60 percent compared to a control area. “It definitely is an investment using bear-resistant cans,” Thorpe said. While people have to pay more for them, the fee helps with their upkeep and replacement, especially when drought and other factors bring more bears. “What we’re all hoping for is for folks to help us to reduce the number of attractants that bring bears into town, and in turn to let us coexist,” Thorpe said. “If folks take what seems like a pretty small step keeping trash secure, whether inside a shed or garage or one of these cans, they can help to reduce those conflicts and keep bears out of trouble.” Source: Colorado Parks and Wildlife

Credit: Greg Shine, BLM

Oregon hunting and fishing licenses and tags are now available on smartphone apps and online.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the city of Durango are investing in more bear-proof trashcans.

Credit: David Mitchell

Canada set aside money to get more people into nature.

Credit: Ruth Hartnup

16 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

Today’s Wildlife Professional

Mindy Rice was ready to quit. It was 2003 and she was a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University, but her relationship with her

research adviser wasn’t so good. She found herself sitting across the desk from another faculty member and venting. David Haukos helped change Rice’s mind about quitting. From that day on, he became someone she could talk to about wildlife, career and even personal issues. She decided to stay on.

“He has helped me get through a lot of hiccups and struggles to this day,” said Rice, who is now a spa-tial ecologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge System and a TWS member. “He’s probably the only person I go to when I need advice.”

Rice isn’t the only student with this type of rela-tionship with Haukos. He’s advised and mentored a lot of students, including many who weren’t in his classes. Women, in particular, who struggled to find mentors in the wildlife field found Haukos a supportive adviser, Rice said. “He’s just been crazy important, especially to almost every female student he had.”

Haukos stands out as an expert in a variety of fields, including the study of lesser prairie-chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), playa ecosystems and waterfowl. He’s widely published and has received a number of prestigious awards, includ-ing the Hamerstrom Award for prairie grouse work and the 2018 TWS edited book award for Ecology and Conservation of Lesser Prairie-Chickens. He currently leads the U.S. Geological Survey’s Kansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and is an associate professor in the division of biology at Kansas State. He also serves as editor of the Wild-life Society Bulletin. But Haukos believes his legacy is his students.

“My personal recognition doesn’t mean all that much to me because I think the influence I have or the contributions I make need to go beyond just benefiting me,” he said. “The greatest thing we can do in this field in terms of a legacy is the influence you have on people that continue to work after you’re done.”

Becoming a ‘marsh rat’As far back as Haukos can remember, he was sur-rounded by wildlife and wild lands. He grew up in west central Minnesota, and his family lived off the land. “We hunted, fished, grew all of the food that we used,” he said. His grandfather and his parents instilled a conservation ethic in him and encouraged him to wander the 80 acres of forest and fish in the lake near his home. “My parents had taken me out to a duck blind before I could walk,” he said. “I was on boats from the time I was one or two years old.”

One day in high school, Haukos went to the library to research potential careers and saw the words “wildlife biologist” for the first time. The only wild-life career he had known about was game warden, but those two new words stuck in his mind. He began researching schools and what it would take to be in the natural resources field.

It didn’t happen right away. Haukos quit college after his first semester, but his mother urged him

DAVID HAUKOS WORKS TO BUILD THE WILDLIFE PROFESSION’S FUTURE

Creating a Legacy Through his Students

By Dana Kobilinsky

Credit: Julie Thomas

To get young people excited about natural resource management, Dave Haukos worked with urban school children in Lubbock, Texas, to collect playa field data.

17www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

to go back. He started at a community college, where a biology professor pushed him to pursue his wildlife biology dream. He enrolled at South Dakota State and decided to further his educa-tion. He received master’s and doctorate degrees at Texas Tech, where he started studying lesser prairie-chickens and playa wetlands in Texas and New Mexico.

But Haukos’s real passion lay in waterfowl and wetlands. A self-described “marsh rat,” he delights in heading out to wetlands to study marsh environ-ments and document bird migration patterns. “You have to have a real dedication and single-mindedness and a purpose to get up at 3 in the morning and get out when it’s freezing cold,” he said.

He began working on playa wetlands and small freshwater wetlands in the Great Plains in the late 1980s, and his research there continues. “The playa expert is Dave,” said TWS member Warren Conway, Bricker Endowed Chair of Wildlife Biology at Texas Tech. “He’s responsible for what we know about playa ecology in this part of the world.”

A passion to teachAfter finishing his PhD, Haukos joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a private lands biolo-gist, working with farmers and ranchers in its Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program. “The whole idea of management of natural resources in agri-cultural situations — farming, ranching, things like that — it’s been part of everything I’ve done from as far as I can remember,” he said.

Haukos served on the Texas Tech faculty and worked for the USFWS as a migratory bird spe-cialist until 2011 when he landed a job he had long dreamed of — working in the USGS cooperative unit program that he’s in now — a position that allows him to conduct research and train future professionals.

“He is so well-connected,” said former student Lindsay Smythe, now a National Park Service biolo-gist. “He has one foot in the government world and one in the academic world.”

Teaching is so near to Haukos’s heart, he’s been known to instruct students at Texas Tech without getting paid. Now, he teaches an undergraduate program at Kansas State University. “It’s not part of my job duties,” he said. “It’s something extra.

It’s important to me to get as many people excited about natural resource management as I can. The biggest thrills I have are to see people go out and do good things. That’s why I still do it.”

Giving backTeaching doesn’t happen only in the classroom for Haukos, and it doesn’t only involve wildlife sci-ence. Rice said she met Haukos in 2003 at Texas Tech, where he helped her through some tough times before taking her on as a postdoc advisee. She recalls crying in his office while Haukos sat and listened. “My entire perspective on the wildlife world changed,” she said. Haukos approached academia as a collaboration, not a dictatorship. He helped her see a place for herself in the wild-life profession.

“There’s a lot of challenges out there in the world,” Haukos said. “We continue to need strong, edu-cated people to address those challenges. I strongly encourage people in this field to continue to pursue these types of careers, even though there are some obstacles right now in maintaining a career in this field. People always ask me what it takes to be successful in the wildlife field, and I always say three things: patience, persistence and preparation. If you can keep working and never give up, good things will happen.”

Haukos also finds time to give back to the wild-life profession. A member of The Wildlife Society since 1984, he serves as the faculty adviser to the student chapter at Kansas State University. He also has served two six-year terms as an associate editor for The Wildlife Society Bulletin and is now editor-in-chief.

“I think it’s really important, especially when you get to midcareer and beyond, to give back to the profession through The Wildlife Society,” he said. “That’s where I’m at right now — giving back to the profession I have been a part of for nearly three decades.”

Then-TWS President Gary Potts congratulates Dave Haukos on being named a TWS Fellow in 2016.

Credit: The Wildlife Society

Dana Kobilinsky is a science writer for The Wildlife Society.

18 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

By David Frey

She could smell the island before she saw it. As the

sailboat cut through whitecaps off the San Francisco

coast, the odor of guano stung her nostrils before the

white-spattered rocks of Southeast Farallon emerged

from the fog. The Farallones host the largest seabird

population in the continental United States, but it wasn’t

birds Megan Serr was interested in. A PhD candidate at

North Carolina State University, Serr was here for mice.

WILL GENETIC ENGINEERING REVOLUTIONIZE CONSERVATION?

Editing the Ecosystem

19www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

anaged by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service as a wildlife refuge, the Farallon Islands are a designated wilderness area

except for Southeast Farallon, which has a light-house and other signs of human presence. But the island is off limits to the public and has no dock, so Serr, a TWS member, had to reach it the way every researcher who comes here does. She sat in a dinghy as a crane carried it over waters filled with white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) to the rocky bluffs where northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) and Stellar sea lions (Eumetopias juba-tus) stretched out alongside western gulls (Larus occidentalis), tufted puffins (Fratercula cirrhata) and common murres (Uria aalge). Serr spotted a mouse scurrying on the rocks, but she didn’t have to track it down. The USFWS had 21 in Sherman traps waiting for her.

Just 20 miles off the California coast, the Farallon archipelago is considered the most rodent-dense island chain in the world. Some 60,000 invasive Eurasian house mice (Mus musculus), believed to have been accidentally introduced in the mid-19th century, occupy them. At their peak, they reach “plague-like densities,” the USFWS says, with over 1,200 mice per hectare (USFWS 2013). The island once had introduced European rabbits (Orycto-lagus cuniculus) and feral cats (Felis catus), but they were eradicated more than 40 years ago. Mice are the only invasive mammals that remain.

They eat native insects and plants. They may spread disease to pinnipeds. But mostly, they at-tract burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia), which turn to prey on seabirds like the ashy storm-petrel (Oceanodroma homochroa) in the winter when mice are inactive.

The USFWS is considering plans to eliminate the mice using rodenticides, but Serr was here as part of an investigation into whether a high-tech measure could one day eradicate mice from islands around the world. At the time, it seemed far-fetched. It was the fall of 2013, and her graduate work at NCSU’s Genetic Engineering and Society Center had seemed more theoretical than practi-cal. Sailing to an infested island collecting rodents didn’t change that. “We were so far off from think-ing that this was even feasible,” she said.

But researchers had recently described work they had accomplished with a gene-editing system known as CRISPR, short for clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats, which would revolutionize human medicine and raise staggering possibilities in the world of wildlife management. Soon, biologists began considering pioneering genetic techniques that seemed to open new pos-sibilities. Could genetic engineering rid islands of invasive pests? Could tampering with genes protect endangered species from disease? Could it combat human diseases spread by wildlife?

Credit: Eric Davis/USFWS

A crane lifts a small landing boat onto the Southeast Farallon Island. The islands are off limits to the public and there are no docks.

M

20 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

In the years since Serr set sail back from Southeast Farallon with specimens to populate a “mouse barn” at her university, the question has begun to drift from could we use these technologies to help the environment to should we? And if so, how, when, where and why?

Rewriting the scriptThese were the questions Larry Clark had on his mind as he introduced a symposium on the subject at the 25th Annual TWS Conference in October.

“Really, we’re rewriting the world’s script for lots of areas in terms of technology development,” Clark, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wild-life Services’ National Wildlife Research Center, told the crowd gathered in a convention center meeting room. Genetic engineering has already begun to revolutionize medicine and industry, where funding

to advance these technologies is greater, Clark said, but they’re beginning to reach wildlife management. It’s still a new frontier, Clark said, but the technolo-gies are being refined, and biologists, managers and the public need to start thinking about how — and if — to use them.

“Today’s discoveries are going to be tomorrow’s technologies,” he said, but these advances come with a caveat. “Some of these new technologies are scary to folks,” he said. “We need to be transparent and we need to engage them.”

One technique the National Wildlife Research Center is working on could transform the way the Agriculture Department’s Wildlife Services handles the management of invasive species. It could re-place traditional toxicants with an approach known as gene silencing.

“We think that this holds some promise for the future in terms of a very direct pesticide,” Clark said.

Instead of using traditional toxicants like warfarin to poison troublesome animals, technicians could dispatch RNA disrup-tors that attack essential proteins. Unlike conventional toxicants, gene silencing bait would be specific to just one species and could lead to a much less painful death. If successful, the approach would allow scientists to customize toxicants. Bait for feral swine (Sus scrofa) would kill a pig, but it wouldn’t harm a raccoon (Procyon lotor) that ate it or an eagle that fed on a poisoned carcass.

Credit: USDA APHIS

USDA Wildlife Services researcher Katherine Horak is seeking ways to use gene silencing to target invasive species like feral swine.

Credit: Megan SerrCredit: Megan Serr

Mice bred from wild specimens collected at the Farallon Islands are kept in a special containment facility called the mouse barn at North Carolina State University.

A researcher holds a wild mouse bred in captivity for studies involving genetic modifications.

Credit: Pedro Mendes

21www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

“That’s the clutch,” Katherine Horak told the crowd as she described the technique. A pharmacolo-gist and toxicologist for Wildlife Services, Horak is working to develop these technologies. She’s on the hunt for genes that would quickly cause death if turned off, but that are so unique they only occur in the target species. “That’s the win over traditional toxicants,” she said.

Drive for conservationBut it’s another approach that is getting the most attention in conservation circles. Proponents hope to use CRISPR gene-editing tools to alter the genome of invasive species — like the mice Megan Serr brought back from the Farallones — to create creatures designed to bring the downfall of their population through a process known as gene drives. Mice could be engineered to give birth to only males, or only females, or produce sterile offspring, and spread the same trait throughout the popula-tion until it is wiped out.

“It went from theoretically possible to something I think we’re going to see,” said John Godwin, NCSU professor and member of the school’s Genetic En-gineering and Society Center, which is working to develop this technology. His lab has been using the Farallon mice to determine how to breed wild mice to make a gene drive successful. The center is part of an international partnership, the Genetic Bio-control of Invasive Rodents, or GBIRd, which has brought together research institutions to consider how gene drives of genetically engineered mice could rescue islands whose ecosystems are being overrun with invasive mice.

One group extremely interested in the possibility is Island Conservation, a California-based organiza-tion dedicated to protecting islands from invasive species. A GBIRd partner, Island Conservation typically relies on rodenticide to rid islands around the world of invasives, but gene drives offered the possibility of a method that could be faster, cheaper, more effective and wouldn’t require spreading poi-son into an island ecosystem.

“We’re in this massive extinction crisis,” said Karl Campbell, Island Conservation’s South America regional director. About 40 percent of all endangered species are on islands, Campbell said, and invasive species — especially rodents — are the root of most extinctions in the last 500 years. With some 400,000 islands in the world, and invasive rodents populating

the vast majority of them, knocking out rodents us-ing traditional approaches is a massive undertaking. In addition to concerns about poisoning nontarget species, some of the islands are protected wilderness areas and many others are populated by humans — two extremes where the use of toxicants can be equally controversial, Campbell said.

“If you look at it in the big scheme of things, 85 per-cent of the islands that we would love to be working on, we can’t,” he said. “It’s probably much more than 85 percent. If you’re in any other industry, you’d be doing everything you possibly could to break into that market share.”

On California’s Anacapa Island, biologists found that Scripps’s murrelet (Synthliboramphus scrippsi) rebounded after invasive rats (Rattus rattus) were removed. Seabirds thought to be

extirpated returned. The endemic Anacapa deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus anacapae) popu-lation grew (Newton et al, 2016). In the Palmyra Atoll, a U.S. territory between Hawaii and Ameri-can Samoa, researchers found removing invasive black rats led to a 5,000 percent increase in native tree growth (Wolf et al, 2018). In the Galapagos, where invasive rats had decimated a giant tortoise (Chelonoidis duncanensis) population on Pinzón Island, Campbell’s efforts to remove the rats al-lowed hatchling tortoises to survive for the first time in 150 years. “That species was essentially

Credit: Coral Wolf/Island Conservation

A biologist sets up a camera trap on the Palmyra Atoll where an eradication program eliminated rats from the island, allowing native vegetation to return.

22 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

unable to survive in the wild without assistance,” Campbell said. “It’s only because they live so long that they’re still there.”

The group knows removing rodents from islands can be effective. But rodent eradication efforts can cost millions of dollars, and they’re difficult. Some-times non-target species must be removed to keep them from eating the bait. What biologists don’t know is if gene drives can be effective.

Is it possible?Researcher Paul Thomas is trying to answer that question. In his lab at Australia’s University of Adelaide, Thomas had been using CRISPR to edit

mouse genes as a model for human diseases and started working with gene drives in mice. When he heard about the work NCSU was doing to use gene drives on mice in the wild, he realized his work on mice in the lab might be a good fit. But creating that gene drive has been elusive. “Like all re-search, it’s easier on paper than it is in reality,” he said.

Gene drives occur in nature, but scientists are trying to use CRISPR to help the process along. Typically, genes have a 50/50 chance of being passed on to an offspring, and if they increase fitness, they’ll continue to get passed on. Gene drives increase that chance to nearly 100 percent, even if they reduce fitness, by copying themselves onto other chromo-somes, allowing a selected trait — like producing all males or all females — to rapidly spread through a population generation after generation.

Synthetic gene drives have worked in flies and mos-quitoes, but so far, no one has achieved a gene drive in a mammal. Getting the replication process to work in their chromosomes is far more complicated than it is in insects, Thomas found. Even if scien-tists can achieve that, it may still be a decade before it could be deployed outside a lab, he said, but he’s convinced it’s worth the effort because of the pos-sibilities gene drives present.

“It would be quite a humane approach to rodent control,” Thomas said, and computer models on simulated islands suggest it could work fast. By re-leasing just 100 engineered mice into a population of 50,000, Thomas believes, complete eradication could happen in less than five years.

“If it’s possible, there are all sorts of ways we could think about using a gene drive to suppress or even eradicate rodent populations,” he said.

Using gene drives to wipe out mice on an island may still lie in the future, but for the first time, scien-tists have shown they can eliminate a mosquito population in a lab. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology in September, researchers demon-strated that a gene drive could take caged mosquitoes to the point of “total population collapse” in fewer than a dozen generations (Kyrou et al, 2018).

That raises the possibility of using gene drives to wipe out diseases like malaria or dengue fever, either by eliminating the mosquitoes that carry deadly viruses or by making them immune. The British biotech company Oxitec has already de-ployed mosquitoes genetically engineered to limit their populations in an effort to combat diseases in-cluding dengue, Zika and malaria. Gene drives offer a possibility that could be even more powerful.

Not only could the ramifications for humans be huge — the World Health Organization counts

Credit: Sandra Piltz/University of Adelaide

At his lab at the University of Adelaide in Australia, Paul Thomas has bred male mice that lack a Y chromosome and are sterile.

Credit: Rod Waddington

Researchers are looking at the possibility of using a CRISPR gene drive to alter mosquitoes that transmit malaria, a disease that affects millions of people in Africa.

23www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

more than 400,000 malaria deaths each year — the technology could also benefit wildlife. Biologists are considering using gene drives “for diminishing mos-quito populations, if not eliminating populations, in Hawaii where they’re transmitting avian malaria,” said Jim Collins, an evolutionary ecologist at Ari-zona State University. Hawaiian forest bird species such as the endangered ‘akikiki (Oreomystis bairdi) and ‘akeke‘e (Loxops caeruleirostris) are believed to be close to extinction due in part to avian malaria. The birds occupy higher altitudes where mosqui-toes are increasingly able to survive as the climate warms (Paxton et al, 2016).

A brave new worldOn the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vine-yard in Massachusetts’s Cape Cod, researchers are considering genetic techniques to attack another disease — Lyme disease.

“It’s a brave new world,” said Sam Telford, a profes-sor at Tufts University’s veterinary school. He has devoted 30 years to combating Lyme disease only to see it spread as white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virgin-ianus), which serve as the major reservoir for the Lyme disease pathogen (Borrelia burgdorferi) and primary host for the tick, respectively, are on the rise in the Northeast, allowing blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) to spread the bacteria to humans.

“I’ve been trying to get people to do things to reduce ticks for a very long time,” Telford said. “You could get rid of this problem by simply cutting down the forest and killing all the deer, but obviously that’s not going to happen.”

Telford joined the Mice Against Ticks project in the hope that genetic engineering could offer new tools to combat the disease. “Nothing is ever simple,” he said, “but the hope is there.”

The project is led by Kevin Esvelt, a geneticist who heads the Sculpting Evolution lab at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology. Esvelt was interested in addressing Lyme disease, but he was also looking for a good model of how to responsibly deploy genetic technologies. Lyme disease seemed like a good test case. It was serious, but not as grave as malaria, where for some, any ends might justify the means. And Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard presented islands where he could target limited populations of mice. His goal, shaped by community input, is not

just to make mice that are immune to B.burgdorferi, but to make them so unappealing to ticks that the ticks just fall off. By introducing enough engineered mice into the wild population, he hopes, the tick population will plummet, and so will the incidences of Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases.

Containment strategiesHis plan wouldn’t use a gene drive, but he knows a thing or two about them. He’s credited with being the first to identify the role CRISPR could play in creating gene drives to alter the ecology and address environmental problems (Esvelt et al, 2014). He’s also one of the technology’s most cautionary voices.

“I have to hold myself morally responsible for the consequences of CRISPR-based population editing technologies because I invented them,” he said,

Credit: USDA APHIS

USDA Wildlife Services researcher Toni Piaggio is exploring ways that genetic engineering could combat invasive rodents on islands.

Credit: caite maire/Flickr

An MIT researcher hopes to eradicate Lyme disease on Nantucket Island by releasing genetically modified mice that are immune to B.burgdorferi, the causative agent of the disease.

24 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

David Frey is the integrated communications managing editor for The Wildlife Society.

“in particular, the drive systems. That means I am, morally speaking, on the hook for whatever any-body else does with this, even if it turns out to be profoundly unwise.”

Esvelt worries these engineered species could escape from their islands, much the way the inva-sives got there in the first place, and wreak havoc in the wider world. What if a mouse engineered to eradicate an island population in the South Pacific reached native populations on the mainland?

Biologists have taken his concern to heart. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has invested in a Safe Genes program to develop tools to keep gene editing from getting out of control. Some researchers who participate in GBIRd have used these funds to look for unique biological markers that would trigger the gene drive only in island populations. “If the mouse got off the island and went to the continent, our modeling shows it would just peter out,” said TWS member Toni Piaggio, a Wildlife Services research scientist at the National Wildlife Research Center.

Even at the lab in Adelaide, Thomas’s gene drive is designed to target only his engineered mice, so wild mice wouldn’t be affected by an escapee. Esvelt is working to create what he calls a “daisy drive,” a system designed to break down beyond the target area if an affected animal got free.

Voices of cautionIt’s hard to complain about fewer ticks, but Esvelt has proceeded slowly. He set up steering commit-tees on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard made up of both boosters and naysayers to guide the proj-ect. As he begins a new project on New Zealand, he’s also using a grounds-up approach, making a

particular effort to reach out to indigenous Maori communities. “This kind of technology demands community governance from the earliest stages,” he said, “because the changes that will affect people’s lives, and the lives of the other creatures we share this planet with, will depend primarily on decisions made in the very earliest stages.”

Esvelt is a co-author on a paper published last November in Science calling for both international governance and local oversight of environmental gene editing projects (Kofler, 2018). “The success of this approach will depend on inputs and expertise from diverse worldviews and disciplines,” the team wrote.

The paper stemmed from a multidisciplinary summit on the subject in 2017 organized by Yale University’s Editing Nature. “This is changing the code of life,” said molecular biologist Natalie Kofler, Editing Nature’s founding director and the paper’s lead author. “I personally feel, if we fail to see humans as an integral part of this larger tapestry of nature, I do not think we’ll be able to come up with the humility to do this properly.”

Conservationists have been divided by the idea of gene editing to benefit wildlife. Some, like Island Conservation, welcome the benefits it could bring to endangered species. Prominent environmentalists, including Jane Goodall, David Suzuki and the orga-nization Friends of the Earth, have come out against gene drives, in part out of fear that the engineered ani-mals will escape. The National Audubon Society hasn’t taken a stance. “I personally wouldn’t want to call an end to research because you don’t really know what will come out of it,” Steve Kress, Audubon’s vice presi-dent for bird conservation, told the society’s magazine in 2017. “But I also think there is a place for voices of concern, which will help guide the research.” At a United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in November, members rejected a proposed gene drive moratorium but called for caution.

Although Esvelt created the technique, he believes scientists have to be prepared to shelve it unless the public accepts it. “But I feel very strongly that as soon as we develop the power to intervene, then we become responsible for the consequences one way or another,” he said. “What that means is, yeah, if we decided to go ahead and act and things go wrong in ways we didn’t expect, that’s on us. But if we choose not to act when we could have, we are also responsible. As soon as you develop the power, the responsibility is yours.”

Credit: Kaloian Santos Cabrera/Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación, Argentina

MIT researcher Kevin Esvelt is credited with creating gene drives that could revolutionize eradication of certain diseases, but he and others are spearheading ethical use of the technology.

https://afstws2019.org

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In 2001, a paper presented at the 66th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Con-ference, “Why hunting has defined the North

American Model of wildlife conservation” (Geist, et al. 2001), was immediately hailed as a ground-breaking analysis of the influence hunters have had on the recovery of wildlife populations, many of which were on the brink of extinction little more than a century ago.

As hunting and hunters have come under renewed attack, the message this paper delivered has become even more important. For generations, hunters have provided irreplaceable funding and political support for conservation, and their demand for

abundant, widely distributed game populations has protected millions of acres of habitat and provided the impetus for the creation of millions more. Many of the most persuasive voices in the conservation movement have belonged to hunters who convinced the American public that wildlife and wild lands are essential parts of our national heritage.

For all these reasons, the wildlife profession not only embraced the tenets presented in the Geist paper but began to refer to it in the same reverential tones once reserved for A Sand County Almanac. Since then, The North American Model has become a catch phrase in any philosophical discussion of wild-life management and an instant rebuttal to nearly any criticism leveled against the profession. Since we in the wildlife profession offer the Model as a comprehensive defense against any attack, it should come as no surprise that in recent years a small but growing number of critics have pointed out what they believe to be shortcomings in our implementa-tion of the Model and, in a few cases, blind spots in the Model itself, including most recently the authors of a paper in Science Advances (Artelle, et al. 2018).

This ongoing interchange has led to several newer publications. Perhaps the most comprehensive is The Wildlife Society’s Technical Review, “The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” under-taken by sixteen wildlife professionals, including the three authors of the 2001 paper (Organ, et al., 2012). In that document, the authors list challenges the seven tenets of the Model face. I’d like to raise some additional concerns about several of the tenets.

Where clarification is neededI’m an enthusiastic supporter of the first tenet: wildlife in America is “held in trust for the people.” This precept has been upheld in court and cus-tom throughout our history. But, over the last two decades, it has come under increasing attack as well described in the TWS review. For that reason, our profession should commit to maintaining it as a cen-tral theme in our system of wildlife conservation.

By Chris Madson

IS IT TIME TO REVISIT THE NORTH AMERICAN MODEL?

Holes in the Model

The laws to protect the snowy egret (Egretta thula) and other species and their habitats were championed by a combination of birding, hunting, and conservation interests after the bird was shot to the brink of extinction to provide plumes for the millinery.

COMMENTARY

Credit: Chris Madson ©

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The same can said for two other tenets in the Model: “allocation of wildlife by law” and the “democracy of hunting.” These provisions would seem to be an automatic extension of our democratic system, but as the TWS review points out, they are both under attack and require wholehearted advocacy from wildlife professionals and anyone else who cares about wildlife and wild places.

However, I find elements of the other four tenets to be confusing and even contradictory.

Elimination of markets in wildlife. The original paper states that a key element of our system is the “elimination of markets for wildlife.” Then, six lines down, it makes a huge exception because, according to the authors, “it has been demonstrated that furbearers can be managed as sustainable resources.”

We need to justify this apparent contradiction. If the modern system of regulations and law enforce-ment is enough to guarantee that fur can be taken sustainably, then I struggle to understand why it can’t regulate the market in other wild animals. The distinction between “furbearers” and “game” is largely an artifact of tradition. There are sound reasons for maintaining that tradition in our system of wildlife management; but if we’re going to continue to support sustainable fur harvest-ing, this tenet should reflect our commitment to that tradition — for recreation, even profit, and occasionally as a tool for dealing with issues like depredation and epizootic disease, as long as it is done sustainably. This should be noted in the bold print at the top of the page, not in the footnotes at the end of the chapter.

The TWS review points out several other markets in wildlife or access to wildlife that contradict the assertion that we have eliminated markets or even that we are trying to eliminate them. It would be easier to defend this tenet if we had a clearer notion of the reasons behind the exceptions we tolerate as a profession or even embrace.

Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose. The TWS review offers an extensive review of the history of this tenet, when prominent members of the Boone and Crockett Club railed against “pot hunters” who hunted only for meat and, most of all, against those who killed “merely for the fun of killing.” The review catalogs the

attributes of a sportsman, which include the idea that he “will not waste any game that is killed.”

I think the ethical tide has turned ever more strongly against people who kill only for the fun of killing. But at the same time, surveys of pub-lic opinion show that nonhunters are much less distressed by modern pot hunters who are hunting for the freezer than they are by sportsmen who hunt “primarily for the pursuit or chase” and may be more interested in a big rack than in roasts and tenderloins from animals.

And the idea of “wasting” an animal is itself open to broad interpretation. Most hunters leave the hearts, livers and small intestines of big game animals in the field, when all these parts are ed-ible. The law in Wyoming, where I live, allows me to leave the ribs and neck of a big game animal in the field. If I were to do that in Alaska, I would be guilty of wanton waste. When I have killed an animal, how much do I have to use in order to consider my action legitimate?

From a strictly ecological point of view, the whole idea of meat, hide, extremities or internal organs left in the field as being somehow wasted is a curious notion. Unused parts from a dead animal are more surely wasted if they are consigned to a sanitary landfill than if they are left in the habitat where the animal died. Our profession approaches this issue with remarkably little underlying thought or consistency. At the very least, we should consider a more nuanced definition of the word “legitimate.”

Credit: Chris Madson ©

Although less sought-after than the snowy egret, the plumes of the great egret (Ardea alba) were also valuable in the milliner’s market in the Gilded Age.

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Wildlife are considered an international resource. I would be more comfortable with this tenet if it began with the word some. Clearly, there are many species of wildlife that are relatively sedentary and can be managed quite well without worrying about international borders. There are, of course, species whose distributions cross bor-ders. Some, like waterfowl, migrate back and forth, almost demanding close international cooperation in their management. Still other species are interna-tional in distribution, even if individuals seldom, if ever, leave the jurisdiction where they were born. As a profession, it seems we often struggle to take an international view of these.

Here in the United States, we mandate relatively intensive management for mammals like the wolverine (Gulo gulo), gray wolf (Canis lupus) and Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) — three species that are still relatively common and widely distrib-uted in Canada. At the same time, Canada lists the northern swift fox (Vulpes velox) as threatened and the greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus uro-phasianus) as endangered, even though there are still extensive populations of both species south of the border.

This tenet, as it has been understood and is cur-rently applied, seems to be the subject of extensive debate and no small amount of disagreement. If we can’t reach broad consensus on what it means and how it should be applied, we could at least insert a word or two of qualification to recognize that this tenet has some limits in its application.

Science is the proper tool for the discharge of wildlife policy. These are the words in the original 2001 paper, and they are carefully chosen. Certainly, we would be remiss if we did not collect pertinent data on how a given management deci-sion affects the wildlife population it’s designed to influence. Easily said, although it’s much harder to do. Dependable indices of population size are a starting point in nearly any management effort; but, as any field professional will tell you, getting really dependable annual indices is remarkably difficult and expensive for most big game popula-tions, and nearly impossible for most species of small game.

The profession does the best it can, but I think we have to admit that our application of science to the task of monitoring wildlife populations is still far from perfect. Where data are incomplete or lacking, management decisions still have to be made.

The TWS review rightly recognizes the problems associated with scientific technique and limited funding. Even further, it recognizes the need for social science as an aid to defining public opinion on wildlife issues. The review goes on to observe that wildlife management appears to be increasingly “politicized.” “Politics meddling in science have challenged the science foundation,” it concludes.

After nearly 40 years in two state wildlife agencies, I can appreciate the frustration the professional faces when an interest group demands a management action that simply won’t deliver the expected result. If that’s what the authors of the Geist paper had in mind when they drafted this tenet, I fully support it.

However, I challenge the notion that management can be based on science. Management is a set of actions intended to reach a goal. Science can help with the choice of actions. An unbiased approach to collection of data can answer a lot of questions about the current state of a wildlife population and its habitat. It can help us understand the effect of a management action or other changes in the envi-ronment. In a few cases, it may even predict the effect of an action we haven’t yet taken.

What it cannot do is answer any question that starts with: “Should we . . . ?” Science can’t tell us whether we should protect a species from extinction. It can’t tell us whether we should allow construction in a deer migration corridor, dam a creek, log a hillside, apply a pesticide, impose antler restrictions or close

Credit: Chris Madson ©

Most raptors, even the smaller species like the sharp-shinned hawk (Accipiter striatus), were considered threats to poultry in the last century. The coalition of hunters and birding enthusiasts of that era worked tirelessly to convince farmers that most nongame birds, including birds of prey, were a benefit to agriculture, not a pest.

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a hunting season. These are questions that can only be answered by consulting our values.

Wildlife policy has always been driven by collec-tive preference, prejudice, and, quite often, moral judgment. The tenets of the North American Model are an excellent example. Setting wildlife policy is an innately political process and always has been. To suggest that science can somehow help us decide what we want is not only inaccurate but opens science to accusations of bias that damage the discipline.

The missing eighth tenetThe North American Model should have an eighth tenet, something like, “All native wildlife should be sustained, whether it is hunted or not.” This tenet would account for our efforts on behalf of the huge gathering of wildlife that is classified as “nongame.” I’m not surprised that Geist and his co-authors neglected this element of wildlife conservation in North America. Their goal in drafting the paper for the North American Conference was to defend hunting as a critical part of the broader conser-vation movement. The other tenets that stress elimination of markets, allocation of wildlife, and the democracy of hunting suggest strongly that, in this paper, wildlife mostly means game. In the con-text of the argument the authors were making, this is understandable.

What I have more trouble understanding is why the wildlife profession has still not included nongame explicitly in our North American Model. It certainly isn’t because we’ve ignored nongame. As early as 1705, natural historians traversed the American wilderness, risking their lives to catalog wildlife, game and nongame alike. In the nineteenth century, a new generation of conservationists — almost all of them hunters — began the effort to protect nongame animals from the ravages of habitat loss, overharvest and pest control. In the modern era, wildlife manag-ers are moving mountains to understand the ecology of nongame species, from plants to mammals, and to protect populations that are in trouble.

None of this is even mentioned in the tenets of the North American Model as they are currently pre-sented. The TWS review argues that the Model “is not exclusive to game species;” but the title of the 2001 paper itself — “Why hunting has defined the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation” — certainly leaves the impression that it focuses primarily on game management.

This omission neglects a rich part of our history as a profession and fails to stress that, over the history of conservation, many hunters have been motivated by much more than a selfish interest in producing targets. It also leaves the profession and the com-munity of ethical hunters open to criticism from mainstream conservation groups and anti-hunting organizations. I don’t offer this critique to impugn the contribu-tion represented by the original paper. However, I think there are difficulties with our current description of the Model; and I don’t agree with the authors of the TWS review that we should not “revise, modify, or otherwise alter what has hereto-fore been put forward as the Model.” We should do precisely that.

Game and hunter management are subsets of the profession of wildlife conservation. We would serve ourselves better if we gave the world a Model that accurately reflects everything we do, not just a part.

I hope these comments encourage discussion to that end.

Chris Madson, MS, CWB®, is a freelance writer. He is retired from

the Wyoming Game and Fish Department where he served as editor of Wyoming Wildlife magazine.

Credit: Chris Madson ©

Once valued in the meat markets of the nineteenth century, the American avocet (Recurvirostra americana) was extirpated in the eastern United States before the provisions of the Migratory Bird Act gave it permanent protection.

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Credit: Bob Wick/BLM

COMMENTARY

A t the invitation of the chair of the Editorial Advisory Board and the editor-in-chief of The Wildlife Professional, we respond to the

commentary provided by Chris Madson, Holes in the Model, on page 26. We were asked to respond because at issue is narrative provided in two pub-lications we coauthored (Geist et. al 2001; Organ et al. 2012). Our intent is not to rebut or critique Madsen’s remarks; rather, we wish to clarify the ba-sis for certain points he raises and commend him for the thoughtfulness that went into his perspectives.

Intent of the 2001 North American presentationMadson suggests our goal “was to defend hunting as a critical part of the broader conservation movement” in writing the paper, “Why hunting has defined the North American Model of wildlife conservation” (Geist, et al. 2001). That is not accurate; the role of hunting in

wildlife conservation has been effectively chronicled by others (see Reiger 1975 and Trefethen 1975).

In reality, our intent was to put forth the concept of a North American model of wildlife conserva-tion. A special session at the 66th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference that happened to focus on hunting provided an oppor-tunity; hence, the title and its link to hunting. The intent behind the Model was to identify the over-arching legal and policy constructs that distinguish wildlife conservation in the United States and Canada from other forms worldwide. Hunters and hunting have clearly influenced those constructs.

The Model was never intended to be prescriptive. Rather, it is a means for the wildlife conservation community to reflect on our collective successes and failures and to serve as a reminder for the com-

By John F. Organ, Shane P. Mahoney and Valerius Geist

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE NORTH AMERICAN MODEL

Our Precious Wildlife Resources

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munity to be vigilant in identifying legal and policy constructs that are lacking as we endeavor to address current and future conservation challenges. Implicit is a need to evaluate the effectiveness and relevancy of the historic constructs.

Additional clarification Markets for game are eliminated. This con-struct, originally labeled “Elimination of Markets for Wildlife” in Geist et al. (2001) and clarified in The Wildlife Society’s Technical Review (Organ et al. 2012), has generated consider-able debate (e.g., Vercauteren et al. 2011). As a general rule, species classified as game under state laws and taken by hunters cannot be bought and sold in the market. Exceptions exist to this rule but, by and large, the market hunting of the past has been eliminated (Trefethen 1975). Yet, markets exist for other taxa, including some mammals that can be legally hunted and certain reptile species.

Madson asserts that, “It would be easier to defend this tenet [elimination of markets] if we had a clearer notion of its limits and the reasons behind the exceptions we tolerate as a profession or even embrace.” We wholeheartedly agree. As put forth in the TWS Techni-cal Review, “The principle that markets for wildlife are eliminated should remain intact, but exceptions do and will occur. These should remain exceptions and be warranted only where there is a conservation ben-efit that cannot otherwise be achieved.” The review also encourages key administrators and stakehold-ers to engage in discussion on this construct, posing the question “Should limited markets for meat harvested by licensed sport hunters be established to address management of overabundant wildlife” as well as to foster increased public appreciation of wildlife values?

“Consideration also needs to be given to restrict-ing or eliminating markets for certain taxa, such as

reptiles. As unregulated markets for North Ameri-can game species led to imperilment, other taxa face the same vulnerabilities.” The caveat that a conservation benefit should dictate whether or not a market is warranted — as opposed to an eco-nomic or other driver — should include ecological and social considerations, such as public tolerance of human-wildlife conflicts. These considerations are often localized, rather than statewide, which creates potential challenges in legal administration and implementation.

Trapping and furbearer management, as noted by Madson, is most often cited as the exception to this construct in critiques of the Model. Legal fur trapping seasons established in the early 20th century allowed for the sale of fur and other prod-ucts by the public for conservation purposes by incentivizing population control of certain species whose population rebound demanded manage-ment control, and advocating for maintaining and protecting the environment (Boggess et al. 1990, Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen 1996). The alternatives were bounty systems and public and privately funded nuisance programs.

Credit: Neal Herbert/NPS

Market hunting decimated populations of many wildlife species to the brink of extinction, including the bison (Bison bison).

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Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose. Madson suggests a more nuanced defini-tion of the word legitimate should be considered, given the variability of state laws related to wanton waste and changes in social acceptance of hunting for meat versus the chase. The underlying rationale for this being a construct is the fact there are laws,

however variable and selective in their application, given the purpose of the Model is to articulate the collective legal and policy constructs that distin-guish wildlife conservation in the United States and Canada. This is not to say some other nations do not have such laws; rather, it is the collection of these constructs that establishes uniqueness. The notion — or definition — of legitimacy is ever evolving in the court of public opinion, as recent events such as the July 2015 killing of a male lion in Zimbabwe demonstrate.

We agree with Madson that this tenet has holes. Rather than nuancing a definition of legitimate, we suggest that the wildlife conservation community take charge in the thought leadership in the evolv-ing discussion.

Wildlife are considered an international resource. Clearly, as Madson indicates, not all species of wildlife move freely across the border between the United States and Canada, and many species with ranges in both nations are not man-aged cooperatively. As noted in the TWS Technical Review, since the 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty, further international laws, policies and agreements have developed — and many more are likely. We in-cluded this construct in the Model not only because it distinguishes Canada and the United States from other nations, but it also reflects our pioneering international conservation efforts. Current appli-cations are limited as to what is codified in treaty and law, but legal applications are likely to evolve, further reinforcing this construct and precluding the need to place finite limits on it.

Science is the proper tool to discharge wildlife policy. Madson acknowledges that the wording in this construct was carefully chosen; indeed, we took the phrase almost verbatim from Aldo Leopold’s book, Game Management (1933). Madson also acknowledges that the TWS Techni-cal Review details the many challenges confronting this construct. Madson challenges the notion that management can be based on science, effectively pointing out science cannot dictate the “oughts” that are in the realm of values.

We agree. Recently, some of us involved in the Technical Review pondered Leopold’s word choices, and Dan Decker, TWS past president and Leopold Award recipient, suggested that discharge of policy

Credit: Mark Gocke/Wyoming Game and Fish Department

Studies being conducted by Anna Chalfoun of the Wyoming USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit will help inform conservation efforts for the Columbia spotted frog (Rana luteiventris), a species of greatest conservation need in Wyoming.

Courtesy Anna Chalfoun

Matt Kauffman, Leader of the USGS Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and master’s degree student Brendan Oates prepare to attach a GPS collar to a moose (Alces alces) as part of an investigation of the behavioral response of moose to the presence of gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

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means: After you’ve established wildlife policy, which is created with ingredients from science and values and professional judgment and politics, then the work of wildlife management — choosing specific technical alternatives and taking actions — should be guided by best available science. This definition of science includes all rel-evant fields such as ecology and sociology.

The question of the eighth constructMadson suggests our primary goal in drafting the paper for the North American Conference was to defend hunting as a critical part of the broader conservation movement. Understandably, he likely infers that from the paper’s title. However, as explained earlier, that was not our pur-pose. The seven constructs became policies during a time when the focus was largely on species being exploited. Many game species at the time, such as colonial nesting waterbirds, are now classi-fied as nongame, thanks to these legal constructs.

Confusion continues to exist over the intent of the Model and its application. Today, most of the constructs are being applied to a wide array of both hunted and non-hunted taxa, such as ownership of wildlife, wildlife markets, legal allocation, legitimate purpose, international resource and science. How-ever, the actual application is not consistent. The reason is not the Model itself, but rather resources and advocacy, as noted in the TWS Technical Re-view. Efforts underway to broaden the funding base for state-based wildlife management, if realized, will do much to broaden application of these constructs to a greater diversity of taxa. Finally, Madson disagrees with the assertion put forth in the TWS Technical Review that effort should not be expended on revising, modifying or otherwise altering what has heretofore been put forward as the Model. We stand by our assertion, and our disagreement may stem from differing visions of what the Model is and how it should be used. Our intent in articulating the Model was to celebrate our achievements and to form a basis for understanding where gaps exist in law and policy that may threaten conservation of all wildlife for future generations. As such, we feel we should look backwards only to ensure we fully understand what

has made North American conservation unique, as it will guide us in the more important task of looking forward to place emphasis on ensuring we have the needed legal and policy constructs for the future. The future should be our focus.

We thank Chris Madson for his thoughtful comments. Our hope is that such thoughtful dialogue will indeed focus on needs for ensuring the future of our precious wildlife resources.

Shane P. Mahoney, MS, is president and CEO of Conservation Visions, Inc.

John F. Organ, PhD, CWB®, TWS Fellow and Honorary Member, is the

chief of the U.S. Geological Survey, Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units and a TWS past-president.

Valerius Geist, PhD, is a professor emeritus of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. In 1971, he received the TWS Best Book Award.

Credit: Mike Glenn/USFWS

School children learn about the recovery of the island fox (Urocyon littoralis) at an Endangered Species Day event sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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HUMAN-WILDLIFE CONNECTION

On a frigid January day in 2009, U.S. Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport. As it passed an altitude of 2,800 feet

about 4.5 miles out, the aircraft encountered a flock of geese and ingested birds into both engines, causing an almost complete loss of thrust in both engines. Four minutes later, the pilot of the A-320 aircraft with 155 people on board made what has been described as the most successful ditching in aviation history, putting the jetliner safely down on the Hudson River.

Known as the “Miracle on the Hudson,” this near catastrophe ushered in a new age for mitigation of wildlife hazards at airports. Within days, personnel

in the Feather Identification Lab of the Smithso-nian Institute identified migrant Canada geese (Branta canadensis) as the culprits in the airstrike. By April, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) opened the National Wildlife Strike Data-base to publicly share reports from all airports across the country. About a year later, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) published its report that identified concerns and recommended actions to improve airport safety (NTSB, 2010).

Now, a decade later, management of wildlife-aircraft strikes has matured through research and improved data collection.

By Jenny Washburn

IMPROVEMENTS IN WILDLIFE STRIKE MANAGEMENT

10 Years After the Miracle on the Hudson

A jetliner lands at an airport located in the Northeast while a flock of brant (Branta bernicla) feed on the ground.

Credit: Jenny Washburn/Wildlife Services

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Establishing the baselineAs a first step, the NTSB recommended that all air-ports federally certified for passenger traffic conduct a wildlife hazard assessment to proactively evaluate the potential of wildlife strikes. By 2014, airports had updated or completed the one-year assessments, involving documentation of wildlife and habitat on the airfield and surrounding area and details of how the airport addressed potentially hazardous wildlife. When conditions documented in the assessments warranted, the FAA required airport managers to prepare and implement a wildlife hazard manage-ment plan to reduce the risk of strikes.

At the time of the January incident, about 20 percent of strikes at passenger-certificated airports were reported under the still-voluntary system. In a paper reviewing the bird strike, researchers recom-mended, “Increased reporting of bird strikes with improved information on the exact species involved and other aspects of the event is critical to devel-oping a more comprehensive national program to mitigate the risk of strikes (Marra, et al., 2009).”

Airport wildlife professionals pushed for better reporting of strikes. The FAA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services’ Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, the Smithsonian and biologists across the country raised awareness of the value of wildlife strike reporting. They encouraged the airport community to attend the annual Bird Strike USA Conference to gather more information on recent research and tools to reduce strikes. “Report Wildlife Strikes” posters, pamphlets and videos advocated using the database maintained for the FAA by the Wildlife Services airport program. FAA-required training for airport and airlines personnel also began to place more emphasis on wildlife strike reporting and the necessity for accurate reporting.

Making strides in safetyThe number of reported events and trained personnel at airports increased as the aviation industry came to understand the importance of capturing strike information. In 2008 just 7,516 strikes were reported; by 2012 more than 10,726 were reported, with the recent reports leveling off at 11,000 to 13,000 annually, with about 90 percent of strikes at passenger airports. In 2017, Wildlife Services biologists trained more than 5,000 airport staff at 406 airports compared to just 2,751 at 365 airports in 2009.

Along with the emphasis on reporting wildlife strikes, species identification also grew in impor-tance. Canada geese became the scapegoat of bird strikes. New research showed that although the highly abundant species often present a hazard at airports, double-crested cormorants (Phalacro-corax auritus), great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus) and even large flocks of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) often are to blame (Devault, et al. 2011; DeVault. et al, 2016). It be-came clear that every airfield faces unique wildlife hazards, even those situated close together.

Not unexpectedly, reported strikes continue to increase today as the larger aviation community be-comes more involved. Most importantly, however, the number of damaging wildlife strikes reported is decreasing, especially at lower altitudes and near airports. Airports have become more cognizant of managing wildlife, paying closer attention to miti-gating attractants of hazardous wildlife on airfields.

Once rare, “snarge” kits have become commonplace today. Comprised of inexpensive and easily assem-bled materials — such as latex gloves, paper towels, a marker, alcohol wipes, and a strike information sheet in a zip-lock bag — airport personnel now collect biological remains from a strike event and store them in a freezer, allowing for later identifica-tion. Knowing which birds are involved in strikes and that frequent airfields and the surrounding

Credit: National Transportation Safety Board

Wildlife Services biologists collect biological remains, called snarge, from the engine of Flight 1549 that ditched in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, 2009, after a bird strike.

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areas has helped evolve management strategies for specific species during the specific times of year, such as migration.

Beyond the airport fenceWildlife concerns don’t stop at the fence for air-port management, however. Managers of land surrounding airfields have become more involved in mitigating wildlife hazards. Some took steps to reduce feeding of ducks and geese at ponds next to airports. Others tried to reduce the number of pigeons (Columba livia) nesting under nearby over-passes or being fed by well-meaning people in airport

parking garages. These birds can land on the airfield to forage for seed, attracting larger birds like per-egrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) or red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) that pose risks to airplanes.

States also have recognized the safety hazard posed by raptors near airfields. Permits for trapping rap-tors on airfields have become more common and require the permit holder to release the birds at suitable sites, sometimes more than 100 miles away.

New tools under investigation In its 2010 report on Flight 1549, the NTSB noted that, “Although currently no technological, regu-latory, or operational changes related to wildlife mitigation, including the use of avian radar, could be made that would lessen the probability of a simi-lar bird-strike event from occurring, considerable research is being conducted in this area.” The agency also recommended that the USDA and FAA develop

innovative technologies that could be installed on aircraft to reduce the likelihood of bird strikes.

NTSB was especially interested in work being done at USDA National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) field station in Sandusky, Ohio, aimed at understanding how birds detect and respond to vehicle approach and lighting treatments (Black-well et al. 2009). In the intervening decade, NWRC researchers Brad Blackwell and Travis DeVault, in collaboration with Esteban Fernandez-Juricic and Benny Goller at Purdue University, have learned more about how birds see and the point at which they respond to moving hazards. Recently, scientists developed a configuration consisting of LED lights of varied hues and frequencies that affects brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) (Goller, et al. 2018). A similar model for alerting Canada geese may soon follow.

Investigations into how birds see and react repre-sent just one avenue of research. Studies of grass types have shown the composition of vegetation is as or more important than height, as is the behavior of birds relative to perceived predation risk. Out of more than 200 available varieties of tall fescue, NWRC scientists have identified several commercial-ly available varieties that grow successfully in airport environments but are not a preferred food source for geese (Washburn, 2012). NWRC and other scientists are also evaluating use of various agricultural crops (Iglay, et al. 2017) and biofuel/biomass (Conkling, et al. 2018) by wildlife to determine if some may be safe for planting on and near airports.

As the demand for less costly and greener energy grows, solar arrays are popping up at airports, po-tentially creating new safety concerns (DeVault and Seamans, et al., 2014). A comparison of land near solar arrays to grasslands at airports in three states found higher numbers of birds in solar array zones, although they represented fewer and less hazardous species than those using grasslands. This finding suggests that solar arrays don’t necessarily increase the risk of bird-aircraft collisions or conflict with safety regulations.

After habitat management, dispersal is still a com-mon practice for mitigating the risk of bird strikes. Researchers have identified acoustic hailing devices to disperse vultures and gulls, at least temporar-ily, but the effect on blackbirds and diving ducks appears limited (Schlichting, et al 2017). Work con-

Credit: Wildlife Services

Training airport and airline operational staff has increased reporting of strikes and awareness of the issues and importance of wildlife management.

37www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

tinues on potentially relocating birds — especially raptors — to improve aircraft and bird safety. NWRC and Wildlife Services operations are actively investigating this approach with red-tailed hawks at Chicago airports (Pullins, et al. 2018).

Tools from technology Technology offers other promising tools for wild-life hazard management. To help identify birds on airfields, cell phones with high-resolution cameras make it easy for crews to take and share photos with other biologists. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID App also allows even novices to use a photo or a five-question set to identify most birds.

GIS mapping software is also taking on a major role in highlighting airport wildlife hazards. (Pfeiffer, et al. 2018). Smaller, less expensive and more mobile com-puting devices like cell phones have allowed airport biologists to map wildlife hazards, including the wild-life species itself or the habitat that attracts wildlife. This GIS field data allows visualization of hotspots of wildlife activity at airports. Along with analysis of wildlife strikes, the maps can help inform the entire airport operations team about wildlife hazards that exist. Airfield managers can also better prioritize habitat management efforts and focus resources on mitigating the problem. Along with Wildlife Services’ recent efforts to model risks from species most likely to be struck and cause damage, based on actual strike data, these technologies are expected to help evaluate management strategies and measure program effec-tiveness (DeVault, et al. 2018).

In yet another approach, researchers are evaluating more sophisticated radar techniques. Even though research on bird-detecting radar began well before the 2009 incident, this technology continues to unfold, showing utility in tracking and quantifying wildlife at and around airports. A recent NWRC study (Phillips, et al. 2018) demonstrated the ef-ficacy of three different radar sensors is influenced by several factors. Detection was better for large birds, birds flying at high altitudes and birds flying within 2.5 miles of the radar, suggesting bird-track-ing radar can be a useful tool for monitoring flock activity at airports. On the other hand, it appears to be less effective for single, large birds like raptors (Gerringer, et al. 2016).

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was one of several research sites that began studies of avian radar in 2010 with the Center of Excellence for

Airport Technology at the University of Illinois. In 2016, the airport tested radar with 3D-scanning technology for detecting bird hazards. The sys-tem alerts a network of trained staff that then can respond to a specified area and harass the wildlife. If the birds are at high altitudes, the staff advises air traffic control to notify pilots.

Although primarily useful for situational awareness in commercial aviation, radar also can assist on military airfields where flight operations are more flexible. At the Naval Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, the Wildlife Services airport hazards biologist inte-grates radar into daily air operations using historical radar detection data and real-time observations to avoid pockets of birds in critical airspace. Us-ing avian radar target counts, the biologist predicts

Credit: Wildlife Services-Idaho

County and federal officials cooperated to modify a bridge near an airfield where swallows (Hirundinidae spp.) nested. The birds, which weigh less than an ounce, caused $142,000 in damage to two military aircraft.

Credit: Wildlife Services

This pair of GIS maps shows annual raptor observations on an airfield before (left) and after (right) biologists used a rodenticide treatment to manage prey availability.

38 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

peak bird presence by time of day for each month or season. Historically spring migration was the peak season for bird strike events. Avian radar target counts also showed a significant increase in bird ac-tivity during those months. More importantly, a high percentage of bird activity was elevated between the hours of 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. This observation impacts night training, an essential component for aircraft-carrier-qualified jet pilots.

When advised of the bird activity data, the base commodore took immediate action to schedule student pilot training times based on the spring mi-gration trend rather than the weather as had been the practice. This action — combined with ceasing flight operations during peak bird activity based on real-time radar data — decreased strike rates slight-ly in March and April of 2018 and by 44 percent in May (Eddie Earwood, personal communication).

Although bird-detecting radar is not mandatory technology at airports, in 2010 the FAA published an airport advisory circular that provides general

information and other requirements that this specialized radar should have. The FAA is still actively supporting research on how avian ra-dar systems can be integrated into the air traffic control environments to help reduce the risks of bird strikes and provides avenues for funding at commercial airports.

Lessons learnedEarly on after the NTSB report on Flight 1549, the flying public was concerned that airports or airlines with high strike rates were less safe. The truth was quite the contrary. In reality, closely monitoring and reporting strikes enables airports and airlines to collect information that helps improve plans used for managing hazards. In many cases today, multiple methods are used.

The recovery and investigation of the A-320 aircraft dispelled beliefs that a few birds could not take down a large airplane. It also served as a wakeup call to all those who work in aviation — airport operations, engineers, and biologists — that continued work and better communication is criti-cal to addressing strike risks and minimizing strike opportunities.

The intervening decade since that January day in 2009 has brought increased focus to research on land use, vegetation, sound, lights and radar. Since then communication within the aviation and biological communities and between airports and their neigh-bors has increased and research has continued on how to improve wildlife management methods at airports.

Prior to that memorable day, many people, both in the aviation industry and biological community, were seeking a single answer to eliminate wildlife hazards. Some thought it would be a single technol-ogy such as avian radar or sonic nets. Others feared it would be an effort to sanitize airports of wildlife. However, the answer is complex yet simple: mul-tiple tools applied consistently and constantly along with open communication.

Jenny Washburn, BS, is a staff wildlife biologist for the USDA

Wildlife Services’ Airport Wildlife Hazards Program.

Credit: Wildlife Services, Purdue University

One path of investigation to reduce bird strikes is focused on determining if lighting treatments can be used to deter birds in flight.

39www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Credit: Scott Copeland

CONSERVATIONCONSERVATION

When the Wyoming Game and Fish commissioners gathered in September, they faced a big challenge: how to handle

federal oil and gas leasing crossing the Bridger-Teton National Forest, a key mule deer corridor. The 150-mile Sublette mule deer migration corridor connects summer range above the Hoback area to winter range in the arid plains of southwest Wyoming’s Red Desert, and it was up for federal oil and gas leasing.

At the request of the governor and Wyoming Game and Fish, the Interior Department agreed to defer leases on 5,000 acres — all the parcels at least 90 percent inside the corridor. The rest of the parcels along the corridor would have a special lease notice attached, requiring energy producers to work with state biologists to mini-mize impacts on wildlife.

Conservationists — and some commissioners — worried that didn’t go far enough. “Just say ‘no surface disturbance within the corridors’ and see what happens,” suggested Commissioner Mike Schmid, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

But while many conservationists were disappointed the agreement wasn’t more restrictive, the Inte-rior policy behind it has been broadly welcomed. In February 2018, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke issued Secretarial Order 3362, requiring agencies with the department to prioritize pro-tections across the West for migration corridors used by mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), elk (Cervus canadensis) and pronghorn (Antilocapra americana). The Wyoming decision was the first to emerge since Zinke issued the order. While Zinke’s tenure at Interior was controversial, this secretarial order was broadly welcomed.

By David Frey

WYOMING STARTS IMPLEMENTATION OF SECRETARIAL ORDER ON MIGRATION CORRIDORS

Protecting Connectivity for Western Big Game

40 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

“When 3622 came out, I was optimistic, abso-lutely,” said Dwayne Meadows, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, one of sev-eral organizations pushing for more protections along the corridor. “It’s a recognition of migra-tion in general. That was the first step I’d seen in this administration, or past administrations, to recognize the protection of wildlife corridors.”

The order comes at a time when scientific knowl-edge about wildlife migration corridors is surging. Refinements in GPS collar technology have given biologists unprecedented amounts of data about the movement of individual animals through-out their life histories. Wyoming has been at the forefront of these advances, thanks largely to the work of TWS member Matt Kauffman’s Wyoming Migration Initiative, a University of Wyoming pro-gram focused on ungulate migration in Wyoming, including the Hoback-to-Red Desert corridor.

“We’re gaining a new appreciation for how impor-tant migration is,” Kauffman said. Over the past few years, his team has documented social learn-ing among migrating species (Jesmer et al., 2018), their use of overpasses and underpasses (Sawyer et al., 2016) and their “surfing” of greening forage across the landscape (Merkle et al., 2016). Their findings points to the importance of corridors as more than just ways to get from mountains to plains. “We need to think of the corridor itself as its own habitat just as important as summer range or winter range,” he said.

Unlike many thorny environmental issues, Kauffman sees the protection of migration corridors as pretty straightforward. Corridors can be mapped. Problem areas can be pinpointed. Regulations can protect them. “It’s not like climate change,” he said. “It’s not an intractable problem. It’s a very solvable problem.”

Shifting the focus from rangesZinke announced Secretarial Order 3362 at the Western Conservation and Hunting Expo in Salt Lake City last February. It directs the Interior De-partment’s bureaus to work with 11 Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming —not only to enhance winter range and migration corridors for the three big game species but also to maintain their populations and expand hunting opportunities.

“My goal is healthy herds for American hunters and wildlife watchers,” he said in a statement, “and this order will help establish better migration corridors for some of North America’s most iconic big game species.”

Although the order focuses on big game species, others will benefit, said Casey Stemler, the U.S.

Credit: Scott Copeland

Conservationists question whether Wyoming officials should have pressed for more protections for a key mule deer corridor.

Corridor ThreatsEleven western states identified several threats to wildlife corridors. Here are some of their top responses.

Noxious weeds: 5 statesExurban and suburban development: 5 statesFencing: 4 statesRecreation*: 4 statesFeral horses: 3 states Wind and solar development: 2 states Pinyon/juniper encroachment: 2 statesOil and gas: 1 state Mineral extraction: 1 state Agricultural land conversion: 1 stateOvergrown forests: 1 state

*non-motorized and motorized vehicles and timing of activities within winter range or corridor

Source: USFWS

41www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Fish and Wildlife Service employee recently named senior adviser to the director for Western states and charged with implementing the secretarial order. “If you focus on those three species as your primary focus and you don’t lose sight of that, I would argue you do a heck of a lot more conserva-tion that way,” he said.

Under the order, Interior officials asked wildlife agency directors in each state to list their top three to five migration corridor, stopover and winter range priorities, as well as their top three research priorities to expand their knowledge of these areas. Interior pledged at least $2.75 million in total to address habitat needs and over $3 million to fund the states’ No. 1 research priorities.

On Sept. 21, 2018, the eve of National Hunting and Fishing Day, Zinke announced that all of the states had submitted their priorities, leaving Inte-rior poised to craft state-by-state plans, a process that will use five regional Interior Department liaisons, to conduct conservation activities and fund research priorities.

Action in WyomingThe Bureau of Land Manage-ment’s lease deferrals in Wyoming were the first action that Interior officials said was “consistent” with the secretarial order.

“Secretary Zinke’s order comple-mented the efforts we had already initiated,” said Wyoming Game and Fish Deputy Director Scott Smith. “The bottom line of the signing of that order was a kind of enhanced collaboration between our state wildlife managers and BLM land managers.”

Conservation groups com-plained that Wyoming didn’t take the order far enough. They urged state officials to ask the BLM to defer all the leases along the corridor until a new resource management plan is in place that takes into account new mule deer research, including a recent study that found mule

deer decline 36 percent in areas of energy devel-opment and avoid those areas for years (Sawyer et al., 2017).

“I’m grateful to policymakers for taking steps to conserve the corridor and set aside some leases for sale,” said TWS member Holly Copeland, director of science for The Nature Conservancy in Wyoming, “however, based on research concerning the impacts of oil and gas development on migrating mule deer, I do have concerns that the remaining leases for sale in the corridor could result in future development that is problematic for migrating deer.”

Smith called the agreement “a balanced approach.”

“At the end of the day, I feel I’m striving for the same outcome,” he said. “It’s just, there are several different ways to achieve that ultimate outcome of maintaining the viability of the migration corridors.”

‘A good step forward’Despite the Wyoming corridor’s controversy, the secretarial order has been widely praised.

Credit: Scott Copeland

A new model would help create a designated pronghorn corridor in Wyoming.

42 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

“Big game migration and habitats other than winter range have long been ignored,” said TWS member Ed Arnett, chief scientist for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which also called for broader protections in Wyo-ming. “In establishing the secretarial order, Zinke put a good step forward.”

Other states may face fewer controversies. Wyo-ming was the only state to identify oil and gas as a concern for wildlife corridors, Stemler said. The most common concerns were development and noxious weeds. Two states identified wind and solar farms. Three expressed concerns about feral horses.

“I think we have a wonderful opportunity here, and some wonderful things are happening, if people would take two minutes and put aside their political persuasions,” Stemler said.

“It comes across to me as a good thing,” said TWS member Ryan Long, associate professor of wildlife sciences at the University of Idaho. “I think that even if you’re not a hunter — or even if maybe you’re anti-hunter — if the end result of this order is improved habitat for wildlife and healthier wildlife populations and the prioritiza-tion of migration corridors, then, I mean, how could you argue with that?”

Picturing the corridorsWhile the commissioners were in Dubois wrestling over the Sublette mule deer corridor, Regional Wildlife Coordinator Brandon Scurlock sat in his office 45 miles to the south in Pinedale, focusing on pronghorn.

Scurlock was trying to paint a picture of the Sublette pronghorn herd’s migration using the same mod-els that depicted mule deer movement in the same area. When finished, it would be Wyoming’s first recognized pronghorn migration corridor.

The animals weren’t cooperating. Some traversed 180 miles from the Tetons in the north to Interstate 80 in the south, Scurlock found. Others seemed to barely budge. Most fell somewhere in between, making a clear-cut corridor hard to craft.

“It’s a little bit discombobulated,” he said. “We’ve got a wealth of collar data on pronghorn. We just need to assimilate all this data and run the models.”

In the end, the data will help biologists determine what kind of stipulations might be necessary to pro-tect the herd from energy development and other factors, Scurlock said, as the new secretarial order makes protecting these migratory routes a priority.

“I don’t feel like it’s very exciting right now running these pronghorn data,” he said, “but it’s going to help protect these corridors into the future. That’s kind of what our job is.”

David Frey is the integrated communications managing editor for The Wildlife Society.

Credit: Map from Wild Migrations: Atlas of Wyoming’s Ungulates. 2018. OSU Press © 2018 University of Wyoming and University of Oregon

A map created by the Wyoming Migration Initiative details the Sublette mule deer herd’s migration.

43www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY

Credit: Hunter Ritchie/VDGIF

E very fall, Tyler Urgo, an assistant wildlife bi-ologist with the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries (VDGIF), allocates about

four hours of his time to collect data on oak mast on the Highland Wildlife Management Area in western Virginia. There, he inspects acorn abundance on 40 white (Quercus alba) and 40 red oak (Quercus rubra) trees marked with bands of white and red paint. The survey of the 40 trees includes 10 at low and high elevations and from east and west aspects.

About 10 years ago, Tyler would have spent at least twice as much time counting acorns on 10 randomly selected limbs on those 80 trees and gone home with a sore neck. Back then, VDGIF used a tedious and time-consuming quantitative method of counting acorns developed in the 1960s by C. J. Whitehead in Tennessee. No doubt, Tyler and many other state agency wildlife biologists in the Northeast dreamed of the day when annual mast abundance surveys would be less tedious and less painful.

Mast crop data collection VDGIF is a member of the Northeast Associa-tion of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (NEAFWA), a quasi-governmental organization that includes 12 other northeast states, the District of Columbia and eastern Canadian provinces. Its work is facilitated through a committee structure consisting of North-east Fisheries Administrators Association and the Northeast Wildlife Administrators Association, and their respective specialized technical committees.

In the late 1990s, committee reports often ad-dressed the fluctuation in mast crops and the resulting effects on game harvests and populations, raising concerns for the region’s administrators about how the mast survey data was collected.

A charge to improve mast surveysSo in 2000, NEAFWA administrators charged the Upland Game Bird Committee with evaluating mast monitoring methods and recommending — if

possible — a standardized method for NEAFWA members to use. The charge also included making the survey as efficient as possible without sacrificing the integrity of the estimates.

A subcommittee of the Upland Game Bird Commit-tee (formerly Wild Turkey Committee) — consisting of Jim Pack, the wild turkey project leader of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (now

By Gary W. Norman

THE NORTHEAST REGIONAL MAST SURVEY OFFERS ACORN ABUNDANCE DATA

Oh my Aching Neck!

Tyler Urgo, an assistant wildlife biologist with the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries, scans the tops of oak trees for acorns, a task that includes the guarantee of a sore neck.

44 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

retired); Steve Bittner, retired wild turkey project leader of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (now deceased); and me — called upon other experts to help with the charge.

We first turned to Bill Healy, a retired research biologist for the Northeast Region of the U.S. Forest Service, who was well known for his knowledge of oak ecology. Bill had been using a rapid hard-mast index for acorn presence-absence based on the work of Walter Koenig, a researcher based in California (Koenig et al. 1994).

The subcommittee eventually adopted Bill’s recommendation to survey abundance by esti-mating the percent of a tree’s crown with acorns. The method involves scanning the crowns of 40 white oaks and 40 red oaks and estimating the percent of the crown with acorns, in 5 per-cent increments. The method avoids the tedious task of actu-ally counting acorns. Overall, the method is simple, fast, easy and accurate — just what we were looking for.

However, before scrapping the long-term, hard-mast index collected from 1973 to 2000 in Virginia, VDGIF staff col-lected annual estimates using both the old and new methods for five years, from 2005 to 2009, to compare the results. Halfway through the exercise,

researchers in North Carolina compared a similar time-constrained method to 21 years of mast abun-dance survey data obtained by the Whitehead method (Greenberg and Warburton 2007). Their results rein-forced the validity of the new survey method, which not only improved precision, but also took less time. At the end of Virginia’s trial, the agency found that the two methods were highly correlated, so VDGIF formally adopted the new method in 2010.

The Regional Mast SurveyBill McShea, a wildlife ecologist with the National Zoological Park’s Conservation Biology Institute, has been a strong advocate for research investigat-ing the role acorns play in wildlife communities and for sustainable management of oak trees in U.S. forests. Bill urged our subcommittee to form a collaborative group for the purpose of housing the hard-mast data in a central site where researchers and managers alike could draw upon the power of larger sample sizes and meaningful ecoregion impacts. In 2012, the group launched a web site and opened it so that all cooperators can enter mast data, get annual reports and observe mast produc-tion trends within and among ecological regions.

Known as the Regional Mast Survey (RMS), the col-laboration currently includes eight state agencies:

Source: VDGIF

The Regional Mast Survey database provides summary data for white oak acorn abundance across eight states from Kentucky to Connecticut.

Cooperators Welcome!The Regional Mast Survey is open to anyone with the need for acorn abundance data. We particularly want to encourage researchers to include acorn crop data in their studies even if only the slightest chance an ecological relationship might exist.

Everyone is welcome to help collect the data. It’s a great excuse to get outside in late August. Participating is a great opportunity for early career professionals to gain additional experience and to network with project leaders.

Contact Gary Norman for more details: gary.norman@dgif.virginia.gov.

45www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

the Connecticut Bureau of Natural Resources, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commis-sion, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the South Caro-lina Department of Natural Resources, and VDGIF. Although acorns are the primary focus of the surveys, data on other species of trees — such as the beech (Fa-gus grandifolia) in the Adirondack National Park and the walnut (Juglans nigra) in Kentucky — are also included. Today the project is managed by the VDGIF.

Turkeys and moreMany species of wildlife depend on mast as a food source. Wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) (Lint et al., 1995), black bear (Bridges et. al, 2011) and white-tailed deer (McShea and Schwede, 1993) populations thrive when acorns are abundant, making the RMS database useful to managers of many game species. Relationships to many non-game species, including gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar dispar) outbreaks (Jones et al., 1998), feral hogs (Sus scrofa) in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Levy, et al. 2015) and some song birds like the veery (Catharus fuscescens) (Schmidt, 2003), have been published.

Researchers also have suggested an indirect relation-ship between acorns and the risk of Lyme disease for humans (Barbour and Fish, 1993).

Some surprising relationships have been uncovered, too. VDGIF included acorn abundance in recent research conducted as part of the Appalachian Cooperative Grouse Research Project and found correlations between acorns and grouse survival, reproduction and home range that might have been overlooked if not for the standardized hard-mast survey method (Whitaker et al., 2007).

No doubt there are many applications for the RMS, both small and large, that are yet to be found. We hope more wildlifers will take advantage of this resource.

Gary W. Norman, MS, CWB®, is the forest game bird biologist for

the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries.

46 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

Global demand for energy is increasing rapidly as the world’s population grows and urban-ization expands, creating new challenges for

the use of conventional fossil-fuel energy resources. Not only are supplies of fossil fuels limited, burning them produces greenhouse gas emissions that nega-tively impact natural ecosystems and human health.

But thanks to advances in technology, favorable policy changes and financial incentives, today development of renewable energy systems is flour-ishing (Cameron et al. 2012). These systems provide a cleaner and healthier source of electricity and can reduce dependence on fossil fuels while also

mitigating impacts of climate change. Capturing the sun’s thermal energy has emerged as one of the most promising technologies, with interest in solar-powered generation of electricity increasing exponentially over the last decade.

The environmental foot print of large-scale solar power plants can be considerable, however (Turney and Fthenakis 2011). Extensive tracts of land are typically needed to harness the sun’s energy. One study estimated that a land mass roughly the size of the state of South Carolina would be required to meet the renewable energy demands of California alone (Hernandez et al. 2015a).

By Jennifer Wilkening and Kurt Rautenstrauch

A FACILITY IN THE SOUTHWEST HOPES TO FIND THE ANSWER

Can Solar Farms Be Wildlife Friendly?

Large solar energy facilities provide a clean source of electricity but can result in habitat loss for wildlife and plant species in the Mojave Desert.

Credit: Jennifer Wilkening/USFWS

RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

47www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Paradoxically, construction of energy facilities that mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change can result in unexpected negative impacts on ecosystems and wildlife. Solar facilities located on previously undisturbed lands have the potential to threaten natural ecosystems through habitat loss and fragmentation, leading to reduced biodiver-sity and ecosystem resilience. These impacts are particularly detrimental to land in the southwestern United States, a region characterized by sensitive arid environments and where large tracts of public land are being considered for solar energy develop-ment (Lovich and Ennen 2011).

When Valley Electric Association, Inc. (VEA), a non-profit, member-owned electric cooperative in southern Nevada, decided to build a solar facility on land inhabited by the federally threatened Mojave Desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), co-op leaders agreed to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to explore building a wildlife-friendly facility. Lessons learned at this facility could help guide future devel-opment of these renewable energy facilities.

Collecting the sun’s energyThe Southwest, the sunniest region in the U.S., in-cludes portions of three deserts — the Great Basin, Chihuahuan and Sonoran — and encompasses the entire Mojave Desert, a sparsely populated area dis-tinguished by large tracts of public lands and many popular tourist destinations such as Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks. Studies estimate that full development of solar energy resources in the Mojave alone could provide 50 percent of the demand for electricity in the U.S. (EIA US 2009).

Similar to other eco-regions defined by harsh environments, the Mojave is home to a dispropor-tionately large number of endemic species and is considered a hotspot for threatened and endangered species (Flather et al. 1998). One such species is the Mojave Desert tortoise, a long-lived, slow-growing reptile with relatively low reproductive rates. The species was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act as threatened in 1990. Desert tortoises construct burrows that other wildlife species use, plus their conservation status benefits other plants and animals, elevating the ecological importance of the species (Tracy and Brussard 1994).

With construction and operation of solar energy facilities expanding in the Southwest, conservation-

ists worried that the tortoise’s ongoing population decline may be exacerbated by habitat loss and fragmentation. Developers typically grade the land, remove the vegetation, and install impermeable fences around the facilities to prevent animals from moving back inside. This means biologists often capture desert tortoises and translocate them to other sites before construction on a facility starts. USFWS wildlife managers also became concerned about the limited availability of translocation sites, as well as unintended negative impacts on translo-cated individuals in the Mojave.

Partnering to reduce wildlife impactsVEA follows a cooperative business model that is guided by associated principles, including demo-cratic member control and leadership, concern for the community, and emphasis on education and training opportunities. In 2015, the co-op, in part-nership with Bombard Renewable Energy, proposed constructing an 80-acre solar energy facility on vacant land in Pahrump, Nev., an area inhabited by the Mojave Desert tortoise.

Before construction activities began, a team of bi-ologists captured desert tortoises within the project footprint and moved them off site into holding pens. Temporary wildlife-exclusion fences were then erected to prevent the tortoises in adjacent habitat from wandering into the construction zone.

Rather than grading or leveling the entire site, construction crews left the ground underneath so-lar panels in its native state, retaining the natural

Credit: Flo Gardipee/USFWS

The threatened Mojave Desert tortoise occurs in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts in southern California and Nevada, northwestern Arizona, and southwestern Utah.

48 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

topography of the site and a watercourse that bisects the site. Native vegetation was clipped or mowed when necessary to avoid interfering with the solar panels.

The site plan included other modifications to make it more wildlife friendly. Construction crews built the solar panels 18 inches higher off the ground than the industry standard to allow more light to reach the vegetation underneath them. In order to evaluate impacts of solar panels on native vegeta-

tion and migratory birds, two different spacing configurations were installed. Rows of panels in the northern half of the site were spaced 14 feet apart, a commonly used separation in the solar industry. Rows in the southern half were spaced 20 feet apart to allow more light to reach the ground and po-tentially break up the lake-like optical illusion that may attract birds in search of water to solar farms. Instead of impermeable fencing, crews built the permanent fence surrounding the facility with open-ings around the bottom perimeter to allow desert tortoises and other wildlife to enter, exit and occupy the site during operation of the facility.

VEA and USFWS also created operating guidelines to minimize risks to wildlife. Only small utility vehicles were allowed on the site, speed limits were set lower than normal, and workers received special desert tortoise awareness training.

Wildlife monitoring and researchAt the completion of the project, VEA committed to funding research and monitoring studies to track desert tortoise use of the facility and examine the impact of different panel configurations on vegeta-tion and avian mortality. These ongoing studies being conducted by researchers at HDR, a firm that provides environmental consulting services, and the University of Las Vegas, Nev., are designed to provide new knowledge regarding the ability of na-tive plants to persist under solar panels and the use of habitat by wildlife. Research questions include: Does native and invasive vegetation response vary between the two spacing configurations? How do changes in panel configuration affect avian species? What are the specific siting and micro-climatic con-ditions that will promote successful restoration of native plants to provide additional forage for desert tortoises? How do soil conditions like temperature, moisture, and biotic soil crust change underneath solar panels following construction?

The facility removed the temporary exclusion fence surrounding the perimeter of the site in 2017, and biologists outfitted four tortoises previously cap-tured — two adults, one sub-adult, and one juvenile — with radio transmitters and released them into artificial burrows created within the facility. The tortoises continued to move in and out of the facility using the openings in the bottom of the permanent fence. When colder temperatures set in, the adult and sub-adult tortoises moved into overwinter-

Credit: Jennifer Wilkening/USFWS

The VEA Community Solar Project in southern Nevada made modifications to make the facility wildlife friendly, leaving natural landscape features and vegetation to preserve continuity with the surrounding desert ecosystem.

Desert tortoises and other wildlife species are able to move freely in and out of the facility via small openings at the base of the perimeter fence.

Credit: Jennifer Wilkening/USFWS

49www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

ing burrows outside the facility while the juvenile tortoise remained inside the facility. They continued to move in and out of the site during the spring and summer of 2018. Other wildlife species, including rattlesnakes (Crotalus scutulatus), black-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus californicus) and kit fox (Vulpes macrotis), were documented inside the facility, sug-gesting that they also used the openings.

Solar panels could cool desert surfaces and pro-vide additional moisture under the panel drip line, creating favorable microclimates that enhance plant growth and survival, so the plan includes monitor-ing established plots under two panel configurations and outside the facility. Biologists also will assess the vegetation for growth, photosynthetic activity and flower production. Temperature sensors and soil moisture probes will be used to evaluate how solar panels influence ambient temperature and distribution of precipitation, and how differences in these environmental conditions affect vegetation.

Other studies planned for the future include avian mortality monitoring and transplanting native plant species like creosote (Larrea tridentate), bursage (Ambrosia dumosa), and beavertail cactus (Opuntia basilaris) into the site to evaluate habitat restora-tion techniques.

Options for the futureAlthough solar energy facilities designed to be wildlife friendly might lessen negative impacts, they are not a panacea. Appropriate site selection remains one of the most important considerations for balancing solar-energy projects with biodiversity protection. Some alternatives are to locate facili-ties on land with low conservation value, previously disturbed land or land adjacent to urban areas.

A systematic approach incorporating spatial data on biodiversity conservation value and solar potential found that sufficient land area exists to fully de-velop the Mojave, while still avoiding areas of high conservation value (Cameron et al. 2012). This type of research can help to guide solar-energy projects toward locations that are commercially attractive to developers because they are close to existing energy infrastructures and away from lands that are highly important ecologically. In California, for example, researchers determined that electricity produced from solar farms located on land within the existing infrastructure would exceed statewide energy de-

mand (Hernandez et al. 2015b). Other options that could reduce impacts on wildlife include locating energy facilities on previously disturbed lands, such as brownfields, abandoned mines, or landfills.

Constructing solar-energy facilities on agricultural land is another option. Agricultural crops can be grown under and adjacent to solar panels, while

Credit: Kristin Mettke/Valley Electric Association, Inc.

A tortoise moved back into the VEA Community Solar Project after construction was complete where it used an artificial burrow.

A desert tortoise outfitted with a radio transmitter.

Credit: Kristin Mettke/Valley Electric Association, Inc.

50 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

livestock grazing would lessen the need for remov-ing tall vegetation. This practice would support both energy and food production and reduce the need to further develop undisturbed lands while generating an additional income stream for the land owner or providing a renewable source of electricity for the ranch. Additionally, re-vegetating land or maintain-ing native plants underneath solar panels might prevent the loss of the soil’s carbon fixation capacity.

Another important consideration for locating wildlife-friendly, solar-energy facilities is main-taining habitat connectivity as much as possible, although the quality of the habitat may not be totally preserved. Many desert plants accustomed to high levels of direct sunlight may not thrive in the shaded conditions under solar panels, and disturbances associated with the facility’s construc-tion and operation could facilitate establishment of invasive plant species such as red brome (Bromus rubens) that outcompete native vegetation. Hu-man activities also may attract novel species or additional predators to the site, which could have unintended consequences by altering species inter-actions or predator-prey dynamics.

Nevertheless, maintaining some degree of habitat connectivity will almost certainly benefit some wildlife species in the Mojave Desert. The facil-ity described here is an important first step, and research results will help to answer questions about how specific species may be affected. Lessons

learned could be incorporated into decisions about the siting and design of future solar energy facilities in the Mojave.

As the solar-energy field continues to evolve, con-siderable opportunity exists today for the alignment of energy development goals and wildlife habitat preservation. As this project demonstrates, interest in establishing wildlife-friendly solar energy facili-ties has grown along with increased developments in the Mojave Desert, and this trend is likely to continue into the future.

Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Jennifer Wilkening, PhD, is a wildlife biologist and regional

habitat conservation planning coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kurt Rautenstrauch, PhD, is a wildlife biologist with HDR.

Credit: Michael Burroughs/USFWS

Areas of native vegetation left in place during construction of solar-energy facilities provide habitat for wildlife.

51www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

LAW AND POLICY LAW AND POLICY

Whether it’s adequate funding of con-servation programs, management of public lands for multiple uses or myriad

other issues faced by wildlife professionals, the Conservation Affairs Network (CAN) engages and unifies the efforts of The Wildlife Society and its more than 60 sections and chapters to advance policy issues at the national, regional and local levels. Launched in 2014, the network — which is coordinated by TWS policy staff — has become an important avenue for streamlined communication, collaboration and cooperation on policy matters important to wildlife professionals.

With support from CAN, TWS members can work more efficiently and effectively to ensure science plays an active role within the policies and regula-tions driven by all levels of decision makers in their region. This includes issues that are unique to a specific geographic area like the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and common issues — like management of public lands — faced by members in multiple organization units. By pro-moting constant communication and coordinated messaging, the network provides a uniformly appropriate mechanism for information and idea sharing that benefits wildlife conserva-tion and management.

The U.S.-Mexico border wallIn the summer of 2017 when dis-cussions in Congress on the Trump Administration’s proposed expan-sion of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border were heating up in prepara-tion for upcoming Fiscal Year 2018 spending talks, the Western Section began tapping into the resources and connections of CAN to voice con-cerns about the impacts to wildlife movement. Members of the section, which includes the state of California,

were uniquely qualified to provide information that would be of direct relevance to members of Congress as they contemplated funding the wall’s expansion.

Their concerns about the impermeable barrier along the border largely stemmed from Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, as amended. This provision exempts road and barrier construction along U.S. borders from federal, state and local environmental analysis laws, including the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Section 102 has been cited several times by U.S. Administrations to streamline projects deemed relevant to national security, including in 2017 when the Trump Administration announced it would construct several new wall prototypes along the California-Mexico border. These exemptions have restricted

By Caroline E. Murphy, Kelly Holland and James Ramakka

COORDINATING WILDLIFE POLICY ISSUES ACROSS TWS SECTIONS AND CHAPTERS

The Conservation Affairs Network in Action

Credit: Vince Smith

The Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, located in the Rio Grande Valley, straddles the U.S.-Mexico border and could be bisected by the expanded border wall proposed by the Trump administration.

52 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

opportunities to reduce wildlife impacts when evaluating border security goals.

The Western Section’s Conservation Affairs Com-mittee recognized that collaborating with the Southwest Section would create a stronger voice for wildlife professionals on this issue. Ninety-three percent of the U.S. southern border with Mexico runs along the states of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, which are in the Southwest Section. Initial discussions on how to move the concerns of both sections forward with their Congressional represen-tatives occurred during a monthly CAN-wide call hosted by TWS policy staff.

The committee leaders of the two sections as-sembled key points on the ecological impacts of the border wall from TWS members, other professional groups and published studies. This information, along with an existing TWS policy statement on “The Impacts of Border Security Measures on Wildlife” and a 2017 resolution released by the Texas Chapter of TWS, were referenced in the letter opposing construction of the wall.

After the sections approved a joint letter, it was sent to members of the House and Senate Appro-priations Committees in May 2018, urging them to consider the concerns of wildlife professionals. These concerns include potential disruptions to normal seasonal movement and genetic exchange that may result from impermeable barriers bisect-

ing wildlife habitat. Congress did not fund the expanded wall in FY 2018, which ended on Oct. 1, and was still in the midst of discussions about it for FY 2019 at press time.

Collaboration on common issuesIn contrast to the geographically unique wildlife impacts, many national and international policy issues affect multiple organization units, regardless of location. CAN, through TWS staff, also assists individual state chapters in evaluating the immedi-ate relevance of such issues. Several chapters, including Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, took up recent Department of the Inte-rior and congressional initiatives to transfer certain federal public lands to alternative public uses and states. Leaders of each chapter created position statements on the transfer of public lands that are specifically tailored to the unique conditions in their states, translating an issue being discussed at the national level and applying it to their geo-graphic area. This approach makes the information more useful to state policy decision makers. TWS policy staff also share these statements with other chapters that are considering engagement on the same issue.

Rallying for federal conservation fundingOrganization units have also stepped up to advocate on behalf of an issue of importance to every state fish and wildlife agency: proactive wildlife conserva-tion funding. Working through their CACs, chapters and sections have supported TWS’ efforts to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act — legislation that would provide up to $1.3 billion annually to states to conserve at-risk species.

To keep members informed, TWS policy staff regu-larly convey updates on the proposed act through CAN. These communications give each unit’s CAC the opportunity to deploy messaging specific to their memberships via social media posts and email blasts that speaks to the overall benefit of consistent funding for conservation while also being specific to the needs of the region to gain the attention of their congressional representatives. For example, members of the Illinois Chapter have emphasized the success of state-based efforts to restore the river otter (Lontra canadensis), while the Arizona Chapter highlighted species in need of increased conservation efforts such as the Mexican grey wolf

Credit: Justin Meissen

The Jefferson salamander (Ambystoma jeffersonianum) is listed as a species of greatest conservation need in eleven eastern states including Virginia, New Jersey, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. These state chapters sent correspondence to their members of Congress requesting co-sponsorship of the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.

53www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

(Canis lupus baileyi) and jaguar (Panthera onca) with their representatives.

The efforts have been paying off. Many state chapters and their members have sent letters and emails to congressional representatives, spoken with congressional staff on the subject, and been directly responsible for some members of Congress co-sponsoring the legislation.

Valuable insightsTWS policy staff also benefit from the regular com-munication with organization units through the Conservation Affairs Committee. These members help provide headquarters staff with the expert knowledge for TWS to engage on behalf of wildlife professionals on a federal level.

Comments collected through CAN have helped staff provide a detailed set of comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service on three proposed rules that, if finalized, would modify the listing, delisting, critical habitat designation and consultation processes of the Endangered Species Act.

Network leaders worked with their unit’s membership to provide comments that reflected the expertise of their geographic region and their members’ interactions with the ESA. This input allowed staff to provide robust comments on the

proposals that included suggestions for improving them, concerns about the impacts to wildlife professionals and requests for clarifying the intended outcomes and potential effects of the proposals.

Through these collaborative processes, TWS policy staff, as well as members, can more effectively express the concerns and impacts to wildlife and wildlife professionals on policy conversations.

Kelly Holland, MS, CWB, is a senior wildlife biologist at GEI Consultants and

the Conservation Affairs Committee chair for the Western Section of The Wildlife Society.

Caroline E. Murphy, BS, AWB®, is the government relations program

coordinator for The Wildlife Society.

James Ramakka, PhD, CWB, is a retired national wildlife program lead

for the Bureau of Land Management, past chair of the Conservation Affairs Committee for the Southwest Section, and the Southwest Section representative.

How the Conservation Affairs Network Helps Members

TWS policy staff work to ensure wildlife professionals have the tools necessary to adequately conserve and manage wildlife populations through the Conservation Affairs Network (CAN). State chapters may choose to form a body within their unit called the Conservation Affairs Committee. Members of this committee organize the policy and regulatory initiatives of the chapter and inform chapter members of relevant policy updates.

The chairperson of each chapter committee communicates to the Conservation Affairs

Committee (CAC) assembled by its respective TWS Section. Each of the eight sections also has a CAC chair who works directly with TWS policy staff to ensure information and resources flow within the CAN structure.

To learn more about the policy work conducted by TWS and TWS chapters and sections, reach out to the CAC chair or the elected leadership within your organization unit. For assistance in starting a CAC in your organization unit, send an email to policy@wildlife.org or visit www.wildlife.org/conservation-affairs-network.

54 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In 2014, the Western Section of The Wildlife Society kicked off a project known as The Wildlife Confessional, an anthology of short stories by wildlife professionals

about their adventures, misadventures, revelations, reflec-tions, mishaps and pivotal experiences with wildlife in the field. This year will see the project’s culmination through the crowd source publisher Inkshares after backers of the project effectively funded its publication in 2018 by pre-ordering cop-ies of the book.

The Wildlife Confessional was conceived by members of The Wildlife Society’s Western Section to record the oral histories, memories and experiences of wildlife professionals in a way that promotes collegiality and camaraderie. But the book will also double as a recruiting tool to attract and educate students interested in entering the field of wildlife biology and — ideally

— recruit new members to TWS. The money raised from the book sales will be used to support student involvement in the Western Section by funding scholarships, grants and training opportunities.

The thirteen authors represent women and men from all walks of wildlife biology — state and federal biologists, consultants, students, professors. Their stories take place across the Arctic and North and Central America in settings like stock ponds, pick-up trucks, doctors’ offices, roof tops, Igloos, outhouses and even bombing ranges.

In the following excerpt from The Pirate Kit Fox, San Joaquin kit fox expert Brian Cypher recounts the one that got away — a kit fox so formidable and cantankerous, it nearly brought a grown man to tears.

By Matthew Bettelheim

ORAL HISTORIES, MEMORIES AND EXPERIENCES OF WILDLIFE PROFESSIONALS

The Wildlife Confessional

Owned by a Pirate Kit FoxBy Brian Cypher

It has been said I am a kit fox expert. To this day I’m not sure I know what that means — I’ve always suspected it was a title earned with equal parts longevity and experience. In my case, I suspect I joined the “expert” club by virtue of persistence — clearly, that’s what hap-pens when you mess with something long enough (two decades, if anyone’s counting).

Although today I consider myself suffi-ciently competent and adept at handling the San Joaquin kit fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica), this was not always the case. In the beginning, there was one fox that “owned” me. He was a 2.5-kilogram ball of nastiness that for nearly a year caused me untold stress and anxiety, made me fearful of showing up for work and gave me nightmares. This is our story.

In July of 1990, I moved to Bakersfield, Calif., in the southern San Joaquin Val-ley. I had been offered a position with a company that was contracted by the De-partment of Energy to conduct extensive research and monitoring of listed species at the then government-owned Elk Hills oil field in Kern County. This new job of-fered an opportunity to work extensively with the San Joaquin kit fox. I jumped at the opportunity.

Since 1980, my company had conducted intensive trapping sessions across the summer and winter to census kit fox abundance. The resulting data were analyzed with a mark-recapture program to produce a population estimate.

Between the summer and winter, the summer sessions were the worst. As a consequence of the San Joaquin Valley summers’ intense heat, we could only open and bait traps after 4:30 in the

Brian Cypher, PhD, CWB®, TWS Fellow, is a research ecologist in the Endangered Species Recovery Program at California State University, Stanislaus. His primary professional interest is the ecology and conservation of wild canids. However, he enjoys working with a variety of species, many of which are endangered, and include several species of kangaroo rats, pocket mice, antelope squirrels, shrews, and even rare plants, particularly Bakersfield cactus. For the past 26 years, his work has been centered in the San Joaquin Valley. He is looking forward to retiring in a few years to northwest Washington, although Brian likely will be making frequent trips back south to check on the kit foxes that he’s become so attached to. He has been a member of The Wildlife Society since 1980, served as an associate editor of the Journal of Wildlife Management, and was appointed a TWS Fellow in 2014.

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55www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

afternoon, a condition of our permits to prevent exposing trapped animals to high temperatures for prolonged periods of time before sunset. And in the morning, we began checking traps again at 5:00 to make sure all the traps were closed and all foxes were processed and released no later than two hours after sunrise. This meant getting up at 3:30 in the morning to check and close traps, and not getting home before 7:30 every evening after reopening. Although in principle there were two separate crews to open and close, all bets were off if you were the new guy. And I was the new guy.

Although I wasn’t yet trained, it wasn’t long before I was asked to work both crews until my training was completed. I had a hard time saying no. So I went with little sleep for four nights each week: up at 3:30 a.m., closed traps, opened traps, returned home, ate a quick meal, showered, slept for a few hours, repeat. Those first weeks were rough.

In my past field positions, I had worked with wolves, coyotes, gray foxes, and red foxes using chemical immobilization. So when the San Joaquin kit fox handling method was first described to me, I was understandably anxious. No drugs were used.

I was admittedly skeptical about the no-drug policy at first. But, I reasoned, I was the new guy. Handlers before me had followed this method for more than 10 years before my happy face showed up!

In line with the training protocol, I first had to ob-serve experienced handlers in the field. The whole process seemed simple enough. And not once did a handler come close to getting mauled by a fox. So when the day came that it was my turn to give it a try, I bagged the fox with little effort. My training went as well as could be expected for a rookie. But it was clear to me I was still struggling to keep control of the foxes. In those first few weeks, a couple of foxes escaped my grasp prematurely. Adept or smooth I was not.

According to the training protocol, a trainee needed to handle 10 foxes with a trainer before they were considered “trained.” By week five of the six-week summer session, I was nearly there. Then came the fateful day. I and my trainer du jour, a gal who had scarcely more experience than I, had just finished processing my tenth fox. As I was collecting our gear, she had run back to our truck and — unbe-knownst to me — radioed a colleague (recall, this was 1990 – cell phones were still some fantasy of the future!). I had loaded the gear and jumped into the driver’s seat on our way to the next trap when a fellow biologist who was working the adjacent trap line crossed our path. I knew — as did the entire staff — that he and my trainer were in a relation-ship. Even so, it came as a surprise when, as I pulled our truck alongside his to chat, my trainer said, “Okay, you are now trained. See ya,” jumped out of my truck and into her beau’s, and they drove off. So be it, but there were still traps to be checked.

Flying solo now, I had only made it to three traps down trap line 21 before I came across my first fox. I didn’t know it at the time, but my first solo fox would prove to be the fox. Okay, I thought, I’ve got this. I laid out my gear and went to bag up my first fox. I may have been green, but two things struck me rather quickly as I approached that trap. The first thing I noticed was that his left eye was “squinty” to the point of almost being closed. Also,

The San Joaquin kit fox, a federally endangered and state-listed species, is endemic to the grass- and scrublands of California’s Central Valley.

Credit: CSUS ESRP

56 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

his left upper lip was pulled up just slightly in a sneer. Together, these beauty marks suggested a resemblance to a pirate.

The second thing that struck me was the ear-piercing, snarling scream! Most foxes never make a

sound when they are handled. This fox’s scream was blood-curdling. He made it clear from the start he was not going to be the textbook fox I had become accustomed to during my short initiation.

Things only got worse when I went to maneuver the trap to get him into the bag. Not only did he continue to scream, he flung himself with snapping jaws wherever I touched the trap. Tentatively, I worked the bag over the mouth of the trap and — carefully opening the trap door through the bag — I blew on him, banged on the sides of the trap, and feigned rushes at him to work him into the bag. Each move was met with a scream and a snap. This went on for several minutes until I began to feel panicked and fatigued. I was beginning to consider letting him go — the ultimate failure of a handler — when, still snarling and snapping, he finally backed into the bag.

Even in the bag, he continued to scream and spun around in the sack like a whirling dervish. Every time I touched the bag, he would immediately spin around and bite at the spot. I was holding a five-pound bag of canid hell. I didn’t know what to do. And as soon as he saw daylight, he exploded out of my grasp. For a split second, I feared he was going to come back for me. But like many foxes, he stopped a few feet away and stared back at me. The only difference was, this pirate fox managed to give me an incredible vulpine “stink eye” with his one good eye before he turned and trotted off into the saltbush.

The whole encounter left me shaken and soaked with sweat. But there were still traps to check and I finished the trap line that day without encountering another fox. By day’s end, I felt thrashed. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but that morning it sure sounded like a good idea.

And maybe I should have, because the next day, the pirate kit fox was back in the same trap! The processing didn’t go much smoother than the day before. And the next day, to my horror, there he was again! In the same trap! And again we went through the same stressful, humiliating procedure that ended with him escaping. Thank Leopold, the fox was nowhere to be seen on the fourth and last day for trap line 21. I didn’t for a minute think his absence was an act of pity on my behalf — more like boredom since I had offered so little challenge. He owned me and he knew it.

Credit: CSUS ESRP

Credit: CSUS ESRP

Once caught, handlers must coax the kit fox from the trap into a denim bag, which allows the handler to restrain the fox while performing a routine examination.

With the fox firmly restrained, Brian Cypher performs a tooth exam to inspect the mouth for tooth wear or signs of injury.

57www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Matthew Bettelheim, BS, CWB®, is a senior wildlife biologist at AECOM,

freelance science writer, member of The Wildlife Professional Editorial Advisory Board and president of the Western Section of The Wildlife Society. He served as co-editor of The Wildlife Confessional.

In late November, we started the winter session. It wasn’t uncommon for staff to be assigned trap lines they had run previously because it was assumed they were familiar with the trap sites and could work the lines more efficiently. As it turned out, I was assigned trap line 21 with the pirate fox. I didn’t dwell too much on the fox. With turnover from death by predators or natural causes, shifts in individual home ranges and random chance, I figured my chances were good he wouldn’t be back to terrorize me. But as I approached the infamous trap my first day back on trap line 21, there he was! Déjà vu turned to dread combined with a sudden pressing urge to evacuate my bowels. Resigned, I let the games begin…

How to help support this project

Find out what happened when Brian returned to face the dreaded pirate kit fox by purchasing The Wildlife Confessional. It’s available for purchase online. Search for Inkshares on the internet and enter the book title or contact Matthew Bettelheim at blackfish@nasw.org. The price is $15 for the paperback and $7 for the ebook. The money raised will support student involvement in The Western Section of The Wildlife Society by funding scholarships, grants, and training opportunities. Your support is appreciated!

58 The Wildlife Professional, January/February 2019 © The Wildlife Society

In Memory

The Wildlife Society pays tribute

Walter E. Howard

Longtime TWS member Walter E. How-ard died at his home in Davis, Calif., on June 29, 2018. He was 101.

A TWS member since 1942, Howard, who was known to friends as “Howdy,” was a professor emeritus at the Univer-sity of California, Davis’s Department of Wildlife, Fish & Conservation Biology.

He was born April 9, 1917, in Davis, where he spent most of his life. The youngest of four sons of UC Davis horticulture profes-sor Walter L. Howard and May Belle Cooper Howard, he grew up with a love of the natural world.

Howard studied zoology at UC Berkeley and worked as a ranger at Yosemite National Park. “I’m an outdoors person and spent my entire summers in the Sierra,” he said in a UC Berkeley oral history interview.

After serving in the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment ski troops in World War II, Howard obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1947, where he was a pioneer in the field that came to be known as animal ecology.

In 1947, he was hired by the division of agricultural zoology at UC Davis to do field research on pocket gophers at the San Joaquin Experimental Range. He became the first ecology pro-fessor at the campus, where he continued to teach and conduct research until he retired in 1987.

Howard’s work in vertebrate ecology took him to about 80 countries, including New Zealand, where he studied environ-mental damage caused by red deer, rabbits and opossums. He published widely throughout his career on pest management, wildlife conservation and ecology.

In later years, he enjoyed teaching courses on the issue of over-population. He was a founder of the Vertebrate Pest Conference and was involved in many professional and civic organizations. After retiring, he wrote books on animal welfare and ecology and an autobiography, Saved by Bed Bugs!

He is survived by his wife Betty. Donations may be made to the Yolo Hospice or a charity of choice.

John E. Toepfer

John E. Toepfer, a TWS member since 1970, died Oct. 9, 2018, at his home in Bartlesville, Okla., following routine hip replacement surgery. He was 70.

For nearly 50 years, Toepfer studied and worked to conserve grouse across the American prairie and published more than 60 scientific and popular press articles about this research. His lifelong commitment to understanding prairie

grouse — particularly greater prairie-chickens — was fueled by his passion for the birds and his steadfast work ethic.

A native of Wisconsin, he earned his BS and MS in 1972 and 1976 at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point where he developed a lifelong interest in greater prairie-chickens.

As part of his PhD work at Montana State University, he made the first attempt to reintroduce prairie-chickens in Wisconsin at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area. As a professor at Little Hoop Community College at Fort Totten Indian Reservation in North Dakota, he developed what was considered to be the first tribal college Native American wildlife program and was instrumental in the development of an Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative.

Although Toepfer’s focus was prairie grouse, in 1978 he followed radio-marked sandhill cranes between Wisconsin/Minnesota and Florida, documenting migration routes and stopover areas now used to re-establish endangered whooping cranes. He also developed radio-marking, trapping and handling methods for American bitterns.

Throughout his career, Toepfer was instrumental in studying and translocating prairie-chickens throughout their range. He served on the Attwater’s Prairie-Chicken Recovery Team and on the Board of the North American Grouse Partnership. In 2015, he became the first STCP/Hamerstrom Prairie Grouse Research Chair at the George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center, where he conducted and published research on prairie grouse and assisted with captive production and release of greater prairie-chickens. Toepfer received several awards for his work, including the Hamerstrom Award from the National Prairie Grouse Technical Council and the Minnesota Chapter of The Wildlife Society’s Minnesota Award.

For more information on his research, visit www.prairiegrouse.org. Donations in his memory can be made to the John E. Toepfer Prairie Grouse Research Scholarship administered by the Sutton Center (www.suttoncenter.org.)

–Contributed by Greg Septon

Credit: Don Wolfe/G. M. Sutton Avian Research Center

Members who wish to submit a tribute should send an email to editor@wildlife.org.

Credit: Lois Richter

59www.wildlife.org© The Wildlife Society

Field Notes

Tools and techniques for today’s wildlife professional

A novel, cheap solution for vehicles to cross wildlife barriers

Sometimes, wildlife managers and researchers need to raise fences or barriers to keep animals in certain areas and out of others. But gates that let wildlifers’ motorized vehicles pass through can also allow crit-ters — particularly small ones — to slip underneath.

In a study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, researchers tested a novel way to let vehicles, even heavy ones, enter and exit fenced areas while blocking wildlife — using decommissioned conveyor belts as gates.

“It gives a very inexpensive and very convenient way for researchers to have vehicular access in and out of conservation areas or construction areas,” said Zach Adcock, a PhD student at Texas State University and the study’s lead author. “It’s cheap and easy to install, and it’s a very convenient application of a material that’s readily available.”

Ordinary gates often end up being cumbersome, expensive or simply don’t work well enough to prevent movement of small wildlife, Adcock said. In a standard ranch gate, the gap between the lowest bar and the ground lets the gate swing freely, but it also allows small animals to pass underneath or — as gopher tortoises (Gopherus polyphemus) often do — burrow underground to get past. Other methods, like cattle guards or electrified mats, can be expensive and work better for larger wildlife.

Adcock and his team needed frequent access to gopher tortoise conser-vation areas on central Florida phosphate mines, which happened to have a surplus of decommissioned conveyor belts. That gave them an idea for a different kind of gate.

The researchers screwed a couple two-by-fours to a belt and buried the attached planks underground so the belt wouldn’t get pulled up. They then put the conveyor belt in place vertically. Standing just a couple feet tall, it worked as a solid barrier to small animals, similar to a drift fence; but it was flexible and rigid enough to stand without support stakes. The researchers could drive right over the flexible belt, pushing it down as they passed. Afterward, the belt sprang back to its upright position, keeping the tortoises in place.

Adcock and his colleagues found the conveyor belt structure worked well for small vertebrates such as non-climbing snakes, tortoises, turtles and some small mammals. Studying toads in central Texas, the team could even drive dump trucks and bulldozers across the belt without wearing it down.

“A really good bonus of using this material is it’s incredibly resistant,” Adcock said. “It’s usually used in high-friction, high-heat applications.”

But the technique doesn’t work for wildlife species that can climb or larger vertebrates, he said. “If anyone is interested in using this, they should make sure they understand the natural history of their study taxa and determine if this method would be appropriate.”

—Contributed by Dana Kobilinsky

Credit: Bob Davidson

Researchers screwed two-by-fours to a conveyor belt and buried them underground so the belt wouldn’t get pulled up.

Credit: Bob Davidson

The conveyor belt’s material is flexible enough to bend when a vehicle drives over it but rigid enough to stand upright on its own.

Credit: Bob Davidson

Used in place of a gate, a conveyor belt can stop small animals from crossing but allow vehicles to pass.

Carelessly discarded litter can spell trouble for wildlife, as this photo taken by retired TWS member Peter Ommundsen poignantly illustrates. He spied a Columbian black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) near his home on Salt Spring Island, BC, as it crossed the road wearing a corn chip bag around its neck.

Gotcha!

Photo by Peter Ommundsen

Want to share your photo here? Send it to editor@wildlife.org.

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