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The first hopeful news comes from the lab of Richard Hofstetter, a forest entomologist at Northern Arizona University. Working with a private company called Montana BioAgriculture, Hofstetter has identified a deadly strain of the Beauveria bassiana fungus that kills 80 to 90 percent of pine beetles, one of the most destructive bark beetle species of recent years. The fungus is naturally present in the bark of some infected trees; Hofstetter and Montana BioAgriculture's Cliff Bradley simply collect it, propagate it and dissolve the spores into a liquid that forest managers can spray on trees to help control local outbreaks.
As the journal Entomology Today explains, "The fungus releases white powdery spores, and when the beetles crawl over them the fungus gets into their bodies and takes over." Once that happens, Hofstetter says, it's lights out within a day or two, no pesticides necessary. The product may be on the market by the end of the year.
But the big question for the Intermountain West may be whether Beauveria bassiana — or a similar fungus — can also be used to treat other bark beetle species, like the spruce beetle. That's because aerial surveys released this month by the U.S. Forest Service show the mountain pine beetle epidemic is quickly waning: New infestations in Colorado have sunk to levels not seen since the 1990s, and Wyoming and South Dakota show similar downward trends, perhaps because the beetles have exhausted their food supply.
Beyond the region, though, trends are less conclusive. Forest health in the Pacific Northwest is generally improving (see below), but in California, the total number of trees killed by insect, disease and drought more than doubled last year. And while Southwest forest managers haven't yet released the results of their 2014 aerial surveys, Hofstetter says that if the drought continues, beetle infestations there will also rise, because drought-stressed trees are more susceptible to beetle kill.
Though bark beetles are native denizens of the West and their outbreaks naturally cyclical, Hofstetter argues that managers shouldn't just let them run amuck. "These outbreaks are larger than anything we've seen before, and we need to be aware that ecological impacts are pretty big," he says. "The forest has changed because of human interference. If humans are altering the environment, we're responsible for it as well."
Current efforts to control outbreaks use either pesticides, which affect other wildlife, or chemical pheromones, which aren't always effective. Fungus, Hofstetter says, is not only environmentally benign, it actually keeps pace with swiftly-evolving beetles: Pesticides have to be reapplied again and again, and insects evolve resistance, while fungus continues to evolve with the beetles after just a single application.
While a fungal spray to control pine beetles may not be necessary in the Intermountain West right now — forest managers are already changing their tactics from battling outbreaks to clearing out dead trees and re-opening campgrounds — Hofstetter's work is nonetheless an important step foward. Fungus has been used in agriculture for years, but it's largely been overlooked as a forest management tool.
That's starting to change. Already, a Montana scientist is testing fungi's ability to fight blister rust in whitebark pine, and there's a good chance that scientists will find a strain that targets spruce beetles. If current trends continue, that should be welcome news.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent at High Country News. Image of Rio Grande National Forest credit Brian Howell/USFS.
It was hard work, plagued by uncertainty and inefficiency. We once waded up a steep tributary for hours, fruitlessly waving our electrodes beneath logjams and waterfalls, certain that the stream was uncontaminated — only to shock an intrepid, lonely brook trout at the headwaters. Our sweat-soaked shoulders slumped. A day of back-breaking work to find a single fish? There had to be a better way.
Now, I'm happy to report, such a way exists: environmental DNA, or eDNA. The scientific technique allows researchers to sample water or soil for minute traces of animal DNA — morsels of shed skin, fecal matter or reproductive material — to verify the presence of their target critter. Have brook trout or other invasives infiltrated a watershed? Is the cryptic Idaho giant salamander hiding in a mountain creek? Just grab a few water samples and run some polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) — a method for amplifying DNA that's used in everything from forensics to diagnosing hereditary disease — and voila, you've got your answer. During my time in Yellowstone, eDNA could have saved us hours, even days, of arduous searching.No wonder, then, that scientists around the West are spreading the eDNA gospel. Among the converts is Matthew Laramie, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who recently employed the technique to find summer chinook salmon in northern Washington's Methow and Okanagan basins. The fish head upriver in spring, when melt-swollen creeks make traditional sampling methods like snorkeling or electrofishing impractical. By contrast, says Laramie, using eDNA barely requires getting out of the car: "A single person could sample the whole Okanagan Basin in a day or two."
More important than convenience, of course, is accuracy. Fortunately, eDNA passes that test. In streams where Laramie knew chinook were present, he generally found their DNA; in streams that the fish couldn't access, he didn't. Now that the test has been proven effective on chinook, says Laramie, it can be used to track the salmon restoration efforts of the Colville Confederated Tribes, which plan to reintroduce spring chinook into the Okanagan within the year.
eDNA is also being employed to combat those pesky brook trout, an eastern species that have displaced bull trout, a threatened native cousin, in many Western streams. Tracking the fishes' relative distributions may help researchers like Taylor Wilcox, a PhD student at the University of Montana, understand exactly what happens when the invader enters a system — especially whether bull trout can survive by fleeing to connected streams elsewhere in the watershed. Such a vast study is tailor-made for environmental DNA. "With eDNA, you can have really high detection probability over very large scales, and the cost of sampling is lower than doing backpack electrofishing," Wilcox says. Indeed, he and collaborators have picked up traces of brook trout genetic material in situations where backpack electroshocking had stunned nary a fish.
Still, eDNA remains immature in many ways. The technique has only been in widespread use for a few years, and there are important questions it can't yet reliably answer. How many fish — or frogs, or salamanders — live in a stream? Are they old or young, healthy or sick? Though traces of Asian carp DNA have led some scientists to suspect that the infamous invader has finally reached the Great Lakes, others claim the samples could have come from bird droppings or boats. Distinguishing the DNA of close relatives like brook and bull trout, or coho and chinook salmon, is also challenging. Scooping up water samples might be easy, but creating sufficiently sensitive PCR assays, claims Laramie, "is where the hard work of this method comes in."
Nonetheless, eDNA is already changing the face of aquatic science and conservation — and as methods improve, its role will only expand. "There are still so many unknowns," Laramie says with relish. "It's a field that's just ripe for research."
Ben Goldfarb is a Seattle-based correspondent for High Country News.
In mid-January, the agency released its new "strategic growth policy," declaring that expansion should prioritize lands and waters to protect threatened and endangered species and migratory birds. Acquisition proposals must identify how refuges can contribute to landscape-scale conservation, with nearby landowners' cooperation, and whether they can still thrive as the climate changes. "It's a way for the Service to say, 'Given our limited resources, how are we going to do this in the future?' " says Desiree Sorenson-Groves of the National Wildlife Refuge Association.
The shaggy beasts had been imported from Yellowstone National Park, a quixotic project co-sponsored by the state and a local rod and gun club. Seventy-four years later, those bison's descendants find themselves unwitting combatants in a range war, blamed by Utah cattlemen for eating cows out of house and home. A new study, however, suggests that ranchers' real beef should be with another mammal entirely — along with state predator control policies.
Upon their release in 1941, it didn't take long for the bison to flourish. By the 1960s, the shaggy beasts had forsaken the desert in favor of the Henry Mountains, between Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks, where their numbers kept growing; today, the population hovers at 325. While nearly all of America's half-million bison contain cattle genes, the Henry Mountains herd has remained pure, its numbers carefully managed through the issue of wildly popular hunting tags. "We've worked hard to maintain a genetically viable population while increasing hunting and wildlife viewing," says Bill Bates, section chief at the Utah Division of Wildlife.
Bison tend to attract controversy wherever they roam, however, and the Henry Mountains are no different. Unlike in Yellowstone, the problem isn't that the bison harbor the bacterial disease brucellosis — the Henry herd has been certified clean since the 1960s — but rather that they compete with cows. Some 4,200 cattle share the bison's winter range, and the struggle for forage can be fierce. When, in 2007, the state decided to incrementally grow the herd by dispensing fewer hunting licenses, many cattlemen were incensed. "The atmosphere was really intense," says Utah State University ecologist Dustin Ranglack. "There was a lot of mistrust."
With the state's support, Ranglack set out to quantify just how much forage was being scarfed down by bison. "When you drive around that area, the bison are pretty conspicuous — they've trampled down the dirt, they've got these big dust wallows," he says. "But when you step out of the truck, you start noticing the jackrabbit scat." Ranglack saw clusters of little spherical pellets everywhere. He began to wonder whether rabbits might be even more prolific grazers than bison.
To figure out who was eating what, Ranglack set up a simple experiment. At 20 sites throughout the Henry Mountains, he constructed two 8x8-foot squares of cattle-proof fencing — pens designed not to keep animals in, but to shut them out. To one exclosure at each site, he added an apron of chicken wire that deterred rabbits. In sum: 40 exclosures overall, 20 that barred cattle and bison but let rabbits in to browse, 20 that thwarted all grazers. To figure out which large herbivore was exerting more grazing pressure, he melded data from bison radio collars with ranchers' own reports about their cattle's activity.
A year later, Ranglack returned to his sites to see how much vegetation remained in each plot. According to his analysis, published Monday in the Journal of Applied Ecology, cows were the power mowers of the Henry Mountains, devouring around 52 percent of the available forage. Bison, by contrast, were eating just 13 percent. As for those tiny, innocuous jackrabbits and their lagomorph cousins? They gobbled 34 percent.
Clearly, then, the Henry Mountains are chock-full of bunnies. But why? Ranglack speculates that Utah's take-no-prisoners coyote management strategy is responsible for the rabbit explosion. The state spends $1.35 million on lethal coyote control annually, paying a $50 bounty for every kill; in the Henry Mountains, a trophy mule deer unit, at least 156 coyotes have been eliminated over the last five years.
Ranglack is quick to point out that the link between predator policies and lagomorph populations hasn't received scientific scrutiny. Still, it's conceivable that, at least in some places, the trophic cascade set off by coyote control is actually costing Utah money in the form of lost cattle forage. And the state is taking notice: Ranglack's study "is something we'll definitely have to take into account" in devising future management plans, says the Division of Wildlife's Bill Bates.
State managers aren't the only folks rethinking the Henry Mountains ecosystem. Over a year ago, Ranglack presented his then-unpublished data before a group of local ranchers. He'd tried to keep cattlemen in the loop during his experiments, but he knew his analysis ran counter to expectations. He feared the meeting would turn ugly.
Nonetheless, Ranglack launched into his presentation, quickly arriving at the slide that broke down which critters were consuming how much grass. As he explained what he'd found, a loud, challenging voice boomed from the audience.
"Wait a minute," the rancher interrupted. "You're trying to say that jackrabbits are eating twice as much as bison?"
"That's what I'm saying," Ranglack replied. He waited nervously for the outburst. A murmur passed through the crowd. Then the rancher spoke up again.
"Well then," he declared, "we need to stop shooting all these coyotes!"
Ben Goldfarb is a Seattle-based correspondent for High Country News.
]]>On January 12, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Mexican gray wolf, or Canis lupus baileyi, as an endangered subspecies under the Endangered Species Act. Before the new rule, Mexican grays were protected under the E.S.A. but lumped in with their larger, more northerly relative, the gray wolf, reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. Today more than 1,500 grays inhabit large swaths of the northwestern U.S.
In addition to being slighter in stature than grays, Mexican gray wolves, or lobos, are far smaller in numbers. Based on the USFWS's latest survey, completed at the end of 2013, there were only 83 wolves in 14 packs along the New Mexico-Arizona border. Since reintroductions began in the late 1990s, the effort has been marred by human conflict. According to USFWS data, between 1998 and 2011, 88 Mexican gray wolves died -- more than half of these deaths were attributable to illegal shootings and car collisions.
As HCN contributor John Dougherty reported in 2007, ranchers in the Gila tried to gain the upper hand by exploiting a "three strikes" law that allows federal officials to remove or kill animals deemed habitual livestock killers. Recent efforts reported on by HCN have sought creative means to alleviate the tension between wolves and ranchers, including grazing buyouts, which pay farmers to remove cattle from key wolf habitat.
Lack of genetic diversity has also proven a serious obstacle to reintroduction efforts. All of the remaining animals are descended from a group of five lobos captured in 1973 (coincidentally, the year the Endangered Species Act was passed) after the species was almost driven to extinction. Federal wildlife managers hope to increase genetic variation through selective breeding and strategic release of animals into the wild.
Under the new rule, the USFWS will seek to establish an experimental population of between 300 and 325 Mexican grays. The rules also significantly expand the boundaries of the wolves' protected range and areas where animals can be released. The former territory comprised portions of the Gila and Apache National Forests but the new rule pushes the southern boundary for the experimental population from Interstate 10 all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border. (However, the northern boundary ends at Interstate 40, so wolves that travel to the Grand Canyon and into potential habitat beyond would not be managed under the new guidelines. USFWS intends to capture and return wolves that disperse north of I-40.) "This revision of the experimental population rule provides Mexican wolves the space they need to establish a larger and more genetically diverse population – a population that can meaningfully contribute to the subspecies' recovery," said Benjamin Tuggle, the Service's Southwest Regional Director.
According to Tuggle, the rule is also accompanied by "clearer and more flexible rules to support the interests of local stakeholders" – namely, a provision that allows individuals to get permits allowing them to kill wolves that attack livestock or domestic dogs.
This "take" provision is one of several aspects of the law that has drawn criticism from environmental groups, such as the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife. The same groups have also pointed out that the law is unusual in that it defines a maximum rather than minimum population threshold. "Allowing Mexican gray wolves to disperse over a broader area is a positive, but that positive is negated by an unfounded population cap and increased authorized killing," said Eva Sargent, a spokeswoman for Defenders of Wildlife in a press release.
The new protections for Mexican grays come amid uncertain times for gray wolves. In 2013, the USFWS recommended delisting the northern gray wolf entirely while adding the Mexican gray wolf as an endangered subspecies, a proposal that was met with fierce outcry from the public.
Four years ago, several states in the Great Lakes region delisted gray wolves and implemented hunting seasons, during which over 1,500 animals were killed. But last year, a federal judge overturned that decision, banning hunting and trapping and restoring the northern gray's endangered status in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In a similar move, last September a federal judge reinstated endangered status for grays in Wyoming, leaving Montana and Idaho the only western states without protections for wolves.
]]>KEMMERER — Of the many wonders in Wyoming, the sight of a herd of animals migrating across the landscape is among the most precious.
Even a jaded driver negotiating hours of windshield sagebrush will marvel at a string of antelope marching single-file through an early winter storm. When 1,000 elk queue up to move down from the high country, their column becomes an organism itself, driven to wintering grounds by deep instincts.
Routine and predictable, such mass movements also are at risk. They're blocked by developments, bisected by highways and upset by drought.
"These migrations are threatened," says Matt Kauffman, a University of Wyoming professor who studies them. "Large migrations are dwindling across the globe. There is a focused conservation interest."
Kauffman leads a branch of the university's Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and migrations make up much of its work. He also directs the Wyoming Migration Initiative, a coalition of researchers and mapmakers that tracks and documents the state's many terrestrial migrations.
Animals migrate because they have to. Migrating wildlife earn rewards. "As plants grow, they're particularly nutritious at some times, like in the spring when they first green up," Kauffman says. Annual journeys take animals to prime forage when it is most nutritious.
But migrating animals can be disruptive. They cross property lines, political subdivisions and bureaucratic dominions. They damage fences, get in the way of zooming cars, eat crops and spread disease.
Migrations require an unbroken avenue, a route sometimes more than 100 miles long. Without such natural highways, wildlife can't survive, or if they do, it's only on altered terms.
Last December, a team from Kauffman's unit took to the field in western Wyoming to continue five separate mule deer studies, each of which has a migration component. For a week the group of about 10 researchers rises before dawn to catch, collar, sample and release deer.
When they're done, 175 mulies will continue their tenuous treks, transmitting information about where they travel. When circumstances change, the science may reveal how those changes affect the deer's well-being.
Wyoming's mule deer population has fallen to two-thirds of the Wyoming Game and Fish department's objective, according to the latest estimates from that agency. While populations fluctuate naturally, some herds in the western part of the state haven't rebounded from their last dip.
Spreading energy development, increasing traffic, human encroachment, drought and disease all might play a role. The picture looks discouraging to Kevin Monteith, an assistant research professor at Kauffman's unit. Yet he holds out hope.
"What can be encouraging is some of the populations we have are still very robust," he says. "As decisions are made, if we can have the best information, at least be informed, we can realistically say 'this is likely what will happen.'"
After 15 years of following deer that spend the winter on the Pinedale Mesa, researchers have some clues as to what happened there. The mesa is a 15-mile long ridge that's also the site of the Pinedale Anticline gas field. It's the site of the first of the five studies.
Thousands of deer from the 28,000-strong Sublette Herd spend the winter among the mesa's gullies, seeking shelter from biting wind and grazing on exposed plants. To give deer the best chance, most people are banned from this critical Bureau of Land Management winter range during the coldest months.
But gas-field activity continues year-round. Research that's entering its 15th year began when development started on the anticline gas field. "That's why they have a really good population estimate," Kauffman says.
The Sublette Mule Deer Herd has seen a 20 percent decline, he says. But the portion that winters on the Pinedale Mesa has fared worse.
"The Pinedale Anticline has seen, at one point, a 50 percent decline," he says. "It's rebounded to a 40 percent decline."
The ongoing study on the mesa carries the scholastic title "Behavioral and nutritional response of mule deer to development on the Pinedale Anticline." In other words, it will evaluate whether mule deer that contend with well-pad disturbance lose fat faster than others.
Radio-collar data will reveal which deer surrender their instincts and venture closer to intrusions like gas wells. Information from their twice-annual capture will describe their condition before and after the cold months.
There are other insights researchers may gain. Samantha Dwinnell, a graduate student at the university and a leader of the field team, seeks to build on work by researcher Hall Sawyer. A biologist with Western Ecosystems Technologies and also an associate professor at the university, his work has been instrumental in revealing western Wyoming mule deer secrets.
"We know from Hall's work that these animals avoid energy development," Dwinnell says. Yet some mule deer are seen near well pads.
"Animals in those areas are potentially in poorer nutritional condition," she says. They take risks to forage in those areas. "They need to do it to ensure survival."
Boiled down, research seeks to understand the relationship between nutrition, habitat and mule deer behavior, Dwinnell says. Energy development and other intrusions may have an effect on the nutrition and condition of mule deer. Deer may subsequently modify their behavior to try to overcome the effects of development.
In the second study, the capture and recapture of deer from the Wyoming Range Herd will help answer a simple question — how many deer can the summer and winter habitat support. The herd has numbered as high as 50,000, but today has only 33,000 members.
The population hasn't recovered to levels seen in the 1980s. The Wyoming Range Mule Deer Project seeks to measure the "nutritional carrying capacity" of the herd's habitat.
The U.S. Geological Survey helps fund the third study, also involving Wyoming Range deer. It would answer questions about how long-term drought affects mulies.
"We're starting to see the sort of signal of drought on big game in Wyoming," Kauffman says. "We study the influence of drought on mule deer and benefits of migration."
Drought is easily understood in arid Wyoming. But in a state heavily dependent on energy development, the related concept of human-caused climate change is not embraced.
"If you say you're studying climate change in mule deer, the politics around climate change and misunderstanding muddies the discussion," Kauffman says. "We often refer to it as drought as opposed to climate change.
"We're studying what is happening right now — the drought intensity the deer are experiencing," he says. "Leave it to somebody else to evaluate why we're seeing more frequent drought. We're not addressing those questions. We're addressing 'What does it mean for mule deer?'"
The recapturing of deer twice a year moves the Wyoming Range and Pinedale Anticline studies beyond the simple "collar-and-foller" characterization of some wildlife studies. All the data, from weight to amount of fat and so on reveals how individual animals fare.
"In March, we'll capture them and they'll be all skin and bones," Kauffman says. In fall, researchers find out how much weight each doe has gained. Tracking information from the radio collar reveals where the animals fattened up.
The same information from the winter also is important. "Does an animal who has to contend with energy development lose fat more quickly?" Kauffman asks.
The capture team's two other studies focus long-term on significant migrations. Researcher Sawyer discovered one — the now-famous 150-mile Red Desert-to-Hoback route that's the longest documented mule deer migration in the world.
Some 4,000 to 5,000 deer make the trek twice annually. Mapping the route already has reaped rewards by highlighting a critical bottleneck. Many of the deer traverse a 400-meter-wide gap between homes and the outlet of Fremont Lake.
There, subdivisions, recreation and traffic threaten to cut the route. A private 364-acre parcel was a migration keystone — and it was on the market. Acting on the research, the Conservation Fund secured a purchase contract for the parcel. In September, 2014, the group launched a $2.1 million campaign to buy the land.
"That migration has a lot more to teach us about mule deer," Kauffman says, "how they migrate, how they interact with the harshness of winters, the harshness of the summers." Researchers might learn why the timing of migrations fluctuates wildly.
"Sometimes they come down from the high country, finally getting to the Red Desert in February," Kauffman says, when human snowbirds have long gone from Wyoming. "Then (the deer) turn around and leave the next month."
The fifth study will track the Baggs Mule Deer Herd in southern Wyoming. It migrates between the Sierra Madre Mountains and the Atlantic Rim. BLM land on the Atlantic Rim, part of the Great Divide Basin, is targeted for natural gas development, Kauffman says.
"Monitoring started prior to major expansion of the energy development," he said. "We'll have GPS collar data before and after the development."
Kauffman tweets one already established finding to his cyber audience during the capture week. "Baggs #wyodeer speed up and stopover less in developed areas reducing the benefit of migration," he writes. The tweet links to an 11-page scientific paper.
University researchers give wildlife and habitat managers valuable information. "Game and Fish often refer to the co-op unit as their de facto research arm," Kauffman says. "When Game and Fish is struggling to figure out what is going on with deer in the Wyoming Range … they come to us first, typically."
Independence from the Game and Fish helps reduce potential conflict-of-interest charges from the public, he says. "Game and Fish can point to [research] as a University of Wyoming study. It creates a nice separation between research and management."
There's a challenging element to the relationship however. "The co-op unit essentially has no budget for research," Kauffman says.
The U.S Geological Survey pays three salaries and a fourth is funded through grants and foundation support.
"That's essentially it," he says. "The Game and Fish Department, the cooperator, provides $40,000 to our operating budget. That sort of keeps the coffee machines on."
When researchers launch a study, they have to raise funds to conduct it.
"All the projects come from outside sources, including the Game and Fish," he says. Other contributors include the sportsmen's groups Muley Fanatic Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the BLM, the Wyoming Governor's Big Game License Coalition, the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust Fund and private foundations, among others. It is, Kauffman says, "a long list of funders."
Game and Fish used to provide $180,000 a year to fish research, and the same amount for big game. Budget cuts have hurt. Today that sum is down to $150,000.
"Typically we raise enough to start the project in the first year and we're raising money every year after that to keep it going," Kauffman says. His ungulate branch is one of three parts of the co-op unit. Another co-op arm studies fish, the third birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Collectively they raise $1 million to $1.5 million a year.
Game and Fish money often launches studies. "Once the co-op unit and Game and Fish get together, then it's fairly straightforward to get other funders to consider coming on board," Kauffman says. "We're often matching Game and Fish funds four-to-one."
The contributions are essential, Monteith says. "Without all of those folks stepping up we couldn't do our jobs."
It is lunchtime in the field near LaBarge and capture crewmembers stand while eating chili that's offered from a pickup tailgate. They are waiting for pilot Mark Shelton and "mugger" Donnie Wackerman to bring in more deer. Their aerial net gunning is the safest way to catch mulies, and it allows the animals to be immediately released without the lingering effects of sedation.
Work lasts until dusk forces the airship down. One evening, when the team moves south to Kemmerer, Shelton sets the bird down in the parking lot of the Best Western motel for the team's one-night stopover.
In the heart of Wyoming's energy boiler, Kemmerer is home to the 13,400 acre Kemmerer coal mine and PacifiCorp's nearby coal-fired Naughton power plant. Energy workers and consultants check in and out of the motel regularly. Dually pickups with chrome trim dot the motel lot.
Yet Shelton's ride is the sweetest one here. By nightfall, the Robinson R44 helicopter is cloaked in a trim-fitting cape and rotor sock, its core electronics fed by an extension cord that runs to a nearby light pole.
While it rests, some of the team can't. They've got a date at the Muley Fanatic Foundation's annual fundraising banquet in Green River, 71 miles away. The sportsman's group is a major funder of the Wyoming Range study.
Some members of the team dress up for the ball. Others, who won't go, move a small freezer, a centrifuge and other lab gear into a room. They'll eat pizza, spin blood vials in the centrifuge and use a pipette to separate some samples into smaller containers for various tests. It will be a long day.
"There's no doubt they are really taxing — sleep deprivation to the max," Dwinnell says of the work hours. "Regardless of all that, it's still really fun being out."
In a field that's too often dominated by heavily footnoted scientific papers that use multisyllabic words, Kauffman and his colleagues are changing things. Twitter, Facebook, websites and videos are starting to spread the word in a way people understand.
"The public can relate to migration and is impressed … fascinated by these movements," Kauffman says. "All of that is happening in the little town of Wyoming where you can react with the rancher who owns that piece of land (and) Joe Mulie sportsman. The fact that you can bring research into that whole context is really rewarding."
The payoff is real, too. Studies help determine, for example, where best to locate highway wildlife underpasses and overpasses. Those who keep track estimate cars and trucks wipe out about 3,500 mule deer a year on Wyoming's highways, Kauffman says. Just down the road from the Best Western, 14,000 mule deer use seven underpasses in Nugget Canyon every fall.
Positive results from research are what inspire Monteith, who first came to know deer at his childhood dinner table in South Dakota. "We couldn't afford to buy meat from the grocery store," he says. Now he's giving back.
"Without having good data about what's going on, it's difficult to make wise decisions," he says. "To me it's obvious, we can't make informed decisions unless we have the information in hand."
Cokeville game warden Neil Hymas patrols the winter range where many of the study deer roam. "To anybody who appreciates and understands wildlife, this is a treasure," he says while looking over the rolling hills.
"These are pretty complex critters," Hymas says. "This team will solve most of the mysteries before they're done, I'm pretty sure of it."
Only with the help of the mule deer mothers. Deer No. 42, the "pretty small gal," that has given researchers a file folder of data, eventually gets to rejoin her family.
It's late in the day when she is caught. During her 10-minute processing the sky's color turns cold, the helicopter's chop has faded.
Kauffman has the last hands on her, whisking off her blindfold as her hobbles are freed. In an instant she's part of the landscape again, bounding over sagebrush on a mission to survive, breed and, researchers hope, teach.
Pilot Mark Shelton swoops the Robinson R44 helicopter to hover near an oil well, gently setting down bagged, blindfolded and trussed-up mule deer No. 42 that's dangling below the airship.
Eight researchers rush to gather the doe and another female that Shelton and his net-gunner have just caught. The ground team will measure, weigh and take samples from the two does for one of five western-Wyoming mule deer studies.
"She's a pretty small gal," Carhartt and wool-clad graduate researcher Samantha Dwinnell says after reviewing 42's measurements. Five feet, five inches from nose to tail, 120 pounds.
There's a lot more Dwinnell and her colleagues know about this mother because they've caught her before. She had a fawn this year, twins the year before.
At six-and-a-half years old, her body fat amounts to 9 percent of her weight. She summered on the upper Smith's Fork, migrated 43 miles, swam the Green River to get here.
She has a 39-inch chest, a 14-inch metatarsus – the lower part of her back leg. She's fat and sassy, struggling occasionally against her bonds.
Along with other does that roam the forested mountains and sage hills from Star Valley to Kemmerer, she's the hope of a troubled 33,000-member herd. Gathering their stories, Dwinnell and others at the University of Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit hope to inform decision-makers how they might restore a herd that once numbered 50,000.
"Mule deer are struggling," says Matt Kauffman, University of Wyoming professor of zoology and physiology, who with his crew, caught, wrangled and released 175 deer one week last December. "Mule deer are declining across Wyoming and the West."
Wyoming Game and Fish Department strives for a population of 564,150 mule deer, but the last statewide estimate was 374,400, just two-thirds of objective. Biologists considered the Wyoming Range a mule deer factory, but today its herd mimics the statewide decline.
"It was an incredibly important destination for sportsmen," Kauffman says of the Wyoming Range and the Salt River Range that rises beside it in Sublette and Lincoln counties. "Game and Fish was pushing to do a study … they're explicitly trying to understand why Wyoming Range numbers haven't recovered."
To that end, the co-op team takes to the field twice a year to catch Doe 42 and about 40 other radio-collared female herd members. The Wyoming Range study is one of five the team will work on for a week. In eight days they'll capture does from the Pinedale Mesa to the Red Desert, from Cokeville to Rock Springs.
"The major theme is mule deer and their habitats in transition," Kauffman says. The studies focus on the impact oil and gas and other development has on wintering mule deer, how it affects their migration, and the effect of long-term drought or climate change.
Researchers also monitor what's believed to be the second longest terrestrial migration in the Western Hemisphere. Four thousand to 5,000 mule deer travel 150 miles from the Red Desert to Hoback Junction twice a year.
"We're really trying to tell their story, their individual stories," says Kevin Monteith, an assistant research professor at the university. "They are the ones that are providing information."
The eight days of capturing are hectic. "Dr. Monteith's 5 AM alarm ringtone is stuck in my head," Kauffman tweets one morning. He's broadcasting the capture week on Twitter and Facebook.
Most of the core team of about 10 stays at a U.S. Forest Service bunkhouse in Pinedale during the first half of the week. It's got eight bedrooms, common space, and a kitchen.
"The students" cook a spaghetti dinner one evening. When the team's home at night, a dozen pairs of winter boots dry by the door. As bedtime approaches, Kauffman, Monteith and others work on their computers, Dwinnell collects radio collars, drugs and other supplies.
Before light the next morning, workers begin their routine, dressing warmly, swilling coffee and bolting bagels. Game and Fish wardens and other helpers join the university students and teachers at a parking-lot rendezvous.
Before the first coffee klatch assembles in Pinedale, their convoy is on the road. It takes about an hour to reach the day's first staging location near LaBarge. On a ridge top, the team sets up a scale and mats as the sound of a helicopter grows with the dawn.
All the studies rely on catching, collaring, measuring and following mule deer. The helicopter crew catches the animals from the air with a net gun, then drops a "mugger" off to wrangle the animal into a set of hobbles and blindfold. Once trussed, the deer is laced into a bag and slung below the airship to be deposited gently near the staging and processing site.
Three of the studies catch the same set of deer twice a year; the helicopter team must seek specific animals to net. The ground team takes measurements, performs tests and gathers samples before releasing a deer to its herd and family.
It takes about 10 minutes to process a deer once Shelton and mugger Donnie Wackerman deliver it. A team of four workers runs to where Shelton sets down the animal, then carries it to a processing pad.
Dwinell checks the teeth. She'll pull one from each new deer to get an accurate age.
Love of the outdoors attracted her to this work. A University of Wyoming masters' candidate, she graduated from the University of Minnesota in Duluth in 2007 and planted herself in the Rockies, learning mountain ethos in Victor, Idaho. Now on her fourth capture week, she's a key organizer of the field team.
"Double check the ID," she reminds the crew late on a cold, tiring day. "Make sure you have the capture number. None of it means anything unless it's on the data sheet."
Most team members are her fellow lab mates who have field experience and hustle. "We like working in those environments," she says of the snow and cold. "Adverse weather doesn't bother most of us. It's sort of what we thrive on."
When she's checking a deer's teeth, another team member inserts a thermometer at the animal's far end. There's a danger it might overheat from the stress of being captures.
"One-o-four is the threshold," first-year masters student Alex May says of the highest tolerable temperature. "One-oh-three is when we pay attention."
Too much heat calls for a cold-water enema.
Meantime, one team member will draw a large syringe of blood to be distributed into vials and onto blotter pads. Someone checks the radio collar and replaces it as necessary.
Another worker stretches a tape along and around the deer, then measures a back leg joint. A gloved volunteer mines for a fecal sample, sealing it in a plastic bag. In the lab, someone will find out what each doe ate.
At the rump, assistant research professor Kevin Monteith scrapes hair off a small patch of skin. He applies an ultrasound sensor to help calculate the percent of body fat. He checks for milk – it will tell whether she successfully brought a fawn or fawns to the winter range.
Brett Jesmer, a doctoral candidate in the zoology and physiology department drills deeper. When Monteith is done at his bare patch on the rump, Jesmer moves in with a numbing agent and biopsy needle.
He extracts a sample of fat and muscle for analysis. They will reveal how well she benefited from her summer's grazing. After her condition changes over the winter and she's caught again, he'll know what she's burning — fat or muscle — to survive the winter.
He swabs the biopsy site as the doe gets a shot of antibiotics before being weighed. A scribe jots down all the information.
Co-op unit leader Kauffman, son of an Oregon horse logger and schoolteacher, grew up in the outdoors. Now, wandering mulies keep him bonded to those places.
"As a kid and a youngster, I've always enjoyed hiking and camping and mountains and wide-open spaces," he says. "In migrations, the animals are connecting those things for you.
"I don't typically connect to the animals on a more intimate level," Kauffman says. Yet he knows the charisma the fuzzy species holds.
"When my 12-year-old son came out as a volunteer, he was holding the head of the animal and petting it for me."
Monteith is different. During the week he routinely cradles a captive deer's blindfolded head in his lap, petting it gently. One brays and kicks as he inadvertently pains it during the processing.
"Sorry sweetheart," he says. "It's my fault."
The researcher's reactions are natural, Dwinnell says. "The animal is undergoing a lot of stress. It's sort of instinctual to give it the kind of comfort we're used to — talking to the animal, petting the animal."
Game and Fish warden Todd Graham, who joined the capture team for a few days, more often deals with animals that are dead or in distress. They've been hit by trucks, just killed by hunters. Helping researchers gives him a different experience.
"It's not often you get to put your hands on live, healthy animals," he says cradling a captured mule deer's head and rubbing its neck as colleagues work on it.
Masters candidate Teal Wyckoff talks to deer too. "Although we say things, it's for ourselves," Wyckoff says. "In reality we are perceived as the threat."
Among the observations recorded on each animal's capture data sheet is a characterization of its anxiety.
"The vast majority are in that 'calm' category," Wyckoff says. It's possible that after being captured once or twice, the deer are less frightened.
"I think they actually get used to us," she says, "but that's not a rule."
If researchers don't fall for the does' cuddly looks, they marvel after learning what it takes to raise a family in the Wyoming mountains. Monteith marvels at one old doe whose teeth are just about worn down.
She's lactating. She's raised another generation of mulies since he saw her last, even though she can barely chew.
"She won't quit," he says. "They'll continue to produce babies and raise them as long as they're alive. The more I learn about their world, the more respect I have for them."
Dwinnell's awe grows as she tracks and watches mule deer that she knows. In summer she'll follow them across a tapestry of forests, cliffs and rivers.
"Most of them summer in real high elevations – some of them in extreme terrain," she says. "Some can travel a hundred-plus miles to these winter ranges where they're exposed to these harsh environments. That's enough to warrant a lot of respect."
Fawn surveys are the most fun, especially those she conducts in idyllic wilderness meadows, rich with all things natural.
"It's pretty satisfying to see them come back when they've raised two fawns," she says. "It makes sense — [they] were in really awesome habitat. Scientific theories pan out the way you would expect them to."
The deer's long-range movements are endlessly fascinating for Kauffman and they make up an important aspect of all five studies.
"Why do they make these migrations, how do they benefit from them," he asks. "One of the most interesting things about terrestrial migrations and things like mule deer is all the decisions they make. And you have these vast landscapes that support these movements. It forces you to think about the animals and the landscape at the same time.
"The most difficult question is how they respond when the landscape is altered," he says. "They're encountering more fences, running into people, roads.
"The biggest question is, in what state of wildness do these landscapes need to remain in in order for these migrations to still be incredibly beneficial strategies for these animals?"
]]>However, one justice, William O. Douglas, was persuaded by the Sierra Club's original reasoning. His passionate dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton marks a pivotal point in environmental legal battles, one that still shapes advocacy today and points the way toward a potentially different way of thinking about nature.
Douglas' views were inspired by his own experiences in the wild. He grew up in Yakima, Washington, hiking the foothills and peaks of the Cascade Range, and he sang the praises of nature throughout his life. "When one stands on Darling Mountain, he is not remote and apart from the wilderness; he is an intimate part of it," he wrote in a typical passage from his memoir, Of Men and Mountains. "Every ridge, every valley, every peak offers a solitude deeper even than that of the sea. It offers the peace that comes only from solitude."
An intellectually restless man who wrote and traveled extensively, Douglas published five environmental books between 1960 and 1967. One of them, A Wilderness Bill of Rights, argued for a "Bill of Rights to protect those whose spiritual values extend to the rivers and lakes, the valleys and the ridges, and who find life in a mechanized society worth living only because those splendid resources are not despoiled."
In his dissent in the Sierra Club lawsuit, Douglas advocated for a federal rule that would allow for litigation "in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage." The proper labeling of the case, he argued, should have been Mineral King v. Morton.
It wasn't a huge leap from other legal precedents. Douglas pointed out that both corporations and ships had long been parties in litigation, despite being artificial and inanimate. "So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life," he wrote. Extending standing to the real party at risk of harm — the environment — would preserve "priceless bits of Americana" before they become "forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment."
Douglas recommended accepting nature's rights — allowing nature's own voice to be heard in the courtroom — as a lasting way to shield wild places and processes from the ever-accelerating threats they faced.
His passionate plea didn't persuade his practical-minded judicial brethren, even if fellow dissenter Justice Harry Blackmun called it "eloquent" and insisted that Douglas read it from the bench. Yet Douglas' opinion influenced and inspired environmentalists at the time and ever since. The Wilderness Society published the "stirring" dissent, and Roderick Nash in his history of environmental ethics, The Rights of Nature, said that Douglas had "located the conceptual door to the rights of nature." Michael Nelson, an environmental philosopher at Oregon State University, sees Douglas' dissent as "the cornerstone of a new environmental ethic, one premised upon empathy with the human and non-human world alike."
In the years since then, environmental groups have been able to sue on behalf of nature by demonstrating group members' legitimate interest in conservation issues or in places like Mineral King, a concept called associational standing. But despite Douglas' efforts, nature still finds itself marginalized in courtrooms. Much as a Catholic's confession must go through a priest, nature needs a mediator, a conservation organization.
Where all this leads is unclear. The courts themselves have never fully embraced the idea of nature's standing, but they've come close in the years since Douglas' dissent. This has been particularly true for endangered species like the marbled murrelet, the northern spotted owl and the coho salmon — all of which found themselves in court cases as co-plaintiffs alongside humans. Nature has yet to stand alone in court, however.
Douglas recommended accepting nature's rights — allowing nature's own voice to be heard in the courtroom — as a lasting way to shield wild places and processes from the ever-accelerating threats they faced.
A decade ago, the 9th Circuit Court faced a test when a lawyer sued the president and secretary of defense on behalf of marine mammals, without a co-plaintiff — essentially the approach that Douglas had promoted. In Cetacean Community v. Bush (2004), the court emphatically rejected the species' legal standing, finding no evidence that Congress intended whales or dolphins to have it. The court found nothing preventing the legislative branch from deciding to grant animals statutory standing, however. Still, the prospect of today's Congress acting along those lines seems unlikely on ideological, political and practical grounds, and it's equally unclear that others — judges or policymakers — would agree that the notion passes constitutional muster.
And so it seems unlikely, at least for now, that Douglas' vision of nature as an entity with the right to sue will manifest in our courts. But does that matter? It depends on your criteria. The aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision in Sierra Club v. Morton helped establish standing for environmental organizations, thus facilitating environmental litigation. The court's opinion did not extend that right to natural objects, but Douglas' dissent nudged the courts toward recognizing nature's rights. This perspective pointed the way, according to legal scholar Christopher Stone, toward a new "level of consciousness" for the courts.
And so the debate about nature's standing then becomes a broader philosophical debate about law and what it can and can't, or should or shouldn't, do. Law is not intended to transform levels of consciousness or morality; it is a pragmatic discipline. As a practical matter, extending standing to natural objects may simply be unnecessary.
As a moral matter, however, the failure to acknowledge nature's rights frustrates legal and environmental activists and surely would have disappointed (though not surprised) Douglas, who retired from the Supreme Court in 1975, after a debilitating stroke, and died five years later.
Today, global climate change, biodiversity losses and habitat fragmentation are creating unprecedented social and ecological problems. Environmental crises require serious changes in governance and legal systems and, arguably, in morality. When organizations such as the Earth Law Center work to "advance legal rights for ecosystems to exist, thrive and evolve," or when Ecuador declares in its 2008 Constitution that nature "has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes," they are paying homage to Douglas' -vision and implementing it in governing structures where law and morality may intersect.
"The idea that what many take to be inanimate objects (such as trees)," Nelson says, "or abstract ideas and the places we apply them to (such as wilderness) or even a 'symbol' (such as a river) can be wronged in some way, and therefore can be represented or spoken on behalf of, is brave and thoughtful. And the idea that those who know most about something and care most for it should be the spokesperson seems wise and helpful as we think about the future and what kind of people we need to be or create (a society) that can and should speak about tough natural resource issues in the uncertain future we all face."
Toward the end of his dissent, Douglas noted that well-meaning advocates often flock to the environmental issue du jour, an understandable tendency but one that cannot sustain environmental protection over the long run. "That is why these environmental issues should be tendered by the inanimate object itself," he wrote. "Then there will be assurances that all of the forms of life which it represents will stand before the court — the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams. Those inarticulate members of the ecological group cannot speak. But those people who have so frequented the place as to know its values and wonders will be able to speak for the entire ecological community."
Douglas' day may still come. In the meantime, though, we humans, or at least our organizations, will have to serve as -acceptable stand-ins.
Adam Sowards is an environmental historian at the University of Idaho. He is the author of several books and essays, including The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation and the editor of Idaho's Place: A New History of the Gem State. Follow @AdamMSowards
This story was originally titled "Law and nature" in the print edition.
]]>The problem is that the animal in the hunter's crosshairs turned out to be a federally-protected gray wolf. In the days following, speculation swirled that the 3-year-old female was none other than Echo (named by schoolchildren), who appeared on the north rim of the Grand Canyon in October – the first gray wolf sighted there in over 70 years.
Though wolves have been delisted in a region of northern Utah, they are still protected under the federal Endangered Species Act in southwestern Utah, where the shooting took place. But it's unclear whether the hunter – who reportedly told officials he thought he was shooting at a coyote – will face criminal charges. (The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, for its part, has already stated that the shooting was accidental.)
More details about the animal's identity and circumstances of its death may be revealed after the completion of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-led investigation, which includes a DNA analysis. But according to Mike Jimenez, a spokesman for the USFWS, there is no definitive time frame for completion.
While uncertainties abound, what seems clear is that this wolf's death is collateral damage in Utah's concerted push to exterminate coyotes – an effort underpinned by two pieces of Utah legislation passed in 2012. The Predator Control Funding Act allocates funds to control predators said to pose a danger to "the health of Utah's non-predatory wildlife." The second, the Mule Deer Protection Act, sets aside $500,000 dollars per year to pay hunters a $50 bounty for every coyote they kill in areas deemed important mule deer habitat. (Notably, in this case of mistaken identity, a 2010 state law also requires wildlife managers to prevent the reestablishment of wolf packs in the state.)
Last year, more than 7,000 coyotes were killed across Utah – resulting in $352,000 in payments – under the state's Predator Control Program. (According to DWR figures, an additional 2,700 coyotes were killed by hunters but not submitted for payment.) Since the law's passage in 2012, more than 14,000 of the canids have been killed under the state coyote bounty program.
To date, says Mark Hadley, a spokesman for the Utah DWR, over 2,000 hunters have been certified as eligible to receive bounties. Hadley said he is unsure if the wolf shooter is among them. To become certified, hunters must complete a short online quiz. Incidentally, I took and passed the Utah Predator Control program quiz last week. The test consists of 10 questions and focuses on the specific provisions and intent of the law. But it conspicuously lacks questions about safe hunting and humane trapping practices; moreover, it does not require the test taker to identify a picture of a coyote, much less distinguish one from any other animal -- like a large dog or a wolf.
While news of a wolf at the Grand Canyon enthralled the public, it is perhaps little surprise when one considers the rate of their population growth and dispersal across the West. USFWS estimates that the wolf population in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming (the states with the greatest number of wolves in the Lower 48) has grown to over 1,500 since federal wildlife agents reintroduced more than 60 Canadian wolves to Yellowstone in 1995.
Besides Echo, the West's best-known wild canine is OR7, a male gray wolf who in 2011 wandered more than 1000 miles between Oregon and California, becoming the first wolf confirmed in Oregon since 1947 and in California since 1924. He now has a mate, pups and another adult wolf has reportedly joined the pack. Though reports of wolves have been infrequent in Colorado and Utah, there have been at least a few sightings. In 2010, a gray wolf was trapped and killed in Rich County, Utah by wildlife managers after attacking livestock.
If the wolf shot in December proves to be Echo, there is sure to be a collective howl of despair from wolf advocates. If, however, the animal happens to be another far-ranging female, the story will be no less mournful – but it will also become far more interesting.
Stay tuned.
]]>The long-standing conflict between Robbins and the BLM has flared up again recently, and this time it could have dire consequences for one of the lower 48's largest bighorn sheep populations.
After Robbins' protest in 2000, he took his grievances to Washington, D.C. and accepted a settlement that forgave him for nine years of alleged grazing violations. In return, he agreed to allow BLM employees to access public land through his property.
But Robbins' acrimony towards the agency continued, and his cow-calf operation and dude ranch garnered many complaints over the years. As High Country News reported in 2003, that included "cattle trespassing on the private property of neighbors and on the neighbors' BLM grazing allotments; grazing too early, too late, and putting too many cattle on his allotments; blocking a neighbor's use of a cattle-drive trail; claiming his cattle were on private pasture when they were on BLM pastures; refusing to obtain recreation permits for his dude ranch trail drives over BLM lands; and refusing to modify his grazing practices during drought."
So the BLM pulled all of Robbins' 14 cattle grazing leases again in the mid-2000s, and he had to shrink his herd to what his 75,000 acre ranch would support. The BLM did offer to return some of the cattle leases to Robbins, but he refused the deal.
Instead, a few years ago he started running domestic sheep on his ranch. The problem is that Robbins' ranch is smack dab in the middle of prime habitat for 600 to 800 bighorns, and those sheep intermingle with even more herds. It's well established that bighorn sheep can catch pneumonia from domestic sheep — often with fatal consequences for adults and newborns.
Robbins recently told the Casper Star-Tribune that the sheep were an economic necessity after the agency rescinded his public-land grazing permit, since sheep require less land than cattle. But it also looks like the decision was a form of protest against the agency. The Star-Tribune reported that he sent the BLM a letter in April 2012 stating, "Since you decided not to return the permit in whole we have decided to go forward with sheep."
"If and when a bighorn die-off occurs I want you to know that we feel we have done everything that we have been ask (sic) and been patient for years and you will have to answer for what happens," Robbins wrote.
In the worst cases pneumonia from domestic sheep can obliterate bighorn herds, erasing years of work on the part of biologists, agencies and cooperative landowners. For example, in 2008, after some public land squatters brought domestic sheep and goats into Montana's Elkhorn Mountains, a bighorn herd that biologists had been nursing along for over a decade crashed by 90 percent.
Thanks to reintroductions, habitat protection and restricted hunting, bighorn sheep have been making a comeback since they reached a low point of several thousand in the lower 48 around 1900. But there are still many populations that are perilously small, and many places that once harbored bighorns that no longer do.
Along with habitat loss, pneumonia is one of the biggest challenges for continued bighorn conservation. The main microbe responsible for the disease wasn't identified until recently and scientists still have many questions, like why some herds are more susceptible than others. Researchers are learning that even when adult sheep survive and become immune, some populations struggle to recover, likely because the lambs continue to die from pneumonia before they are weaned. But since lamb carcasses don't last long, that's a very difficult phenomenon for biologists to observe. Efforts to develop a vaccine have been unsuccessful so far.
In short, pneumonia is insidious, dooming many of the West's burliest mountain-dwellers to a mucous-y death. And wildlife biologists are at their wits' end over it. The most obvious solution is to keep domestic and wild sheep separated.
That's why wildlife conservation groups like the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation are so worried about Robbins' domestic sheep. It's also why they, and many others from the ag and wildlife community, spent almost five years working on a plan for domestic and wild sheep to coexist in Wyoming. Now that work is at risk of unraveling. "We think the best thing for all of us is to have a good, viable domestic sheep industry in the state and a viable bighorn population," says Steve Kilpatrick, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. "This just flies in the face of that."
Furthermore, Wyoming Game and Fish has documented Robbins' sheep trespassing on federal land, the Star-Tribune reported — a violation that could result in fines and even livestock impoundment. But the BLM says its staffers need to document the trespassing themselves for it to count against Robbins. The BLM even suspended one of its biologists for insubordination after he asked a state biologist to check on Robbins' leases for trespass during an aerial survey of grizzly bears, the Star-Tribune reported.
Now, the BLM is looking at restoring some of Robbins' cattle grazing leases. Bighorn conservationists are asking the agency to move through that decision-making process quickly, and address the ongoing trespassing issue. If Robbins is permitted to run cattle again, they hope he will stop running sheep on the intermingled BLM and private lands near the top of the watershed -- that's where bighorns are more likely to interact with domestic sheep. That could take years to play out, though."We're not willing to sit and fold our hands on the domestic sheep issue," says Kilpatrick. "The bighorn sheep simply can't afford continuous years of trespass and potential commingling (with domestic sheep)."
The sheep versus sheep struggle, while still a reality throughout the West isn't always a completely intractable feud. Similar to Wyoming, the woolgrower's association in Montana has participated in bighorn conservation planning. Montana wildlife officials would like to reintroduce more bighorns to mountains throughout the state, but they've still struggled to find locations sufficiently far from domestic sheep. After fits and starts, they took a big step forward earlier this month, by releasing 52 bighorns to start a new herd in Southwest Montana's Madison range.
Sarah Jane Keller is a High Country News contributor based in Bozeman, Mont. Follow her @sjanekeller.
]]>Here in Colorado, we have so far been spared the most dramatic consequences of climate change. No oceans are lapping at the shores of Denver and no glaciers are calving off Grand Mesa near Grand Junction. Yet scientists warn that humans are responsible for creating a new geological era some have labeled the Anthropocene, whose warming atmosphere is tipping our world toward a more chaotic climate.
"It was taken for granted that the process was not something that could be observed in real time, an assumption that has now been proven false," writes Elizabeth Kolbert in Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change. In Ithaca, New York, she notes that four out of six frog species have begun to mate 10 days earlier every year, and at an arboretum in Boston, spring-flowering shrubs have advanced by eight days. In California's Sierra Nevada, a butterfly named Edith's checkerspot now lives 300 feet higher than it did a century ago.
Kolbert adds, "The planet has often been colder than today, but rarely warmer, and then only slightly." She cautions, "It is only in the last five or 10 years that global warming has finally emerged from the background 'noise' of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion."
Elk hunting in Colorado's magnificent high country, the last thing I had in mind was climate change. There had been a little early snow. My partner and I had topped the ridge by 9 a.m., seen elk tracks though not fresh ones, and we'd gone our separate ways.
I was on my way downslope when I saw my first rabbit. Pure white, the snowshoe hare quivered in a snowdrift next to fallen timber. He was doing his bunny best to be camouflaged but on that south-facing mountain the previous week's snow had melted fast. Forty yards farther I spied bunny number two, with his nose twitching and pink ears swiveling. He ran off and hid near more snow, but he had to cross bare ground to do it. That was when I found the third rabbit, almost at my feet. He glared white against tan pine needles. Snowshoe hares should know better. Why were they white in early November with limited snow on the ground? What was happening?
"I've seen and had many reports the last three years about mismatched hares and habitat, mostly in the fall when hares are turning white before much snow cover," says Scott Wait, the southwest region's senior biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife. "But I've also seen white hares in the spring when some of our snow has melted from dust storm deposition leading to early snowmelt."
Snowshoe hares survive by mimicry or camouflage, the species evolving to be brown in summer and white in winter. Wait told me, "Color change is initiated due to daylight length, which might be related to snow accumulation on an evolutionary timescale. If snow accumulation varies from normal, the hare continues to change color but might find itself wearing the wrong color, white on a brown background, or brown on a white background."
So that was it: Snowshoe hares have adapted not to the amount of snow but to the length of daylight. That first weekend in November, there should have been more snow on the ground, but there wasn't. The rabbits had planned on winter snow cover that had already begun to melt. I had seen climate change in action, or so I thought. Scientist Scott Wait wasn't sure: "Are the mismatches seen by many elk hunters in recent years due to climate changes, annual variation, or merely an increase in hare abundance?"
No one knows for sure. Dr. L. Scott Mills at the University of Montana says that genetic variation may already be resulting in rapid rabbit adaptation to our changed environment.
Maybe, though not where I was hunting. I saw three bright white bunnies in small snow patches on an otherwise dull brown turf. I hope the rabbits make it through the winter, and I hope they can adapt to climate change. Us, too.
Andy Gulliford is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a professor of history and Environmental Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado (email@example.com).
]]>Whenever I have time and the Spirit allows, I travel throughout this region learning about its history and cultures, and studying its blessings and gifts. In Christian terms, this is called "theology of place," in which our understanding of the Divine comes through the beauty of the natural world. One site where I feel most deeply connected to God is the Hanford Reach National Monument.
Through a sometimes-open gate off Washington's remote Highway 24, a gravel road leads to an overlook where visitors can see the only undammed portion of the Columbia River left in the United States. This is the ancestral home of the Wanapum Tribe, whose name means "river people." This is salmon ground, holy ground, and it is threatened by radioactive waste seeping toward the river.
The Columbia River is indeed holy ground and not a machine, though it has long been treated like one. In 1964, the governments of the United States and Canada ratified the Columbia River Treaty, which mandated the building of large storage dams on the river for flood control and power generation. For these purposes, the treaty has been mostly effective. For Native Tribes and Northwest salmon, though, it has been a disaster.
None of the 15 Columbia Basin tribes were party to the 1964 treaty. They were treated as if they did not exist as sovereign nations, and as if they had no stake in the living river and the salmon that fed their people. Throughout the dam-building era, First Nations in Canada and Native tribes in the United States were moved from their homes, lost their livelihoods and food source, and saw their sacred ancestral sites flooded. This injustice mars the majesty of the river and the lives of her people.
Salmon and steelhead have fared no better. Dozens of the Columbia River's famed runs are now extinct, and 13 remain listed as threatened or endangered. The Columbia is no longer a living, robust river for most of its 1,200-mile journey. It has become a shackled ghost of its former self.
Last fall marked the first time, with 10 years' notice, that the U.S. and Canadian governments could renegotiate the Columbia River Treaty. There is reason to hope that a new treaty can revive the river, respect the tribes, and leave a living legacy for all who love and share the abundance of the Columbia.
Together with many other faith leaders, I uphold the Columbia River Pastoral Letter written by the 12 Roman Catholic bishops of the international watershed; it is an ethical framework for decision-making as the treaty is renegotiated. The values we invoke embrace conservation of the watershed as a common good, including flood control and power production, protecting species and wildlife, respecting the dignity and traditions of indigenous people, and promoting justice for all beings who share the river.
I was also pleased to sign the Declaration on Ethics and Modernizing the Columbia River Treaty, which was sent to President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in late September. The declaration put forward key principles for a renegotiated treaty, including:
Healthy ecosystem function must be a central purpose of an updated treaty. Without a healthy riparian ecosystem, there is no future for the salmon and steelhead that depend on the living waters of the Columbia. The treaty's governance must also include a steward, a designated protector of these unique waters.
The tribes and First Nations must be parties to the new treaty. Native leaders are strong advocates both for salmon and for their communities, which have already lost so much. We must remember that the future of the Columbia River is a moral issue, and that indigenous rights must be revived and preserved for a just future.
Climate change must be acknowledged and dealt with as a factor that will challenge and change the river. For both salmon as well as our communities to survive, the renegotiated treaty must help stem climate change as well as support adaptation to the changes that will surely be manifest in this watershed in the coming decades.
Because the Columbia River is a gift given to us by our Creator and a blessing, I hope this understanding frames the renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty.
The Rev. Martin Wells is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is bishop of the Eastern Washington-Idaho Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and is based in Spokane, Washington
]]>To Barb Smith, a 52-year-old Forest Service wildlife biologist with striking green eyes and a silvery braid, the upper La Sals are an ecological paradise, one of the few chunks of land in Utah that isn't grazed, logged or scarred by off-road vehicles. Smith is also a botanist, and as she and a dozen or so volunteers climb above 11,000-foot Burro Pass, she rattles off the Latin names of flowers: Polygonum bistortoides, Tetraneuris grandiflora. There are so many, it's hard to take a step without crushing one.
We pause on a wind-scoured slope to catch our breaths and everyone crowds around Smith, who has spotted a cute if unremarkable yellow button called the La Sal daisy. She explains how to identify the flower and mark its location on a GPS. "This kind of effort, this kind of documentation, is going to be really helpful," Smith says. The volunteers hold out their smartphones to take pictures.
The La Sal daisy grows nowhere else in the world, and no one knows how it's been faring in the drier winters lately plaguing these mountains. Smith has spent the past five years trying to find out, gathering baseline data on the daisy to use as a marker to measure the effects of climate change. Until recently, she's had a near-perfect place to do so: the Mount Peale Research Natural Area, a 2,300-acre preserve surrounding the La Sals' highest peak. There are 29 research natural areas in Utah, each meant to protect a specific biome from human influence so that biologists like Smith can observe long-term ecological changes there, and use as a control against which to compare the effects of human activity on similar environments.
Lately, though, Smith's work has taken on a new urgency: Last year, despite opposition from the regional Forest Service office and a cadre of local and national environmental groups, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources released 20 non-native Rocky Mountain goats into the La Sals for hunting and wildlife viewing. This September, they released 15 more. Eventually, they hope to increase the population to 200.
To Smith, the goats defeat the very purpose of Mount Peale, which is supposed to be maintained in a natural state without human influence. She and other Forest Service biologists worry that the voracious, sharp-hooved goats will undermine research and irreversibly alter a fragile alpine ecosystem. But many of the volunteers who are here to help her collect data — mainly in hopes of convincing Utah officials to remove the goats or at least limit their numbers — are opposed to the animals on more philosophical terms. "This is our backyard mountain range," says Paul Frank, a desert tortoise biologist who's been coming to these mountains nearly every week since the 1970s. "And we don't want invasive species here."
State wildlife officials say that not every introduced species ends up being a problem, and that goats have been transplanted to other Utah mountain ranges with no ill effects. But that argument holds little weight with Mary O'Brien, who marches along behind Smith as we continue to climb higher into the ominous storm clouds settling over the La Sals.
O'Brien, a wiry 68-year-old botanist with close-cropped gray hair and a sun-worn face, is the unofficial leader of the anti-goat movement. She grew up in east Los Angeles, the daughter of a Skid Row social worker and a minister, and though her family had little money, they spent two weeks every summer in Kings Canyon while her father preached in an open-air chapel. The experience shaped O'Brien's life: Today, as Utah Forest Program director of the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust, she lives in a straw-bale house in the shadow of the La Sals and spends most of her time trying to protect public land from overgrazing and overuse. "Every cell in my body says that national public land exists so a kid from East L.A. can come up here and wander around," she says.
Though my own fingers are so cold I can hardly hold a pen, O'Brien — who refuses to wear close-toed shoes — strides across the ridge in a pair of Chaco sandals, unfazed. As the storm begins to batter the mountains, she stops to throw her hands up, framed against the dark clouds. "We're losing alpine areas to climate change," she says. "And then, for very little reason at all, we introduce an exotic ungulate. Why not elephants? Don't you think it would be neat to have elephants up here?"
She hikes on.
Thirteen months earlier, on June 4, 2013, O'Brien sat in the back of a Utah Wildlife Board meeting in downtown Salt Lake City and listened patiently as the eight-person, governor-appointed board went through the usual formalities. Then the discussion turned to the issue that most of the 60 or so attendees had come for: whether or not to put mountain goats in the La Sals.
Mountain goats aren't native to Utah, but since the 1960s, they've been introduced to a dozen mountains around the state for hunters and wildlife aficionados. Despite the fact that Utah is several degrees in latitude below the goats' native range in Washington, Idaho and Montana, the animals are thriving. There are now some 2,000 of them, and they're extraordinarily popular: In 2012, 7,999 hunters applied for the 161 available tags, which cost between $400 and $1,500. A mountain goat viewing in Beaver, Utah, brought 2,000 tourists to the town of 2,500.
Justin Shannon, the big game coordinator for Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources, was also at the meeting, making the case that goats do more good than harm. "As an agency, if we have an opportunity to expand our wildlife populations for the hunting and viewing public, we go for it," he told me later. Like all big game in Utah, the goats and their habitat will be carefully monitored, and any damage will be mitigated by reducing the population. With goat populations decreasing in parts of their native range, some biologists think that transplants in Utah, Colorado, Nevada and elsewhere may even help the species survive.
This is our backyard mountain range, and we don't want invasive species here."
But why put them in the isolated La Sals? Shannon told the board that the state is simply restoring an ungulate to an alpine community: Bighorn sheep were sighted in the mountains in the 1940s and '50s, but can't be introduced because they'll contract diseases from the domestic sheep that graze at lower elevations. Goats, then, are the next best thing. Decades of study by state biologists elsewhere in Utah show no negative impacts on habitat or vegetation — a fact that the Utah Bowmans' Association, Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and other hunting advocates reiterated at the wildlife board's meeting.
But many Utahns who traveled to Salt Lake City for the chance to speak to the board — including mayors and commissioners from decidedly conservative counties — dispute that logic. The La Sals are smaller, drier and less well-vegetated than other ranges where goats have been introduced. With limited forage and a higher proposed goat density (four per square mile in the La Sals compared to 1.7 elsewhere), the anti-goat faction fears the animals will trample and overgraze alpine ecosystems. There's also a question over the methodology of state studies, and no evidence that bighorn sheep actually lived in the La Sals to begin with: "One sighting by somebody … is not substantiation that (sheep) used to be up there all the time, regularly grazing," Chris Baird, executive director of the Canyonlands Watershed Council, told the board.
Though the debate remained civil, the atmosphere in the room was intense. At one point, after someone expressed concerns that goats in Washington and Montana had harassed and even killed hikers, Shannon spoke up: "A few months ago we got report of a beaver that bit a guy on an artery and killed him. A beaver. But we are not going to (wage) war on beavers because someone had a bad experience."
At its next meeting, the board voted 4-2 in favor of introduction.
A month later, in September 2013, three goats and a kid were munching alpine forb in central Utah's Tushar Mountains, where goats were already doing so well that their numbers were roughly double the target population of 125. When the whup of helicopter blades interrupted their meal, one goat bolted, dodging trees and dashing across bare rock. The helicopter followed, flying low.
A balled-up net exploded into the air, and the helicopter banked and landed. A state wildlife official rushed out to the entangled goat, which thrashed wildly for a moment before being fitted with an orange blindfold. Then it was laced into a sling and airlifted out of the mountains, along with 19 other animals who would become the first of their species ever to roam the La Sals. The Salt Lake Tribune concluded that the operation was "the start of a grand adventure for the billies, nannies and kids."
State wildlife biologist Riley Peck agreed, telling the Tribune that goats "bring joy to a lot of people." The transplants, he said, have been "a fantastic success as far as I'm concerned."
Other wildlife introductions haven't gone so smoothly: Biologists who tried to reintroduce native grizzly bears to Montana's Bitterroot Mountains in 2000 received death threats, and a scientist who suggested bringing new bears to bolster an existing population in Washington's North Cascades was spat on at a public meeting. Exotic ungulates that can be hunted, on the other hand, are generally welcome.
Between 2005 and 2007, for example, Colorado imported 91 moose to Grand Mesa on the state's Western Slope for hunting and wildlife watching. Roger Shenkel, the local physician who helped hatch the plan, said that every time he drove by a particular bog, he felt like he ought to see a moose there. "People just love seeing moose," he told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Never mind that the largest tabletop mountain in the world evolved without them: It simply looked like moose ought to be there. Today, there are an estimated 380.
Mountain goats, equally beloved by hunters and children's book authors, are also appealing. In 2005, Oregon wildlife officials tried to introduce non-native goats to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. The nonprofit Friends of the Columbia Gorge, fearing that the animals would damage endemic wildflowers, sued the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Forest Service. A federal district court ordered a National Environmental Policy Act review, but the agencies instead withdrew the proposal. "Any national forest land requires a special use permit to (bring in) a new species," explains Nathan Baker, a lawyer who represented the Friends. "And there was really no environmental analysis whatsoever."
O'Brien believes that a similar process would convince a judge that the La Sal goats will also harm native flora, and are in violation of Forest Service policy. But though she, Barb Smith and the other volunteers crawling around looking for blooms at 11,000 feet care more about plants than most people do, their fight isn't about flowers. It isn't about goats. It's about protecting this particular place, in its entirety, from the notion that by eliminating some species and introducing others, we can re-shape wild places to what we think they ought to be.
As the storm clouds spit icy rain onto the ridge above Burro Pass, O'Brien cinches the hood of her rain jacket, puts on a pair of gloves and resolutely jabs at her GPS. "In decades," she says, looking across the gnarled spruce and July snow to the ochre plateau below, "someone will come up here and see the big sunflowers and say, 'Oh, that's pretty.' They'll never know there were these other eight species that grew only here. They'll never know what these views used to look like when the mountains were covered with flowers."
This story was originally titled "Unwelcome ungulates" in the print edition.
]]>It is true that all scorpions sting, and that all are venomous. It is true that they hide in places where they're hard to detect, and then ambush their prey — or your foot — in a vicious attack. And, yes, they brutally crush their victims in their pincers, stinging their prey with a paralyzing toxic soup of neurotoxins and enzyme inhibitors before subjecting it to a tissue-dissolving acid spray, after which they coolly slurp up whatever's left.
On the other hand, they are among the planet's oldest invertebrates, and they have the substantially redeeming quality of glowing under ultraviolet light.
There has been considerable debate about scorpion luminescence, but the most persuasive explanation is also the most astounding. Although scorpions are well-endowed with eyes –– one pair on top of their cephalothorax ("head-chest") and another two to five pairs along the front sides of it –– they have lousy eyesight outside the blue-green spectrum. That's unfortunate, considering that the main hazard of scorpionhood is being spotted in the moonlight by a predatory lizard, snake, rodent or bird, and getting picked off. The best way to avoid this fate is to take cover, but how can the scorpion know whether it is in danger if its eyes are unable to detect the wavelength of light emanating from the moon? Their elegant solution, it appears, has been to evolve a cuticle that is charged with beta-carboline and other luminescent chemicals. When the scorpion's exoskeleton is struck by moonlight — which, as a reflection of sunlight, contains some of the same UV rays — it glows. In this sense, the scorpion's entire body functions as an eye, one that is highly sensitive to small amounts of UV light. If a scorpion sees itself luminescing — something it can do only because the wavelength of its luminescence falls within the blue-green spectrum — it knows that it is exposed and must seek cover. Somewhere deep within its 450-million-year-old nogginchest,- the scorpion says to itself: "Dang, my ass is glowing again. Better head for the sagebrush!"
Scorpions' fabulous luminescence also allows desert- rats like me to traipse around on moonless nights, UV flashlight in hand, searching for them. One night, my buddy, Steve, and I set out just after dusk, knowing that we had only 90 minutes before the rising of the full moon, which would flood the desert with light, set scorpion butts aglow, and send their owners scuttling into hiding. It was a breezy night, which is not ideal for a scorpion search. Scorpions stalk insects by detecting vibrations through sensory organs in the tips of their legs and specialized hairs on their pincers, so wind can disturb their hunting strategy and keep them tucked in their burrows. But we soon discovered scorpions near juniper snags, around sage and bitterbrush, in rice grass, even out on sandy flats between patches of mule's ears. The scorpions glowed beautifully in otherworldly splashes of bright purple beneath our lights as they tunneled through the darkness.
I am only slightly ashamed to admit that the high point of the evening was encountering a torrid bout of scorpion sex. Steve and I witnessed two scorpions doing what arachnophiles call the promenade à deux, an appropriately French term for the creature's elaborate, highly ritualized mating "dance." The male grasps the female's pedipalps (little mouth claws) in his, and then dances her around looking for a good place to deposit his spermatophore, the sperm packet that she will take into her genital operculum, thus triggering release of the sperm. This courtship dance can also involve "juddering," in which the scorpions shudder and convulse, and the "cheliceral kiss," during which the male uses his pincers to hold the female's pincers in a gesture that looks to me like holding hands.
I have neighbors who say that in years of living out here in the remote high desert they have never seen a scorpion. In 90 minutes of night hiking, Steve and I saw 80 scorpions, each of them glowing with 450 million years of evolutionary good fortune. I find it fascinating that in all this wide, wild, windy desert, nothing glows under UV light but the scorpion. What if we had a flashlight that illuminated only spiders, or snakes, or rodents? What if we could match the stunning diversity of life here with an equally rich mode of perception?
Those who dismiss this Great Basin landscape as "empty" are looking at something that they are unable to see. This desert is emitting its spectacular beauty in a wavelength their eyes have not yet evolved to detect. To call this place barren is simply to admit an inattentiveness that is the perceptual equivalent of blindness.
When I told one of my neighbors about last night's scorpion safari, he asked, "Where in the world do you find scorpions out here?" I paused before replying. "Everywhere."
Michael Branch writes Rants from the Hill, a monthly essay series available at hcn.org. He rants from a remote hilltop in the Great Basin Desert of western Nevada.
]]>Sterilizing members of a species you're trying to save may sound weird, but there's a reason for it. Pet, or "captive," tortoises were exempted from the 1990 Endangered Species Act listing of the Mojave desert tortoise, an unconventional arrangement designed to allow Southwesterners to keep any tortoises they already had in their backyards. Even as the wild population faces habitat loss and fragmentation, caused primarily by development, tortoises thrive in captivity.
"People don't intend to breed them," Jim Cornall, the director of the nonprofit Tortoise Group, the state's officially sanctioned tortoise adoption program, says. "But a backyard can quickly end up with 10 tortoises in it, and then gets out of control."
Nobody knows exactly how many pet tortoises are in Nevada, but estimates run to the tens of thousands. Despite public education efforts and a 2013 one-tortoise-per-household policy, untold numbers mingle in Nevada backyards. And when people dump unwanted pets or their offspring in the desert, those tortoises compete with the fragile wild population and frequently spread diseases — one of many reasons why dealing with them diverts resources needed for wild tortoises.
Because of budget cuts, those resources are becoming increasingly scant. The Desert Tortoise Conservation Center outside Las Vegas, which was established in 1990 as a research facility for wild tortoises but became increasingly overrun with pets, will close this month. That means organizations like the Tortoise Group are forced to find new methods to deal with captive tortoises in ways that don't harm wild ones. Which is why it is helping train regional vets to sterilize pet tortoises, hoping that even if captive animals are later released, they won't produce offspring to compete with wild tortoises.
"This is all excellent experience," one of the vets, Janet Maker, tells me, smiling in her scrubs one morning in late August. Maker has 25 years in reptile medicine, but before today, she's never done this kind of procedure on a Mojave desert tortoise. Aside from the two trainers leading the clinic, few veterinarians ever have.
Now she has it down pat. First, her technician injects a sedative and anesthetic. Tortoises don't breathe easily under anesthesia; females are intubated to help them through the longer sedation they require. Maker turns a female tortoise onto her back and makes an incision where the leg meets the underbelly. "You go in with the endoscope and forceps, grab the ovaries, pull them out, and remove them," she says. For an endoscope-free sterilization, Maker turns a tortoise on its side, makes a similar cut, finds the fallopian tubes — "the first organ you see, solid muscle" — pulls the ovaries out, snips and sews.
In post-op, Maker rotates the tortoise onto its feet, warms it and eases it awake. Her tech removes the breathing tubes and pumps the tortoise's forearms gently in and out — the animal's natural way of compensating for its lack of a diaphragm — and recovery begins. Female sterilizations generally require 45 minutes and four sutures. Males take around 15 minutes, no stitches. In a single day, all the tortoises here are sterilized, and by the weekend all but a handful are stable. They'll be adopted out, captive still, but no longer breeding.


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