A Week in Yellowstone

I just finished up a week in Montana and Wyoming with a group of ninth graders, studying the history of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone, learning a bit more about the wildlife while we were here. We booked part of our program with the Yellowstone Association, the education arm of the park, and I would highly recommend them for educational groups or for any visitors looking for informative and helpful guides. They were like classroom/field trip teachers for three days; they got to know our students, and they really knew their stuff when it came to natural history, archaeology, geology, and ecology of the region. They also provided transportation in short tour vans, binoculars, and spotting scopes. As our students had been studying wolf reintroduction, the Association arranged for us to meet with two ranchers up in the Gardiner Valley, Martin Davis and Bruce Malcolm. The conversations with these gentlemen helped us all to gain some perspective on the complexity of the issues surrounding wolves, hunting, ranching, ecology, and economics; the students and teachers alike were moved by their equanimity, common sense, and insight. The ranching life is not one that too many of our students are familiar with, and it was eye opening for them (and me).

The week started out snowy and in the 20s, but got a bit warmer and sunnier each day. It is April in Northern Wyoming!

It was a pretty incredible trip.

 

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In the Field – Predator-Prey Ecology

We finished the field component of the predator-prey ecology class this week in the Daly Creek drainage, Montana, Yellowstone National Park. We worked to collect information on how elk browsing habits related to physical barriers in aspen stands affects recruitment of aspen saplings. Here’s a bit of what we saw.

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Predators and Prey

image via montana.edu

I’m in Bozeman this week for an MSSE class on predator-prey ecology, which I’m really psyched about. Two (long) days in the classroom, and three days out in the field in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. I walked around campus this afternoon, got my bearings, and I’m looking forward to a good burger before I settle in for some light reading on trophic cascades, carrying capacities, isoclines, and the paradox of enrichment. I haven’t seen any elk or wolves yet, but when I do I’ll post some pictures.

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On Fungi and the Recycling of Human Nutrients

Really interesting and thought provoking TED talk (is that redundant?) by Jae Rhim Lee on a kind of “mushroom death suit,” that will help recycle you. Quirky? Sure. But she raises some really good questions about our current burial practices and suggests a more green alternative.

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Bioaccumulation: ocean health and human health

My seventh grade class is currently studying the ecology of the Long Island Sound, and we’ve been talking about bioaccumulation. I stumbled across this TED talk from last April by Stephen Palumbi called Following the Mercury Trail. It turns out to be more about PCBs than mercury, but it dovetailed nicely with what we’re covering in class, tying together the issues of bioaccumulation, toxic contaminants, and pathogens. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Stephen Palumbi: Following the Mercury Trail

Related posts:

Red fish, green fish: What you need to know about seafood ratings, from The Environmental Magazine and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

TED – The Mission Blue Voyage

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The Wolverine Way

"The Wolverine Way" Douglas Chadwick. Patagonia Books 2010

I mentioned this book, “The Wolverine Way” by Douglas Chadwick, back in July after posting about the Ocelot sighting in Arizona, and I’ve been meaning to write a full review since finishing it.  (Yes, I know it’s been a while.  Other half-written posts since then have included Experiments in Pickling, How to Build a Cold Smoker, and several food-related summer ideas that could possibly end up at some point in the future as a collaborative food blog.  More on that later if it comes to fruition.)

I first read about Chadwick’s book in an essay of the same title “The Wolverine Way” in a Patagonia catalog, which described the project and the book, and it contains longer excerpts than included here.  It’s what got me hooked on the book.

This book is fascinating, and a must-read for any outdoor enthusiast or armchair biologist.  Chadwick describes his experience on the Glacier Wolverine Project, and he introduces you to this incredible dynamo of an animal with first-hand accounts of his work tracking and tagging wolverines in Montana.  He also brings you into the circle of the dedicated leaders and volunteers who carried out the study; these are people I’d love to sit around a campfire with.  (I was a seasonal wildlife intern for a few years before I started teaching, studying birds, and this is a project I wish I had known about back then, because I’d have been happy to switch over to mammals for a while.  Plus, let’s be honest, who else would you rather sit around a campfire with?  Field biologists, quirky as they are, make for great conversation.)

In the grand scheme of things, for a North American mammal in the 21st century, we don’t know a ton about wolverines.  Their scientific name, Gulo gulo, literally means “glutton glutton.”  Although they consume what they must (when they can) in a quite unforgiving habitat, they have largely been vilified over the course of history through myth, misunderstanding, and hyperbole.  Chadwick provides some insight into their natural history, including new information on its territorial ranges, metabolism, diet, and social structure within family groups.  He also describes the selective forces that have served to shape the wolverine over thousands of years into the creature that it is today, one built for the brutal cold, for survival on ice-covered peaks, where it has a distinct advantage over just about anything.

“…the list of adaptations that allow wolverines to make an ally of winter is impressive.  Yet until scientists started to focus on climate change, no one gave much thought to how creatures with built-in snowshoes, a super-cozy fur coat, smoldering metabolism, and food cached in nature’s refrigerators are supposed to handle swimsuit weather in our ever-toastier Age of Industrial Exhaust.”

I also appreciate that Chadwick is working to bring wider attention to the Freedom to Roam initiative (along with Patagonia), an effort to to connect large areas of wilderness with migratory corridors for animals. He describes wolverines as basically “badass, but vulnerable,” and he explains why in another Patagonia Environmentalism Essay called “The One Thing Wolverines Can’t Take On.”  All are worth reading.

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Ocelots in Arizona

From Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line blog, “Witness For Wildlife Trip Produces Photo of First Live Ocelot In Arizona.”

The ocelot recently photographed in Cochise County, Arizona. Photo: ©2009 Sky Island Alliance.

Ocelots are tropical cats, and they’ve been known to range into Northern Mexico and Texas.  This article tells of the first known Ocelot seen in Arizona; the photo was taken by Michael Quigley in November of 2009 with a camera set up with a motion sensor.  This is significant for a number of reasons, and the article above mentions the importance of wildlife corridors in protecting sensitive and endangered species.

I just finished Doug Chadwick’s book, The Wolverine Way, which chronicles his work as a volunteer on the Glacier Wolverine Project. More to follow on that in a future post.  But one of the things he hammers home on is this idea of natural corridors to connect wilderness areas.  That’s one of the things that can help the chances of the wolverine (or the ocelot).  Small population sizes and slow reproductive rates can translate to slim margins for error when it comes to survival of certain species.  Protected areas like Glacier National Park are great, but for a wide-ranging predator like the wolverine, safe havens free from development and trapping pressures can be separated by hundreds of miles, and those protected areas are essentially islands.  It’s difficult to survive on islands.  Your food runs out, disease hits, your habitat is destroyed, predators increase, etc, you’re pretty much stuck.  For that reason, islands generally support less biodiversity than mainland habitats (proportional to their size).  For more on that and the trophic cascades that can result from disturbances, see David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions.

These organizations are doing good work in support of wildlife corridors in North America:

Witness for Wildlife

Freedom to Roam

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

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The Big Burn

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, by Timothy Egan

This is a book for the conservationist/forester on your Christmas list.  Timothy Egan describes the 1910 wildfires that swept through a huge section of Washington, Montana, and Idaho in the Coeur d’Alene and Bitterroot forests, wiping out an area of forest about the size of Connecticut in the process (about 3 million acres).  It is also a book about the birth of conservation as we know it, and it chronicles the work of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, as they set aside millions of acres of forest for preservation at the beginning of the 1900s.  This was an unprecedented effort, and they ran up against stiff opposition from the entrenched railroad, copper, and timber barons of the day.  This protection of land, setting aside forests for the people, necessitated some oversight, and here we see the formation of the U.S. Forest Service.

So the narrative portrays this fledgling Forest Service, the brainchild of Pinchot, working to prevent fires at every turn, to protect this national investment in nature.  The dry summer of 1910 and years of unburned undergrowth served as fuel for a fire that they had no chance to stop.  Egan writes about the heroes and cowards of the day, and he tells of the sheer destructive power of the fire, a force that felled millions of trees and wiped ramshackle frontier towns completely off the map.

The take home message of Egan’s book is twofold.  First, the fires shifted public sentiment in favor of the Forest Service, which was tragically understaffed and underfunded.  Changes in Congress provided much-needed manpower for maintenance and oversight of the forests.  But second, it firmly set the Forest Service’s misguided policy of fire-suppression-at-any-cost for much of the 20th Century (some background here).  Also, with a change in leadership in the Forest Service came a change in philosophy.  Whereas the early goal of the Service was to protect the forests for the people, to protect nature, the new goal of the service seemed to be to suppress fire as a means to protect forests for the timber industry.

Egan has a knack for writing about disaster.  His book The Worst Hard Time describes the tragedy of the American dust bowl.  It’s also an intriguing read, and he balances the story of the people with the the forces of nature that were at work as the land literally blew away.  These disasters were mindblowing in scope, and I’d recommend both books for anyone interested in learning more about this period of American history.

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Additional information on the U.S. Forest Service current policy on fire management can be found here.  Some folks that think this policy is misguided: here, here, and here.

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