Diversity and species conservation

Eagles and Wind Turbines: A Roundup of Recent News Stories and Some More General Reflections

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Wildlife biologist Mike Lockhart admires a golden eagle after trapping, sampling and fitting the raptor with a GPS device in June 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)

For years we have been told that oil and gas drilling on federal lands is bad because:

1*Federal land is abused for the profits of a few. (corporate profits)

2* Pristine landscapes are industrialized

3* Placement of infrastructure interferes with recreation

4* Bad for wildlife,

5* Roads bad for water quality, also increase human activity

6* Other environmental concerns

7*Methane leakage, chemicals onsite, and finally

8*Usage of oil and gas (not considering substitution from elsewhere)

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If you’ve ever been to a wind installation (whose footprint is much greater and, with proposed solar, is going to be gigantic), you’ll know where I’m going with this.

Some will argue that sacrificing concerns 1-6 are necessary for a low-carbon future.  On the other hand, through time, there will be other choices (including in the new IRA) for low-carbon energy such as the nuclear plant being developed in Kemmerer, Wyoming that will use former coal plant workers and existing powerlines.

Anyway, I’m bringing your attention to three stories about this, two current stories one from Wyofile, one from the AP and one from 2019 from the Hill.

The Wyofile story is an interview with a retired USFWS wildlife biologist now doing resarch for USGS and Conservation Science Global.

 The expansion, which energy experts believe may even accelerate further under the Inflation Reduction Act, could pose a serious threat to eagles and other wildlife in certain areas without field-data-driven information to guide avoidance and mitigation strategies, according to Lockhart. …..

This is probably one of the best places, that I know of anyway, for golden eagles in North America,” Lockhart said. “I am a big wind energy advocate and definitely a green energy supporter. But we can’t devastate one really critically important resource for another.”

Maestro has yet to file an official permitting request with the BLM and other permitting authorities. The company didn’t respond to WyoFile inquiries. To move forward, the BLM, which manages more than 80% of the project area, must conduct a full National Environmental Policy Act analysis with public comment.

The Maestro project isn’t the only wind proposal that worries Lockhart.

“I’m equally concerned about the ones that might impact breeding birds and kind of fill in those gaps between the existing wind [energy facilities],” he said.

Another field scientist concerned about modeling over field data (see, it’s not just me).

But Lockhart worries that the vital data from field research is emerging slower than encroaching wind turbines in southern and south-central Wyoming. Federal wildlife managers that can determine where and how wind energy facilities are configured to avoid threatening eagle populations are relying too much on modeling to fill in gaps between actual data, he claims.

“The data is just inadequate for making these [permitting] decisions,” Lockhart said…

Then there are cumulative impacts:

Of particular concern, he said, are proposed wind energy projects that will essentially fill in yet-to-be industrialized areas, such as the Maestro wind energy project in the Shirley Basin. Carlsbad, California-based Maestro Wind LLC proposes to construct up to 327 wind turbines spanning nearly 99,000 acres that straddle Highway 77 here. The project area essentially encompasses the heart of the Shirley Basin’s eagle habitat, according to Lockhart.

Wind energy developers, in the pre-construction federal and state permitting process, typically borrow from existing data on local nesting sites and eagle populations and hire consultants to conduct new surveys in the field. But that information isn’t typically compiled in a way that allows for a comprehensive count or region-wide database that could be used to analyze potential cumulative impacts.

Although the Wyoming Game and Fish Department reviews and comments on wind energy proposals in federal permitting, it doesn’t conduct comprehensive eagle field surveys and mostly defers to federal wildlife authorities, according to Public Information Officer Sara DiRienzo.

“There is a growing concern especially with raptors, such as the golden eagle or the ferruginous hawk, that there may be population impacts, especially when you look at locations that have multiple wind farms,” DiRienzo said. “Understanding the cumulative effects is still ongoing and not conclusive at this time.”

In the mid 90’s there were many Biodiversity workshops, and so I spent much time listening to presentations about endangered birds of various kinds (think owls and murrelets). I had to wonder whether populations go down partially because wildife biologists conduct activities that look like harassment, calling, baiting, trapping and so on.  Maybe there are studies on this.

The AP (Matthew Brown) has a lengthy story about eagles and windfarms. I found it in the Colorado Sun. Hopefully it’s not paywalled or is available elsewhere.

The rush to build wind farms to combat climate change is colliding with preservation of one of the U.S. West’s most spectacular predators — the golden eagle — as the species teeters on the edge of decline…

Federal officials won’t divulge how many eagles are reported killed by wind farms, saying it’s sensitive law enforcement information. The recent criminal prosecution of a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the largest U.S. renewable energy providers, offered a glimpse into the problem’s scope.

The company pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and was ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after killing at least 150 eagles — including more than 100 goldens at wind farms in Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois.

Government officials said the mortality was likely higher because some turbines killed multiple eagles and carcasses are not always found.

Prosecutors said the company’s failure to take steps to protect eagles or to obtain permits to kill the birds gave it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps — even as NextEra and affiliates received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits for wind power.

The company remained defiant after the plea deal: NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said bird collisions with turbines were unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized.

Utilities Duke Energy and PacifiCorp previously pleaded guilty to similar charges in Wyoming. North Carolina-based Duke Energy was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects.

A year later, Oregon-based PacifiCorp received $2.5 million in fines and five years probation after 38 golden eagle carcasses and 336 other protected birds were discovered at two of its sites.

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We don’t have to go too far back in time, though,  to get a different take. From a news piece on The Hill.

Shawn Smallwood, a California ornithologist, told PolitiFact that about 100 eagles die each year due to impacts with wind turbines…

In truth, wind turbine collisions comprise a fraction of human-caused eagle losses,” Obama-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe wrote in 2016. “Most result from intentional and accidental poisoning and purposeful shooting. The majority of non-intentional loss occurs when eagles collide with cars or ingest lead shot or bullet fragments in remains and gut piles left by hunters. Others collide with or are electrocuted on power lines.”

I think Ashe’s argument is interesting.  If x, y and z contribute to decline of a species, when do we try to shut down x, y, and z, and when do we determine that if the majority of the loss is due to x and y, we aren’t concerned about z.  Is the way we think about this inconsistent?

Finally, these articles are about collisions.  Noise may also interfere with a variety of bird activities. For example, the highly political dramatized sage grouse..from a BLM document:

Recent research has demonstrated that noise from natural gas development negatively impacts sagegrouse abundance, stress levels and behaviors (Blickley et al. 2012; Blickley & Patricelli 2012; Blickley et al. In review). Other types of anthropogenic noise sources (e.g. infrastructure from oil, geothermal, mining and wind development, off-road vehicles, highways and urbanization) are similar to gas-development noise and thus the response by sage-grouse is likely to be similar. These resultssuggest that effective management of the natural soundscape is critical to the conservation and protection of sage-grouse.

 

 

Sensitive species and NFMA?

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Los Padres ForestWatch. The California spotted owl is listed as a Sensitive Species by the U.S. Forest Service and by the California Department of Fish and Game as a Species of Special Concern.

This question came up in the fuel treatment post yesterday, but it is worthy of its own post (wonky as it is).  I think there are some misconceptions out there about sensitive species.  This is without refreshing my memory (which I should do more often any more), but I was heavily involved in lots of this.

NFMA does not require identification or protection of sensitive species.  NFMA requires plant and animal diversity.  Habitat for viability is a requirement for diversity in the planning regulations (old and new).  Sensitive species have never been found in the planning regulations.  To the extent there was an implied regulatory requirement in the 1982 regulations, it was for viable populations of management indicator species (MIS).

“Sensitive species” was apparently created by the Forest Service (I’m guessing the Wildlife staff) as a means of both meeting the NFMA viability requirement and preventing listing under ESA, and requirements for sensitive species (including preparation of a Biological Evaluation) were to be applied to both plans and projects. The details may be found in FSM 2670 (which also addresses ESA requirements) and FSM 2620.  The current version of these is dated 2011, prior to the 2012 Planning Rule.  (The agency has frozen up in its efforts to update this manual direction.)

This led to a lot of confusion, even by judges, regarding what was required at the project level.  It sometimes appeared that parties/judges were saying that the NFMA viability requirement applied to each project (like ESA).  At one point (2004ish?), the Forest Service, issued an interpretive rule to clarify that the viability requirement in the 1982 planning regulation applied only to forest plan decisions (unless the plan imposed its own viability requirement on projects, which some did).

It also made this problem a focus of its efforts to produce a new planning rule.  Language now makes it clear that nothing in the 2012 Planning Rule applies to projects, and specifically the new requirements for species of conservation concern (SCC) apply only to forest plans (and projects must be consistent with what the plan says).

Meanwhile, forest plans that are being revised are following the new requirements for species of conservation concern. The Forest Service issued an internal letter to regional foresters on June 6, 2016 explaining that it would phase out the sensitive species designation. It recognized that, “As noted in the preamble to the 2012 planning rule, “[Regional Forester Sensitive Species] are…similar to species of conservation concern.”   It also stated that, “Applying both systems on the same administrative unit would be redundant.” Consequently, “Once a revised plan is in effect, the Regional Forester’s Sensitive Species list no longer applies to that unit.”

The letter acknowledges that a biological evaluation must still be prepared for a revised forest plan.  The letter doesn’t specifically instruct forests that have not revised their plans to keep preparing BEs for projects, but the Manual direction is still in place, so it is still official policy.

One observation I’ve made in reviewing forest plans revised under the 2012 Planning Rule is that sensitive species are often NOT considered “similar to species of conservation concern.”  Many sensitive species (with “viability concerns”) have not been designated SCC (“substantial concern about the species capability to persist over the long term in the plan area”) during forest planning.  Why is that?

The other thing I’ve seen when forest plans are being revised is that the Forest Service is not doing a very good job of explaining to the public that they are no longer going to have project analysis requirements for at-risk (but not listed) species separate from NEPA, and that some species they used to address at the project-level may not be addressed at all after the forest plan is revised.

Thinking About Adaptation, Naturalness and Tourism: Wyofile Wolf Story

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This WyoFile story on wolves is interesting because it delves into some philosophical issues around managing . Now I am not knowledgeable enough to know anything about how much hunting should be allowed, using which practices, where or when or even if.    I’m just interested in how people think about it, as discussed in the article.  And, to be transparent, I’m one of those people who used to enjoy wolf-watching in Yellowstone.

The title is Yellowstone: Wolf hunt altered behavior, damaged research.  Now some of might be thinking, hey- when ungulate behavior was changed due to wolf reintroduction, that was thought to be “good.” Perhaps not to the involved ungulates, but to the “ecosystem.” In this calculus, some organisms and populations count less than others, based on a philosophical idea/abstraction.

A recent spate of hunting has altered fundamental aspects of the canines’ behavior, and threatened the foundations of one of the most storied wildlife research efforts in American history, according to park scientists.

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Many more wolves have been getting frisky than expected. Ordinarily in Yellowstone, only each pack’s dominant alpha male and female get the opportunity to mate. The custom is reflected in 27 years of hard data: 85% of the time, park packs produce single litters.

But this year — in the wake of at least 25 wolves being shot or trapped just beyond the park’s boundaries — Yellowstone Wolf Project personnel observed three or four females in two different Northern Range packs “tied” and breeding, Smith said. “Usually the most dominant wolf prevents other wolves from breeding,” he said. “You lose that [dominant] wolf and it opens up opportunities for other wolves.”

It appears, in other words, that with their pack hierarchies disrupted by the record-setting killings, some wolves have abandoned their selective mating customs.

Perhaps this change is good from the genetic perspective, as more offspring by different combos of males and females. If I were a wolf, and got a chance to mate and produce offspring from this change, it’s not hard to imagine that increased friskiness might be a good thing.

“It’s broken apart the social structure, it’s messed with the hierarchy, and it’s actually produced more pups. Now this is a hypothesis, but this is what I would call an artificial stimulation of wolf reproductive capacity

Is adapting to this change “good” or “bad”? From whose perspective? It reminds me of the Tennyson quote “The old order changeth yielding place to new.”

For researchers it holds a unique appeal: In the Lower 48, Yellowstone is the easiest place to observe wolves in their natural state. Since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced 31 wolves to the park in 1995 and ’96, the intensive research effort has been predicated on understanding wolf ecology in the absence of human persecution.

In what sense is Yellowstone a “natural” state? Wolves descended (originally) from only 31 Canadian wolves, being heavily watched by scientists, hordes of humans and so on.

“The question now is … let’s see what happens,” Smith said. “But we really don’t want that, because it is not aligned with the National Park Service mission. The National Park Service mission is to protect natural processes.”

I looked on the Park Service website and here is what they say their mission is:

The mission of the National Park Service is to preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.

This makes more sense- if the mission were to protect natural processes they probably would need to shut down the visitation (4,860,537 in 2021).

The Yellowstone wolves on the Northern Range, accustomed to throngs of humans with pricey optics, lacked a recognition that humans posed a lethal threat, and they proved relatively easy targets. “If you’re a wolf watcher in the park, you know they tolerate you at 100 to 200 yards,” Smith said. “That’s a perfect rifle shot.”

This doesn’t seem “natural” to me. But who gets to define what “natural” is? Most interestingly defined as a kind of packaged “nature”experience that brings in more income and economic values than locals wandering the woods.

The prospect that Yellowstone’s remaining wolves have gained a newfound wariness is not welcomed by all. Gardiner naturalist and biologist Nathan Varley, who runs the Yellowstone Wolf Tracker guiding service, said skittish wolves are his biggest concern and a worst-case scenario for his business.

“Wolves that survive hunting events, they quickly learn that there’s survival value in avoiding humans,” Varley said. “And we’ve relied extensively on wolves that do not have that inclination.”

Here’s another “natural”.

“Everybody is just going to look at last year’s count and this year’s count, and go what’s the big deal?” Smith said. “Well the big deal is this is no longer a natural population. It’s a human-exploited population and our job [in the National Park Service] is to have a natural population.”

But this gets back to the question earlier in the article:

Hoppe doesn’t think it’s fair that wolves are regarded differently than other park wildlife pursued by hunters across the boundary.

“The Indians, they shoot the elk and the buffalo and they’re still shooting them and it’s almost the end of April,” he said.”

If it were “the job” of the Park Service  to “have a natural population” of wolves (given that that appears to be a code-expression for “no hunting off park”) why wouldn’t that apply to all species?  And I must have missed the session where the agency tells you that employees get to make up their own versions of the agency mission/job, follow those in their daily work, and describe them as the agency mission to journalists.  I would have greatly enjoyed the opportunity.

When Can Feds Talk During Litigation? Grizzly Bear Restoration Plan for the North Cascades

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Adult male grizzly bear with Wayne Kasworm.
The grizzly bear was captured as a research animal in the Yaak River drainage of northwest Montana.

When is it OK for employees to comment on topics/projects currently under litigation? Many of the FS stories we see say that the Forest Service can’t comment on existing litigation.  So I’ve described this as the litigation “cone of silence.”

But I recently ran across this article (many thanks to Nick Smith!). It’s interesting about grizzlies,  but also seems to focus on a current employee’s views of being stymied by the shutdown of a project- that a;so seems to be currently in litigation.  This may be an entirely different kettle of fish, and hopefully our legal TSW friends will explain why the situation is different.

The unexpected cancellation of the project took government biologists, wildlife managers and others aback.

“It was somewhat of an abrupt termination,” says U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Wayne Kasworm, a senior Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee member and principle figure for grizzly recovery programs in Washington’s Selkirk Mountains and Montana’s Cabinet Mountains. “It was a bit of a surprise to those of us who’d been working on it for years.”

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Experience in Montana provided Kasworm with some background to relate to the Washington public during open meetings about what might occur in the Cascades if grizzlies were to be reintroduced there. Following presentations, he fielded just about every question in the grizzly book, including the obvious ones.

What are the chances of human injury? How many people have been killed by grizzlies over the past century? What are the potential impacts on livestock or the timber harvest? Why would we even want to recover grizzly bears?

That last question would occasionally come up during testier public forums.

“Well, we have the Endangered Species Act—plus the mission of a national park to maintain its natural environment and the species that reside there,” Kasworm would answer. “And because this is a recovery area for bears, there’s interest on the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to look at this program and go through a public process …” And so on.

“It was just part of the whole process,” says Kasworm. “There are places where you run into a lot of supporters and it’s an easy meeting. And there are places where you run into more opposition. I’ve been through controversial subjects with grizzly bears a lot in the last 38 years. I recognize that it can be an emotional issue and people can get excited about it on both sides. But I’d say for the most part those public comment meetings went pretty well.”

Precisely how well is hard to say with a recovery plan that remains incomplete. But there was an overall trend.

I’m curious as to when it is OK for employees to talk about projects being litigated and when not.

Did the program’s sudden termination come as a shock to those who’d spent years working on it?

“Yeah,” says Kasworm, wary of going much deeper into a matter now in litigation.

Was there any clear explanation for the decision?

“Not that I’m aware of is the best thing I can say here,” he says. “The reasons for the termination lie with the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Bernhardt, who made that call a couple of years ago.”

Was it frustrating?

“I probably shouldn’t say it, but yeah it’s frustrating. I mean, you work on something like this for several years. You’re partway through the whole thing. You’ve invested a whole lot of effort and money in the process. Then, all of a sudden, people just say ‘Stop.’ So yeah, there’s a certain degree of frustration.”

I felt the same way about the 1995 RPA Program that I worked on.. I totally get the frustration. Or the folks who worked in good faith on Alaska Roadless and were told from one side “your work doesn’t count, we’re going with no 2001 … and at the other end “your work doesn’t count we’re going with 2001.” That’s what I used to call the territory of “the pay’s the same” and “if you’re not the lead mule, the scenery never changes.”

Another interesting part of this article was about the reasons for reintroduction:

Why would we even want to recover grizzly bears?

That last question would occasionally come up during testier public forums.

“Well, we have the Endangered Species Act—plus the mission of a national park to maintain its natural environment and the species that reside there,” Kasworm would answer. “And because this is a recovery area for bears, there’s interest on the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to look at this program and go through a public process …” And so on.

I think that’s pretty interesting.. because grizzly bears are currently expanding their range and increasing.  Plus National Parks occur everywhere within the former GB range… Santa Monica Mountains, Yosemite and so on.  Now why exactly do we “need” them back in California or Colorado?

From the reporter:

Now the target of a lawsuit brought by the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, the aborted program provides a fascinating example of wildlife management that seems to eschew collaboration and transparency, produces unknown public expenditures, alienates researchers and turns creatures as mighty as grizzly bears into political footballs.

Hmm. Been there done that. Should grizzlies be exempt from football-hood?

 

 

The “Grizzlies and Us” Series

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Here’s a really interesting series in the Missoulian. It’s it’s a 10- part series comprised of more than 20 stories. Lots of stories and they seem to be visible to those without a Missoulian subscription (thank you, Missoulian! and Lee Enterprises!)

I picked this one as the bikes/grizzlies issue seems to be of interest to TSW readers, but there are many others.. feel free to discuss any.  Here’s one about livestock guardian dogs and technology protecting sheep, and the work of ranchers and the group People and Carnivores.

Grizzlies are expanding their range.. how are people getting along with them?

US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Wayne Kasworm had just replaced Servheen as interim leader of the grizzly recovery effort. Treat’s death crystallized one of his top tasks: Getting people to agree on how much safety they all must give up to coexist with bears.

“They’re wild animals, and we are not controlling them,” Kasworm said. “What we attempt to do is provide information so people can make reasoned judgments about what is safe activity or not safe activity. We’re trying to get some conversation going, to get people thinking about what is going on out there in the woods.”

To deal with objective dangers in the outdoors, people already self-limit their recreation in many ways. Boaters avoid rivers during spring runoff, or accept the consequences of lost gear, wrecked boats, and possible death. Golfers voluntarily leave the links when a thunderstorm brings lightning over their metal clubs and spiked shoes. Snowmobilers and backcountry skiers check avalanche forecasts and weigh the risks of the day’s adventure.

“We’re trying to get folks to recognize and take on responsibility for their own safety when they walk into known grizzly bear habitat, when grizzly bear habitat is taking over more and more of Montana,” Kasworm told me. “When a bear results in a human safety issue, or it’s killing livestock repeatedly, we remove the bear. But if you’re tooling around on your mountain bike and you bump into the bear and you’re scared, that’s not necessarily a reason to remove the bear.”

Is it a reason to remove the bikes? And what about everything else humans like to do in bear country? Whose interests rule?

Three years to the day after Treat’s death, Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber declared his disagreement with Servheen’s report. New controversy had arisen over a commercial ultramarathon and a backcountry bike shuttle service in the national forest land around Whitefish, Montana, about twenty miles from Coram.

“I want to start by strongly repudiating the notion that as an agency, we ought not promote, foster or permit activities because engagement in those activities presents risk to the participants,” Weber told the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s summer 2019 gathering in Missoula. “The issues around this are much broader than trail use, and grizzly bears and both people and wildlife may suffer if the discussion isn’t expanded.”

As to Board of Review report, Weber told me he had great personal respect for Servheen but “his (Servheen’s) focus is grizzly bear recovery and solely grizzly bear recovery. Mine is serving the American public and the needs they want in the context of many wildlife species and an overall conservation mission that’s very, very broad.”

Individual sporting events like the Whitefish ultramarathon have such minimal impact on grizzly bears, Weber said, they fall under a categorical exclusion from in-depth environmental review. At the same time, those events endear increasing numbers of people to their public lands as the number of users grows year after year.

“There’s a broad public out there with needs to be served and not just the needs of the few,” Weber said. “We think that greater good for the greatest number will be served. That fosters connectivity with wildlands and a united group of people that can support conservation. And the best conservation for bears is served by figuring out how to have these human activities in ways that are as safe as they can be, understanding you can never make anything perfectly safe.”

Practice of Science Friday: Mind the Model/Adaptation Gap

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Scientist Neil Carter of Michigan State University sets a motion-activated camera with a colleague in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. Tigers in southern Nepal appear to be changing their habits so they can operate under cover of darkness and avoid coming into contact with humans, scientists said.

There seems to be a disciplinary adaptation gap between some climate scientists and “biodiversity” scientists on the one hand, and the disciplines involved in adaptation…fire science, plants, wildlife biologists and so on, on the other hand.  One of the gaps is that organisms adapt.  Critters and plants adapt, human beings adapt and we jointly adapt to each other.

There is the traditional genetic form of adaptation within species, and there are all kinds of adaptations beyond classical genetics.. behavioral, cultural, epigenetic.  And since these adaptations can’t be modeled (since most of them are unknown) to climate and biodiversity modelers, they don’t exist.  And yet.. in real life, and to certain disciplines, they do exist and are important.

Not to speak of humans.. so we have gaps like reading about crop improvement via new techniques like CRISPR, while at the same time climate modelers are predicting wheat yields in 2070.  GAP! Yet among science institutions, it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s job to notice gaps and attempt to fill them.  I think because while the CRISPR people would easily say “hey we have no clue what’s going to happen by then”, climate scientists seem to spend a great deal of time making predictions and mostly get published if the outcomes are bad… seemingly completely regardless of any characterization of the many uncertainties at the level the CRISPR people and farmers deal with.

Here’s an example of the kind of study I’m talking about..with regard to biodiversity predictions:

A new study by University of Arizona researchers presents detailed estimates of global extinction from climate change by 2070. By combining information on recent extinctions from climate change, rates of species movement and different projections of future climate, they estimate that one in three species of plants and animals may face extinction.

So here are a few papers that talk about wildlife adaptation:

First, mammals are becoming more active at night to avoid us. Here’s a link to an article by Michael Page, and here’s a link to the Science study.

Gaynor and her colleagues noticed animals were becoming more active at night to avoid human disturbances. They have now done a meta-analysis of 76 studies of 62 mammals all around the world. Almost all are shifting to the night to avoid us…
On the other hand, the shift is helping animals survive alongside humans. In Chitwan in Nepal, lots of tigers are able to live near people by being more active at night.

In this sense, the shift to the night may be good. “It’s a way to share space on an increasingly crowded planet,” says Gaynor. “We take the day and they take the night.” Thanks to their nocturnal ancestors, many mammals still have plenty of the characteristics needed to be more active at night, she says. And they are likely to be evolving to be even better at it.

“I would expect that this is an incredibly strong selective force,” says Kate Jones of University College London, who has shown that mammals only became active during the daytime after dinosaurs vanished.

Second, we’re finding out that habitats where critters are currently found might not be the only ones they can live in, maybe not even their preferred. This is in New Scientist by Isabelle Groc. Hopefully, there isn’t a paywall, it’s from 2018.

The story of California’s sea otters is not a one-off. Earlier this year, Silliman and his colleagues revealed a wider trend in a paper aptly titled “Are the ghosts of nature’s past haunting ecology today?“. As a result of conservation efforts, a variety of predators are reappearing in ecosystems they were pushed out of by hunting and development. “It is an exciting time for ecologists,” says Carswell, “because these species are coming back to these ecosystems from which they have been absent for many human generations and they are putting their house back in order.”

Mountain lions are another example. Unsurprisingly, we tend to associate them with mountains. But historical records show that in Patagonia they once lived in open grasslands. As sheep farming became established in South America, they were persecuted – along with their prey, a kind of llama called a guanaco. As a result, mountain lions survived only in the remote Andes away from humans. But in the past 20 years, sheep ranching has declined. “We started to see a change,” says Mark Elbroch from conservation society Panthera. “The mountain lions that had been removed from the open grassland began to come back out of the mountains at the same time as the guanaco was beginning to move back into the grassland.”

Third, critters are moving to places where they didn’t formerly live as far as we know. In this case, apparently without direct human assistance. This story is from Wudan Yan in High Country News (also 2018)

Otters were once unheard of in the Beartooths. In fact, there’s no evidence they’re native to this high alpine environment at all; their arrival appears to be part of the sweeping changes humans have brought to the plateau. In the 1960s, zoologists Donald Pattie and Nicolaas Verbeek spent years surveying the various mammals found in the Beartooths. They found creatures as small as dwarf shrews and as large as grizzly bears and mountain goats, but no otters. Continued but sporadic surveys done by field technicians and researchers at the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in the 1990s yielded no sign of river otters, either. But for the last decade or so, there have been a few anecdotal reports from Cross, his colleagues, and some of the locals who frequent the plateau.

This of course raises philosophical issues as on this Yellowstone Ecological Research Center website

Are they “invasive species” in this alpine environment, impacting native carnivores like red foxes and American martens, or adaptive survivors seeking a climate refugium (not to mention food bonanza) at higher elevations?

I’m not suggesting we blow through wildlife habitat and ignore their needs. But when we hear predictions about the future, especially the distant future, even by scientists, I think we need to acknowledge that no one actually knows what will happen. And the people working at the interface of people and wildlife are actually the most knowledgeable about them, and how to work toward our continuing coexistence.

“Wild Souls” Book Review by Jennifer Weeks

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This book apparently goes into many topics of interest that have been frequently discussed by TSW readers. I found this review on The Society of Environmental Journalists page. Would anyone like to review the book for TSW readers? I have to wonder about how these concepts track with abstractions like “ecosystem integrity” or the more recent BLM idea “health of the landscape” (at least with reference to grazing rules) as Steve quoted here.  I have to say it’s much easier for me to think about the question of “what is the appropriate level of intervention?”under the abstraction of “climate resilience.”

BookShelf: ‘Wild Souls’ Explores Paradox of Managing Species To Save Them

“Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World”
By Emma Marris
Bloomsbury, $28.00

Reviewed by Jennifer Weeks

A decade ago on a family trip to the Grand Canyon, my 7-year-old daughter spotted a signboard as we walked along the South Rim: “Condor presentation here at 3:00.”

“Look, a condor is coming!” she said.

We had mentioned that they were one of the region’s rarest species and were clawing their way back from the brink of extinction.

I started explaining that the sign meant a ranger was going to give a talk, not that he or she would bring a condor — they were wild and free-flying, not on display.

As I was in mid-sentence, a huge shadow fell across the sidewalk.

Everyone along the path looked up and started taking pictures of, yes, a California condor gliding overhead. Its massive wingspan and bright red head made it hard to miss.

“See, it’s here early!” my daughter announced.

What’s ‘wild’ when humans interfere?

This episode captured the complexity that journalist Emma Marris explores in “Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World,” a hard look at what it means for a species to be “wild” or “natural” on a planet where humans have radically altered it.

Condors were then and still are critically endangered: At the end of 2020 their wild free-flying population was 329, spread across parts of Arizona, Utah, California and Baja. The most dire threat they face is poisoning from consuming lead shot in animal carcasses they feed on.

And they’re present at the Grand Canyon because they were reintroduced there from a captive breeding program

We may value wild animals, but we interfere with their lives in all kinds of ways that call into question what “wild” means.

“The condors that have been released into the ‘wild’ are still tended to pretty closely by humans,” Marris writes. “They are routinely vaccinated against West Nile virus. When chicks are in the nest, they are visited monthly to make sure their parents aren’t feeding them plastic trash. If they are, the nestlings are whisked away for a quick surgery to remove the plastic. Every condor is assigned a ‘studbook number,’ which it wears prominently on a wing tag.”

Condors illustrate Marris’ central point: We may value wild animals and want to have good relationships with them, but we interfere with their lives in all kinds of ways that call into question what “wild” means.

Hybrid of wild nature and human management

Captive breeding programs are an example. Reintroductions, such as the planned return of gray wolves to Colorado that state voters endorsed in a 2020 ballot measure, are another. So is exterminating predators to protect at-risk species they hunt.

In one well-known example, the National Park Service killed thousands of feral pigs on California’s Channel Islands to save small endemic foxes. The program was so controversial that novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle novelized it in his 2011 book, “When the Killing’s Done.”

In her previous book, “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World” (2013), Marris argued that the idea of preserving nature in a pristine, pre-human state was unrealistic, and that instead the goal should be a hybrid of wild nature and human management.

“Wild Souls” extends this line of thinking to wildlife, drawing on science, philosophy and literature for perspective.

Too often, Marris asserts, we divide the world into nature, which we view as good, and our domesticated world, which we blame ourselves for ruining. In her view, this either/or framing is too simple — and it also is harmful.

Acknowledging human influence

“Our concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ sadly limit the solutions that we can imagine,” she writes. “To make good environmental decisions, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence. … We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory.”

What does that mean in practice?

One example Marris raises is tolerating hybridization between some species — such as grizzlies and polar bears, or barred and spotted owls — if it expands the gene pool for a dwindling species.

Another might be deciding to let a hyper-specialized rare species go extinct, rather than inflicting mass suffering on its better-adapted predators.

A third is using genetic editing tools to help species that we want to protect adapt to a human-altered world.

“Imagine using a gene drive to remove horns from all rhinos so there would be no reason to poach them — and then using another gene drive 100 years later to put the horn back once the market has dried up,” she posits.

None of these interventions would be simple.

But with the Earth losing so many species now, “Wild Souls” is a heartfelt but practical guide through the tangled moral underbrush.

Jennifer Weeks is senior environment and energy editor at The Conversation US and a former board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

 

Science Friday: Law et al. Paper on Prioritizing Forest Areas for Protection in 30 x 30

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We’ve looked at two scientific papers in the last week,  last Friday Siirila-Woodburn et al.   “low to no snow future and water resources” as we discussed here.  Then yesterday we took a look at Ager et al. 2021. as part of a discussion about the Forest Service 10 year wildfire risk reduction plan.  Today I’d like to look at a recent paper by Law et al. that Steve brought up in a comment yesterday. It’s interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is that the journal, Communications Earth and Environment publishes the review comments and responses, and is open access. Apologies for the length of this post, but there’s lots of interesting stuff around this paper.

The first question is “what is the point of the paper?”  In the discussion, the authors say

“We developed and applied a geospatial framework to explicitly identify forestlands that could be strategically preserved to help meet these targets. We propose that Strategic Forest Reserves could be established on federal and state public lands where much of the high priority forests occur, while private entities and tribal nations could be incentivized to preserve other high priority forests. We further find that preserving high priority forests would help protect (1) ecosystem carbon stocks and accumulation for climate mitigation, (2) animal and tree species’ habitat to stem further biodiversity loss, and (3) surface drinking water for water security. Progress has been made, but much work needs to be done to reach the 30 × 30 or 50 × 50 targets in the western US.”

Basically, to put words in their mouths, they used geospatial data from various sources to help figure out how to meet 30×30 and 50×50 goals. It seems to me that they equate “preervation” to “conditions that are good for carbon stocks, biodiversity, and drinking water.”  This is perhaps fine in a non-fire environment (and we can all make assumptions about future fires on the West Side, but if we were perfectly honest we’d admit that “fires may well occur on the west side as well and possibly increase” but “no one knows for sure.”

Now if we were to raise our sights from the details of the geospatial framework, we might see that 30 x 30 is a current policy discussion about how much conservation versus protection and what practices count.  So they might have taken the same tack as Siirila-Woodburn and Ager’s coauthors.. “let’s ask the people who know about these practices and are working in the area what they would like to know that would help them. Keeping in mind that these systems are so complex, we can’t really predict and need to be open about uncertainties.” There’s also a substantial literature about these national or international priority setting analyses, and their tendencies to disempower local people. No reviewers of this paper that I could tell were social scientists.

Nevertheless, it seems like they ran some numbers, and then had a long discussion in a mode of an op-ed with citations.

Differences in fire regimes among ecoregions are important parts of the decision-making process. For example, forests in parts of Montana and Idaho are projected to be highly vulnerable to future wildfire but not drought, thus fire-adapted forests climatically buffered from drought may be good candidates for preservation. Moist carbon rich forests in the Pacific Coast Range and West Cascades ecoregions are projected to be the least vulnerable to either drought or fire in the future25, though extreme hot, dry, and windy conditions led to fires in the West Cascades in 2020. It is important to recognize that forest thinning to reduce fire risk has a low probability of success in the western US73, results in greater carbon losses than fire itself, and is generally not needed in moist forests79,80,81,82.

Biodiversity- wise, though, you don’t need a PhD in wildife ecology to think.. protecting more west-side Doug-fir isn’t as good for biodiversity as protecting some of that and some of Montana or New Mexico.. so really carbon and biodiversity don’t always lead us to the same places.  It’s interesting that the reviewers didn’t catch the claim that “forest thinning has a low probability of success” What is paper 73, you might ask?  It’s a perspective piece in PNAS (so another op-ed with citations) by our geography friends at University of Colorado.  And “results in greater losses than fire itself?”  See our California versus Oregon wildfire carbon post here.

Forests help ensure surface drinking water quality63,64 and thus meeting the preservation targets would provide co-benefits for water security in an era of growing need.

This was an interesting claim for “protected” forests, as our hydrology colleagues (who perhaps are more expert in this area?) wrote in their review..

Changes in wildfire frequency, severity and timing are particularly catastrophic consequences of a low- to- no snow future. Indeed, alongside continued warming, a shift towards a no- snow future is anticipated to exacerbate wildfire activity, as observed169,170. However, in the longer term, drier conditions can also slow post- fire vegetation regrowth, even reducing fire size and severity by reducing fuels. The hydrologic (and broader) impacts of fire are substantial, and include: shifts in snowpack accumulation, snowpack ablation and snowmelt timing171; increased probability of flash flooding and debris flows172,173; enhanced overland flow; deleterious impacts on water quality 174,175; and increased sediment fluxes176,177. Notably, even small increases in turbidity can directly impact water supply infrastructure178,179. Vegetation recovery within the first few years following fire rapidly diminishes these effects, but some longer term effects do occur, as evidenced with stream chemistry180 and above and below ground water partitioning both within and outside of burn scars181.

There’s even a drive-by (so to speak) on our OHV friends..

Recreation can be compatible with permanent protection so long as it does not include use of off-highway vehicles that have done considerable damage to ecosystems, fragmented habitat, and severely impacted animals including threatened and endangered species37

Here’s a link to the review comments. The authors did not include fragmentation in their analysis as one reviewer pointed out, so they added

Nevertheless, our current analysis did not incorporate metrics of forest connectivity39 or fragmentation48, thus isolated forest “patches” (i.e., one or several gird cells) were not ranked lower for preservation priority than forests that were part of large continuous corridors.

To circle back to handling uncertainty and where the discussion of these uncertainties takes place (with practitioners and inhabitants or not), another review comment on uncertainty and the reply:

The underlying datasets that we used in this analysis did not include uncertainty estimates and thus it is not readily possible for us to characterize cumulative uncertainty by propagating uncertainty and error through our analysis. We recognize the importance of characterizing uncertainty in geospatial analyses and acknowledge this is an inherent limitation in our current study. To better acknowledge this limitation and the need for future refinements, we added the following text to the end of the Discussion (lines 445-447): Next steps are to apply this framework across countries, include non-forest ecosystems, and account for how preservation prioritization is affected by uncertainty in underlying geospatial datasets.

It makes me hanker for old timey economists, who put uncertainties front and center. Remember sensitivity analysis?

But the reviewers never addressed the gaps that I perceive between what the authors claim in their discussion and what the data show. I suspect that’s because “generating studies using geospatial data” is a subfield, and the reviewers are experts in that, but the points in the discussion (what’s an IRA, what’s the state of the art on fuel treatments) not so much. I think that that’s an inevitable part of peer review being hard unpaid work- at some point reviewers will use the “sounds plausible from here” criterion. And so it goes..

Large landscape connectivity – could the Forest Service be a leader?

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I watched a webinar provided by the Center for Large Landscape Conservation titled “Legal Protections for Large Landscape Conservation,” part of which focused on “Habitat Connectivity and the U. S. Forest Service.”  That segment can be seen here from 4:15 to 19:05.  The presentation goes over the elements of Forest Service planning that could be useful for habitat connectivity.  It includes a couple of examples of “innovations” from the Flathead and Carson/Santa Fe forest plan revisions, but concludes that few plan components that address connectivity are likely to be very effective.  It cites a familiar refrain that the agency is “unwilling to commit to specific direction,” and “lack of commitment and interest from line officers.”  However, the presenter observed that the movement of the Forest Service toward more centralized planning organizations might provide an opportunity to look at connectivity as a broader regional issue, and to develop regionally consistent approaches to planning for connectivity.

What if the Forest Service was actually interested in conserving the species that use its lands but require connectivity across other jurisdictions and ownerships (as it is required to do, “in the context of the broader landscape,” a phrase used seven times in the 2012 Planning Rule ), and what if the Forest Service played a leadership role in facilitating such cross-boundary connectivity by promoting large-landscape conservation strategies?

Maybe it would look something like what the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative has accomplished since it began promoting large-scale landscape conservation in 1993.  As Rob Chaney reports in the Missoulian, they have recently evaluated the effectiveness of their program in “Can a large-landscape conservation vision contribute to achieving biodiversity targets?”  They found that in the Y2Y region where landscape connectivity was actively promoted, more public lands were dedicated to protection, more private lands were protected, wildlife highway crossing structures proliferated, and occupied grizzly bear habitat (as a proxy for actual benefits to wildlife) expanded.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be a great assignment for the Biden Administration to give the Forest Service (both the National Forest System and State and Private Forestry divisions) to promote its 30 X 30 conservation agenda?

 

 

Southern Rockies (Colorado) Lynx: Disappearing or Stable? LCAS and the RG Plan

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Mapped summer exploratory routes of lynx from Colorado

Matthew posted this about litigation on the Rio Grande plan.

The Canada lynx relies heavily on the Rio Grande National Forest in the Southern Rocky Mountains, which contains more than half the locations in Colorado where lynx are consistently found. But the population is in dire straits, and federal scientists predict that the lynx may disappear from Colorado altogether within a matter of decades. The Forest Service’s new plan has now opened the extremely important lynx habitat in the forest to logging, one of the biggest threats to the cat.

“Scientists are saying the Canada lynx population in the Rio Grande National Forest is in the ‘emergency room,’ but the Forest Service refuses to provide this species with the care it needs,” said Lauren McCain, senior policy analyst for Defenders of Wildlife. “

Since CPW monitors lynx populations, I called them and found that the total lynx population in Colorado is actually stable based on their monitoring. So to say in Colorado RG pops are in “dire straits” does not appear to be accurate, unless there is info somewhere that the RG population is in decline, but it averages out because other pops are expanding (?). It also seems like the LCAS (the statewide lynx forest plan amendment), which has been in existence since 2008, would still be in place under the new RG plan. So if that’s the case (CPW is not the “logging industry” and lynx isn’t hunted, so shouldn’t we trust them?), why would “federal scientists” make those predictions about the species as a whole disappearing from Colorado? Climate change? And yet, if that were the case, why choose southern Colorado for lynx reintroduction? (that was in 1997, so that wasn’t as much of a concern as today).

But.. if you reintroduce species to the southern part of their range, that depend on snowpack during the winter, and then they ultimately have trouble from climate change..is the solution to stop logging? Even with LCAS in place? Ultimately then, it could be argued that anything that disturbs lynx is a threat, and on that basis should be stopped, including, possibly, recreation of all kinds. And yet, with current levels of all those activities, numbers of the species state-wide have remained stable. But we need to do more protective habitat interventions even so, just in case? And what if at the end of the day, we have kept everyone out (and removed developed ski areas) and the lynx still moves north due to climate change?

Here’s the history from CPW:

Colorado represents the southern-most historical distribution of naturally occurring lynx, where the species occupied the higher elevation, montane forests in the state (U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2000). Lynx were extirpated or reduced to a few animals in Colorado, however, by the late 1970’s (U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2000), most likely due to multiple human-associated factors, including predator control efforts such as poisoning and trapping (Meaney 2002). Given the isolation of and distance from Colorado to the nearest northern populations of lynx, the Colorado Division of Wildlife (now Colorado Parks and Wildlife [CPW]) considered reintroduction as the best option to reestablish the species in the state…

The DOW’s strategy for lynx reintroduction was to first release a number of lynx within a “core reintroduction area” in southwestern Colorado that biologists regarded as the best potential lynx habitat available in the state. Biologists hoped that over time lynx would not only remain in this area long enough to survive and reproduce, but also disperse on their own into other tracts of suitable habitat throughout the state. To this end, DOW biologists began releasing lynx back into southern Colorado in 1999 (Fig. 1). During 1999−2006, a total of 218 wild-caught lynx from Canada and Alaska were released in this core area.

Most interesting to me was this video on Colorado lynx, full of information about them and their lives, plus lots of photos and videos, and their summer explorations, as well as research on lynx and bark beetles, winter recreation, and snowshoe hare density, with CPW scientist Jake Ivan. If you’ve seen a lynx way outside of its habitat during the summer, you might not be imagining things; they go on long walkabouts (to Idaho, Montana and out east) and come back for winter. It’s amazing to me that the telemetry gear does not interfere with lynx activities.

Here’s a link to my previous post on the CPW/FS winter recreation research. I just noticed I hadn’t posted the paper then, here’s a link to an article and several papers.

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For more detail, here’s what the ROD for the new RG Forest Plan says about LCAS (page 29 of the ROD):

Southern Rockies Lynx Amendment
The selected alternative uses direction in the Southern Rockies Lynx Amendment Record of
Decision, as amended and modified. The Southern Rockies Lynx Amendment was completed
prior to the spruce beetle infestation and accounts for live, green forested habitat. Standards
VEG S7 (S-TEPC-2) and S-TEPC-3 were added to the land management plan to account for
the increased amount of standing, dead spruce-fir habitat.
The direction incorporates the most recently available information from a study on the use of
habitat by lynx on the Forest (Squires et al. 2018). The direction applies to lynx habitat on
National Forest System lands on the Rio Grande National Forest.
Canada lynx habitat in Colorado primarily occurs in the subalpine and upper montane forest
zones. Lynx show a preference for subalpine fir, Engelmann spruce, aspen, and lodgepole
pine forest types. Recent information demonstrates the close relationship of lynx on the
Forest to particular locations within the subalpine forest zone and their use of specialized
forest structure (Ivan et al. 2014, Squires et al. 2018). Other habitats used by reintroduced
lynx locally include spruce-fir/aspen associations and various riparian and riparian-associated
areas dominated by dense willow, particularly during the summer period (Shenk 2009).
The Southern Rockies Lynx Amendment identified four linkage areas on the Forest that
remain important areas of habitat connectivity. Connective habitat in the San Juan Mountains
is essential for facilitating movement of Canada lynx across the landscape. The plan provides
forestwide plan components that protect connectivity.
This direction identifies the high probability lynx use areas for the Forest and clarifies that
VEG S1 and VEG S2 from the Southern Rockies Lynx Amendment do not apply in lynx
analysis units outside the high probability lynx use areas. Standard VEG S7 provides
direction for salvage activities that occur in the high probability lynx use areas.
The biological opinion concluded that the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of the land
management plan are not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of lynx within the
contiguous United States distinct population segment. Endangered species implementing
regulation (50 CFR 402.14 (i)(6) does not require an incidental take statement for
programmatic level planning. Any incidental take resulting from any action subsequently
authorized, funded, or carried out under the program will be addressed in subsequent section
7 consultation, as appropriate.