A federal district court judge has preliminary enjoined the Tongass’ largest timber sale because the Forest Service relied on “condition-based analysis” in its EIS. In addition to stopping logging, the court’s decision puts a wrench in the Forest Service’s proposal to add condition-based analysis to its NEPA rules.
Condition-based analysis treats acres as fungible; location doesn’t matter. From the Forest Service and timber industry’s perspective, a board foot may be a board foot, but for wildlife, recreation, scenery, and most everything else, location does matter: “the Project EIS does not identify individual harvest units; by only identifying broad areas within which harvest may occur, it does not fully explain to the public how or where actual timber activities will affect localized habitats.”
The decision stops logging until the court issues its final merits ruling, which is promised by March 31, 2020.
Some of the major changes that will be implemented once the 60-day objection period is complete will include going from 17 management areas to nine, larger management areas. The purpose of the decrease in management areas is so that the Forest Service can manage areas in a more organized manner. The plan also altered the Southern Rockies Lynx Amendment to include the dead tree habitat. The original amendment only included green and healthy forest. This change would now include the dead and beetle kill tree habitat in the Rio Grande National Forest. The plan also includes two wildfire management areas, a smaller portion of new recommended wilderness areas near the Sangre De Cristo Mountains and tree harvesting plans that will be spread out over several years to help utilize the beetle kill in the area.
The Inyo National Forest is releasing their final revised land management plan and environmental impact statement for review and possible objections (press release).
The plan recognizes that fire is integral to forest health, while still taking proactive measures to protect communities and mitigate smoke impacts, which affects residents, visitors, and tourism. The plan also strikes a balance of treating fuels, protecting our communities from wildfire, and allowing fire to provide ecological benefits, including fuel reduction, when safe to do so.
Earlier versions of these draft documents were released in 2016. We have since revised the draft documents to address changed conditions across the landscape, including extensive tree mortality, and other concerns brought up through public participation.
The Carson National Forest is taking comments on its draft plan and EIS (commentary from New Mexico Wild).
The protection and restoration of watersheds, wetlands and riparian areas will ensure that our forests continue to provide cold, clean water. It will benefit our fish and wildlife and maintain habitat connections across the landscape. This is one place where the draft forest plan falls short – protections for wetlands and riparian areas are too few and fail to fully recognize the benefits of intermittent and ephemeral waters and their intimate connection to water that flows on the surface.
The Salmon-Challis National Forest is going to prepare separate revised forest plans (article). NFMA requires a forest plan for “each unit of the National Forest System,” so there may be a reason the forest supervisor “can’t think of another forest that’s gone this route.” I think NFMA might also answer his question about “whether a full-on revision of both plans needs to occur or whether revisions can be made by amending the plans” (the former).
Mark said he has learned that some people on the Challis end of the forest feel that “they were left behind,” when the forests were combined and there was no longer a forest supervisor based in Challis. The supervisor is based in Salmon, with two district rangers based in Challis. Some people have said they feel the emphasis on the forest and its management is focused on the Salmon side because of where personnel are based.
While the public has little recourse to protest what happens on private land in the high Crazies, Cleveland said, the Forest Service could incorporate protections for public lands in the range into the revised Custer Gallatin Forest plan… It would be a lot less likely for them to build a road if the public sections get recommended wilderness designation.
The National Forests and Grasslands in Texas are proposing to amend their forest plan to identify areas available for oil and gas leasing (press release). This will be done in accordance with the amendments to the 2012 Planning Rule that will likely require them to address ecological integrity and species viability.
The USDA Forest Service, National Forest and Grasslands in Texas (NFGT), is beginning the preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS) to analyze and disclose the effects of identifying NFGT lands administratively available for oil and gas leasing. The proposed action will identify lands available for leasing, leasing stipulations, and necessary amendments to the 1996 NFGT Forest Plan.
Over the weekend, Wilderness Watch’s George Nickas penned the following oped in the Durango Herald.
Wilderness represents a commitment to humility
By George Nickas, Wilderness Watch
Bill Worf, the Forest Service’s first wilderness program leader and Wilderness Watch’s founder, liked to tell the story of when, shortly after the Wilderness Act passed in 1964, engineers at the Forest Service Development and Technology Center expressed interest in developing a “silent” chainsaw.
Their rationale was that if the newly passed wilderness bill prohibited noisy machines, a really well muffled chainsaw would pass muster since only the operator would hear it.
Bill told them not to bother – the Wilderness Act didn’t ban motorized equipment simply because it made noise, but rather because it represented a level of technology that was not in keeping with the ideals of the Wilderness Act.
Bill would have known. He served on the Forest Service task force that wrote the regulations and policies for implementing the Wilderness Act. Prior to that, as forest supervisor overseeing the Bridger Wilderness in northwest Wyoming, he had the opportunity to lead wilderness bill author and chief lobbyist Howard Zahniser on a trip into the Bridger.
Bill credited his time with Zahniser with helping him to understand that wilderness isn’t merely an undeveloped recreation area, but a place we accept on its own terms – a commitment to humility and restraint. This means using only the lightest touch when allowing for the public uses (recreation, science, education, etc.) wilderness provides.
Congress prohibited chainsaws because motorized tools are the antithesis of restraint – they allow humans to transform the landscape quickly and easily to meet our ends rather than transforming our own attitudes and desires to accommodate the landscape.
Chainsaws embody the attitude that our convenience, impatience and demands come first, that no place is beyond the reach of our attempts to dominate and control.
Authorizing chainsaws to clear trails, as the Forest Service regional forester for Colorado and Wyoming recently did, for the South San Juan and Weminuche wildernesses, strikes a blow to this foundational tenet of the Wilderness Act.
That’s why Wilderness Watch and our allies challenged his decision in court.
But there’s another reason the decision to allow chainsaw use should concern all who care about Wilderness.
The regional forester’s rationale – not enough trail crews to clear trails the traditional way – was essentially an admission that the Forest Service has failed to maintain an adequately staffed wilderness program. At a moment’s notice, the agency routinely assembles hundreds of firefighters, planes and heavy equipment to attack even a small wildfire, but from its nearly 30,000-plus employees and $5 billion budget, it can’t pull together a handful of trained trail crews to help clear the trails in the Weminuche and South San Juan wildernesses.
Why is that?
About two decades ago, the Forest Service effectively abandoned its wilderness program and outsourced the job to volunteers.
It began by diverting wilderness funds to pay the salaries of desk-bound bureaucrats, putting “wilderness” in their job descriptions to make the transfer seem legit. But the main effort was on creating “partnerships” with volunteer groups to mask that the wilderness program was being gutted.
So today, while many wildernesses have volunteer “friends” groups trying to keep trails open or plug holes elsewhere, the agency’s program of a professionally trained and skilled field-going wilderness force has – to borrow a phrase from Bob Marshall – faded like a south-facing snowbank under a June sun.
The real lesson from the proposed chainsaw assault on the wilderness isn’t that the Forest Service is ignoring the Wilderness Act – that’s hardly news at all.
The most important takeaway is that Forest Service leadership has so decimated the agency’s wilderness program that using chainsaws to clear trails is even being discussed.
George Nickas is the executive director of Wilderness Watch, a national conservation organization dedicated to protecting the lands and waters in the National Wilderness Preservation System, headquartered in Missoula, Montana.
It’s fall again in the Rocky Mountain National Forests. Just today I’ve seen (many) hunter camps of multiple RV’s, wall tents, and 4-wheelers. I’ve seen people on horseback rounding up cattle to take them to their winter pasture, and watched a log processor delimbing and stacking logs from a roadside hazard tree project.
People are bringing home elk, deer, firewood, and experiences of hiking, biking, fishing, hunting horseback riding and ATV-ing, as well as driving and leaf-peeping. Plus there’s some prescribed burning going on and wildland fire use, as in the photo above. It seems like it shouldn’t all work, but somehow it (mostly) does.
I’m here experiencing all this, and will be back to The Smokey Wire Sept. 30.
This article by Jason Blevins is my favorite article so far, as it explains things clearly, shows a variety of nuanced perspectives, and even asks the BLM folks what they are doing, as well as having a link to the order itself.
In the order, Bernhardt cited a desire to reduce management burdens and clarify “regulatory uncertainty” around e-bike rules on public land. No one can argue with that. State and federal regulations governing e-bikes do not always align in Colorado.
e-bikes used to be considered off-road vehicles
Colorado lawmakers in 2017 embraced a national standard, establishing three-classes of pedal-equipped e-bikes, based on speed and how the rider engages an electric motor no larger than 750 watts, or roughly one horsepower.
Class 1 e-bikes engage only when the rider is pedaling and have a top speed of 20 mph.
Class 2 e-bikes engage with a throttle and have a top speed of 20 mph.
Class 3 e-bikes engage when pedaled and have a top speed of 28 mph.
The 2017 state law allows Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes on paths where bikes are allowed to travel and gives local jurisdictions the ability to prohibit e-bikes.
Federal land managers have regulated e-bikes as motorized vehicles. The BLM, prior to Bernhardt’s order, classified e-bikes as “off-road vehicles.” The Forest Service in 2015 and again in 2017 defined e-bikes as “motorized bicycles.” Both those designations emphasized the motor in e-bikes and kept e-bikes off trails designated for nonmotorized activity.
……………..
Here’s what IMBA thinks..they seem pretty reasonable to me.
The Colorado-based International Mountain Bicycling Association, or IMBA, heard this summer that an e-bike rule for the BLM and NPS was pending.
What surprised the group was the lack of differentiation between the three classes of e-bikes, essentially lumping in throttle-charged bikes with bikes that deliver power only when pedaled.
IMBA has supported Class 1 e-bikes on trails, as long as local land managers and mountain bikers are involved in the process of reviewing and approving that access, said IMBA’s executive director and legendary mountain biker David Wiens.
But most important, Wiens said, “is we don’t want to see access threatened by the introduction of Class 1 bikes on trails. As soon as access becomes an issue, we are no longer supportive.”
IMBA, while supporting a public process for allowing pedal-assisted e-bikes on trails, thinks they should be officially designated differently than mountain bikes. So those signs with the icons for bikes, hikers, horses, motorbikes and Jeeps should include an e-bike icon.
“We don’t want to see traditional nonmotorized mountain bikes and Class 1 e-bikes combined into a single category,” Wiens said. “We want them to remain distinct. That gives land managers options to exclude them in some places.”
It seems like maybe IMBA is saying some might be OK, and the folks below are saying none are OK so new trails have to be developed, but I’m not really sure.
Juli Slivka, the conservation director for Carbondale’s Wilderness Workshop, said in a statement that while e-bikes are a “great form of transportation” and should have a place on public lands, her group opposes e-bikes on backcountry trails designed for hiking, horseback riding and mountain biking.
“We’ll be working with our recreation and conservation partners to ensure that motorized e-bikes are not permitted on nonmotorized trails and that appropriate trails for e-bikes are developed in a way that protects backcountry recreation experiences and public lands resources,” she said.
More pragmatically, it seems like Bernhardt’s order asks the agencies to develop rules. As rule-making veterans know, there are required opportunities for public comment in any rule-making process.
b) Within 30 days of the date of this Order, submit a report to the Secretary including:
i) A summary of the policy changes enacted in response to this Order;
ii) A summary of any laws or regulations that prohibit the full adoption of the policy described by this Order; and
iii) A timeline to seek public comment on changing any regulation described above.
c) Within 30 days of the date of this Order, provide appropriate public guidance regarding the use of e-bikes on public lands within units of the National Park System, National
Wildlife Refuge System, lands managed by BLM, and lands managed by BOR.
So it sounds like there will be public comment on the change, and that this is interim guidance until the completion of the rule-making (which, let’s face it may well drag along post-election). It will be interesting to see what BLM comes up with in 30 days, especially since…
BLM spokesman Jayson Barangan said the agency in Colorado “is waiting on further guidance and direction on how to implement the order on the ground.” He did not know when that guidance might come..
I think Experimental Forests and Ranges are scientifically way cool.
Everyone has heard of basic and applied sciences. Generally, basic is thought to be better by scientists, and applied, more useful by others. But why is this, and how does it affect how we affect the practice of science today? First, let’s return to Peter Medawar.
The hard and fast distinction between pure and applied science is a quaint relic of the days when it was widely and authoritatively believed that axioms and generative ideas of some privileged sciences (the ‘Pure’ Sciences strictly so called) were known with certainty by intuition or revelation, while the Applied Sciences grew out of merely empirical observations concerning ‘matters of fact or existence’. The distinction between pure and applied science persisted in Victorian and Edwardian times as the basis of a class distinction between activities that did or did not become a gentleman (‘Pure Science’ being a genteel occupation and ‘Applied Science’ having disreputable associations with manual work or with trade). This class distinction is now widely believed to have been rather damaging to this country.
Medawar also argued strongly in the 70’s that basic and applied funding decisions needed to be made by scientists, and not users of science. Here’s a link to a history paper on this. It did not go without notice by others that the position of scientist must make all funding decisions about science is a bit self-serving for something funded by tax dollars. But what does this have to do with us today?
A few months ago, I attended a Forest Service Partners shindig and ran into a person in Forest Service R&D. I asked him how things were going, and he said Congress was on his back about not funding useful research. Of course, this has nothing to do with FS R&D as currently constituted, but has been an ongoing tension for as long as there has been serious levels of public funding for scientific research, and not just in the US. (This is my version of history and others are invited to add their own perspectives and experiences).
The Fund for Rural America was an attempt by Congress to convince researchers to do useful things for rural Americans. You can check out the provisions of the 1996 Farm Bill here (note that the same conversation was close to 25 years ago):
(C) USE OF GRANT.—
(i) IN GENERAL.—A grant made under this paragraph may be used by a grantee for 1 or more of
the following uses:
(I) Outcome-oriented research at the discovery end of the spectrum to provide breakthrough results.
(II) Exploratory and advanced development and technology with well-identified outcomes.
(III) A national, regional, or multi-State program oriented primarily toward extension programs and education programs demonstrating and supporting the competitiveness of United States
agriculture.
Notice the “outcome-oriented.”
Yet, let’s look at the other forces pushing toward basic research. Here’s a 2014 report from the National Academy of Sciences.
USDA has played a key role in supporting extramural research for agriculture since the passage of the Hatch Act in 1887, but its use of competitive funding as a mechanism to support extramural research began more recently (see Figure 3-1). A peer-review competitive grants program was proposed as a means of moving a publicly funded agricultural research portfolio toward the more basic end of the R&D spectrum.2 A 1989 National Research Council report stated that “there is ample justification for increased allocations for the [competitive] grants program to a level that would approximate 20 percent of the USDA’s research budget, at least one half of which would be for basic research related to agriculture” (NRC, 1989, pp. 49–50).
The National Research Council study (part of the National Academies, what I call the Temple of Science) pushed toward more basic research. Why 50% of the total? I’m sure they have a rationale, but not sure that the Congress would agree. So again, we see the Science Establishment going for more basic (and potentially less utility and accountability) and Congress later pushing back asking public funds to have more accountability (outcome-oriented).
I also had a ring-side seat for part of a transition. At one time USDA had (more) formula funds that were given to land grant schools to figure out useful things. Often for forest science, the Dean would get together users and others to help prioritize research via discussions at the state level, at the best. Or perhaps give it to his buddies or use it as trade for something, at the worst. But then USDA-CSREES now NIFA hired a bunch of folks from the National Science Foundation, who came with the idea that only scientists can judge whether research is worth doing, and the best way is to bring them together for panels in DC. The FRA staff, including me, even got in trouble with the Powers that Were for allowing a user on a panel.
Meanwhile, back at the Forest Service, Forest Service scientists were less funded, and told to look for funding elsewhere than the Forest Service, which necessarily led them to focus on what other scientists who run grant programs think is cool.
If we go back to the history paper above, we can see that politicians can see the self-interest of scientists in this, but it has nevertheless been difficult for politicians (even appropriators!) and the public to get a grip on it. Of course, agriculture, health, nutrition, engineering, and different technologies have different communities, funding sources and approaches, so the applied sciences, like science in general, are not one thing.
If something is useful, then framing the question (as we’ve seen, extremely important in figuring out which disciplines and approaches are helpful) should definitely be done including users (in our case, practitioners, land managers and so on). I’m not saying that researchers don’t do this through their own personal commitment- I’m saying that the systems in place do not necessarily support it and could be changed to support it.
Another tendency is for departments to centralize scientists (e.g. USGS), which can also drive them farther away from research that helps their agency colleagues. IMHO the Forest Service was wise, politically astute, and/or lucky to retain their own research scientists, even if it leads sometimes to intramural drama. A small price to pay for a modicum of independence from the Science Establishment.
This article from the Colorado Springs Gazette talks about a bipartisan bill to encourage mining of rare metal deposits. They reported on a Colorado School of Mines professor, Morgan Bazilion, testifying to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee.
Bazilian is director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.
He testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee as it considers legislation that creates incentives for U.S. mining companies to extract more of the minerals to make rechargeable batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and consumer products.
Manufacturing them often requires use of rare earth elements such as lithium, cobalt and yttrium.
Most rare earth minerals used in the U.S. come from China, where regulatory and environmental obstacles are less stringent and costly. Minerals commonly are extracted from open pit mines that are unlikely to win permits from U.S. regulatory agencies.
Nevertheless, new clean energy technologies cannot do without them, Bazilian said.
“The future energy system will be far more mineral- and metal-intensive than it is today,” he told the Senate committee. “Many of these advanced technologies require minerals and metals with particular properties that have few to no current substitutes.”
U.S. Geological Survey studies show large rare metal deposits in Colorado, particularly in the Wet Mountains and San Juan Mountains.
A leading legislative proposal in Congress to encourage more U.S. development of rare earth minerals is the American Mineral and Security Act, S. 1317.
It would require the Interior Department to maintain a list of minerals critical to U.S. economic prosperity and national security. Regulatory agencies also would be charged with improving processes to find, develop and use the minerals for industry.
You can see if there are rare earth minerals spotted by the USGS on these maps. Which even an old GIS-impaired person can use. Some appear to be on FS, although to what extent the FS would regulate vs. it being a locatable mineral, I don’t know.
I think it’s interesting because it’s one of a list of products (1) is something people need and (2) it can be produced from US lands but (3) the choice is to pay folks in other countries with potentially less stringent environmental regulation, and who may not always be inclined to sell them to us. On the pyramid of pristinity, of course, mining is possibly the lowest.
It seems to me that a rational approach would be to suggest:
(1) our country’s demand and use is the ultimate source of environmental damage, not the producer. By buying resources from other countries, we are implicitly accepting our responsibility for their environmental damage. This decoupling of responsibility seems to be assumed.
(2) there is some utility to being diverse and resilient to market forces and not dependent on other countries (especially when there are relatively few).
(3) if we produce, we can regulate in a way that is meaningful to us,
(4) if we produce, we get jobs (seemingly high paying), taxes, and if it’s on federal land, $ back to the feds (and for oil and gas, the states).
(5) to me, it’s conceptually different if we have it and don’t produce it, compared to not having the resource at all, which necessitates trade as a source.
For those of us who remember the oil crises of the past, we may not understand all the ins and outs of the geopolitical consequences of dependence for today, but our experience has not been good.
But what if we decided to take environmental responsibility for our own demand (in cases where we have that resource), and produce what we consume ourselves, or at least enough to make us resilient to market and geopolitical forces?
And what should be the role that federal land would play in that? Politician wise, we have the current Gov. of Colorado who called for less regulating of solar and wind on federal land, and we have current Presidential candidates who want to stop oil and gas leasing on federal land. Should the openness to activities on federal land depend on The Pyramid of Pristinity or the Pyramid of Climate Utility?
The 2012 Planning Rule requires that forest plan revisions address wildlife habitat connectivity. In fact it is one of the “dominant ecological characteristics” that must occur with the “natural range of variation” in order to meet the substantive regulatory requirement for “ecological integrity” and the NFMA statutory requirement for “plant and animal diversity.” The Rio Grande National Forest doesn’t seem to want to take this seriously in its revised forest plan, as recounted here:
“At the federal level, New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall and others have proposed a Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act to create more tools for protecting migration routes. Our neighbors in New Mexico passed a state wildlife corridors act earlier this year. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has emphasized the need to ratchet up awareness and protection of corridors. And even former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke issued an order to conserve big-game migration corridors and winter range.
“Hence, with all of this activity agitating for increased concern and elevated action to protect wildlife corridors, the new management plan just announced by the Rio Grande National Forest is astonishingly tone deaf. Our national forest neighbors to the east finalized their long-awaited 20-year vision and ignored widespread calls for action to elevate wildlife corridors.
“It’s a disappointing example of compartmentalization taken to the extreme. Immediately adjacent across the state line in New Mexico, the Carson National Forest unveiled its draft plan and highlighted extraordinary wildlife values there around San Antonio Mountain with a dedicated Wildlife Management Area. But it’s as though an administrative wall exists at the state line.”
“Having the Interior Department and state wildlife agencies and elected officials and some national forests all calling for action to protect wildlife corridors isn’t enough if one critical player, like the Rio Grande National Forest, is missing in action.”
It only takes one bad actor to ruin a wildlife corridor. That is a reason why connectivity was given such a high profile in national forest planning for diversity (I was there). The Rio Grand is currently taking objections to its final revised plan, which will be reviewed by someone at the regional level to determine if the Forest is meeting its connectivity/diversity obligations. However, this is a cross-regional problem (Region 2 and Region 3), which is why the national office of the Forest Service needs to look at why forests in two regions can’t get their acts together on what conditions are needed for connectivity.
Maybe they should also take a look at a recent example in Region 4. This is a case where a state-recognized wildlife corridor led to changes in a trail project on the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
“The now-scrapped trail could have interfered specifically with the Red Desert-to-Hoback mule deer migration corridor, which was the first route designated by the state of Wyoming. An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 deer pass through the narrow bottleneck at the Fremont Lake outflow, according to a 2016 assessment of the migration path.”
‘The “desired future conditions” — a U.S. Forest Service equivalent for zoning — for where the trail would have gone are “developed and administrative sites” and “special use/recreation.” Those classifications would have allowed for new trails, and the Bridger-Teton’s forest plan easily predates the discovery of the migration route, which wasn’t until 2013. Outside of those processes, the forest sought input before proceeding with the plans.”
It’s great that the project decision is considering this new information and the new state designation. I hope the Forest also recognizes the implications for any future projects in this area where it looks like they have decided that the desired condition is now something else. The discovery of the migration route should have led to another look at the forest plan desired condition, and a plan amendment if they are deciding that it is no longer appropriate based on this new information.
Heather Richards, E&E News reporter
Published: Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Environmental groups have upended the Interior Department’s plans to cut down most of a scraggly forest covering about 30,000 acres of southern Utah within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The Interior Board of Land Appeals ruled yesterday that the Bureau of Land Management failed to consider how cutting down pinyon and Utah juniper trees would affect migratory birds. The appeals board also found BLM’s plan to use “non-native” seed — a part of its habitat improvement plans — was a mistake, as it conflicted with the agency’s management guidelines.
The board bucked other complaints in the appeal, such as conservationists’ argument that BLM failed to properly account for a climate change impact from bringing down the forest. That argument has been fairly effective for environmental groups in recent months for protests and lawsuits of oil and gas development on public land.
National Geographic a couple of weeks ago (with a misleading photo of a lone pinyon pine growing from a rock like a bonzai tree):
The U.S. is moving forward with a plan to create new cattle pasture and prevent fires despite what scientists say is meager environmental review.
Machine tracks in the sand frame the site near Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a harbinger of its vanishing solitude. The federal government plans to remove an unprecedented number of trees here, it says to reduce fire risk, improve habitat for greater sage grouse, and increase forage for cattle and a world-renowned trophy-hunting deer herd.
And it plans to do it fast. The Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct a thorough environmental analysis of the project that considered the impacts of cutting trees on the climate, said scientists who appealed to a federal review board to stop it. If approved, the effort could define how the nation’s most sensitive public lands are managed for a generation.
Some interesting wildlife research from New Scientist. The article is about Australia and cane toads, but had some tidbits of interest to us.
Also in 2011, the US Fish & Wildlife Service began a trial involving endangered Mexican wolves, the rarest subspecies of grey wolf in North America. Like lions, these wolves have a taste for livestock that incurs the ire of farmers. This time there was a different problem. “In the captive facility, we were able to generate an aversion for wolves to livestock bait,” says Colby Gardner of the Mexican wolf recovery programme. “But once we let them go, we couldn’t say whether or not they were killing livestock.” Without hard evidence that the experiment was working, the initiative eventually fell by the wayside.
Nevertheless, a recent project leaves no doubt that conditioned taste aversion has great potential in conservation. Researchers in Richard Golightly’s lab at Humboldt State University, California, were looking for a way to stop Steller’s jays eating the eggs of the endangered marbled murrelet. Pia Gabriel had a crazy idea of training the clever corvids to dislike the eggs, says Golightly. “Then we researched it a bit and realised maybe it wasn’t so crazy.”
So they painted small chicken eggs to mimic the green-blue hue of murrelet eggs and injected them with a nausea-inducing chemical. Sure enough, after taking the bait and vomiting, jays learned to avoid the eggs. The team then began scattering fake murrelet eggs throughout California’s Santa Cruz mountains, where the murrelets nest. The results were dramatic. Once aversion kicked in, it seemed to persist – jays even appeared to train their offspring to keep away from murrelet eggs. In 2017, after four years, the project ended because the murrelet population had recovered from near-collapse.
So I looked the murrelets up and found this interesting link about park management and how the park folks worked on messaging to people combined with taste aversion.
At Redwood National and State Parks, adaptive management principles have been utilized to conserve the endangered marbled murrelet, seabirds which nest in old-growth forest. Marbled murrelets spend much of the year feeding in waters along the Pacific northwest coast. Their nesting behavior was essentially unknown until the 1970s when a nest was discovered high in a redwood
tree. It is now known that the majority of California’s marbled murrelets nest within Redwood National and State Parks (RNSP). In general, logging is a major threat to this species. However, protected areas such as RNSP have experienced unexplained marbled murrelet population declines.
Recently, park-permitted research using nest cameras revealed high rates of nest predation by corvids (members of the crow family), primarily Steller’s jays (Cyancitta stelleri; Marzluff and
Erik Neatherlin 2006). In addition, elevated Steller’s jay densities, and subsequent elevated rates of predation on marbled murrelets, were shown to occur near high-use visitor areas (e.g., campgrounds and picnic areas) because of supplemental food supplied by park visitors (Marzluff and Erik Neatherlin 2006). An increasingly intensive corvid management program that uses visitor
education, wildlife-proofing campground infrastructure, and conditioned taste aversion (CTA)has significantly changed over the past seven years, based on feedback from biological and sociological monitoring data as well as numerous targeted scientific studies.
I found this article about using aversion with Mexican wolves but don’t know how that turned out. Sounds like perhaps none of the trained wolves were released.
