The Unnatural Kingdom
If technology helps us save the wilderness,
will the wilderness still be wild?
By DANIEL DUANE
MARCH 11, 2016
IF you ever have the good fortune to see a Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, the
experience might go like this: On a sunny morning in Yosemite National
Park, you walk through alpine meadows and then up a ridge to the summit
of Mount Gibbs at 12,764 feet above sea level. You unwrap a chocolate bar
amid breathtaking views of mountain and desert and then you notice
movement below.
Binoculars reveal three sturdy ewes perched on a wall of rock,
accompanied by two lambs and a muscular ram. The sight fills you with awe
and also with gratitude for the national parks, forests and, yes,
environmental regulations that keep the American dream of wilderness
alive.
Unless your binoculars are unusually powerful, you are unlikely to
notice that many of those sheep wear collars manufactured by Lotek
Wireless of Newmarket, Ontario. You will, therefore, remain unaware that
GPS and satellite communications hardware affixed to those collars allows
wildlife managers in distant airconditioned rooms to track every move
made by those sheep. Like similar equipment attached to California
condors, pronghorn antelope, pythons, fruit bats, African wildebeest,
whitetailed eagles, growling grass frogs, feral camels and countless other
creatures, those collars are the only visible elements of the backlot
infrastructure that now puts and keeps so many animals in the wild.
Mostly hidden from view, this infrastructure is proliferating and
improving so quickly, thanks to advances in digital technology, that wildlife
managers are seizing more and more of nature’s relevant dials — predator
and prey alike — and turning those dials to keep nature looking the way we
want it to. Undeniably in the service of good, this technological revolution
in the human relationship to wildlife is also accelerating the ancient human
project of bringing the physical world under our control.
In the case of the Sierra bighorn, a genetically distinct subspecies of
wild sheep, there were likely more than a thousand before the 1849 gold
rush brought domestic sheep into the High Sierra. Those domestic sheep
carried diseases for which bighorn had no defense. In the late 1970s, a field
biologist named John Wehausen counted 250 survivors, none inside
Yosemite National Park. In 1979, Mr. Wehausen began a recovery effort
that included translocation of sheep back into the area around Mount
Gibbs, where there had once been a herd. But then a state moratorium on
the sport hunting of mountain lions caused an increase in lion numbers,
and some of those lions began to prey on bighorn. Then a mid1990s
drought depressed the deer population, causing even more lions to become
sheep specialists. Bighorn numbers crashed, and the total population
dropped to near 100. In 2000, the federal government listed the Sierra
bighorn under the Endangered Species Act.
The subsequent Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep Recovery Program, an
interagency collaboration, tacitly acknowledged that our biggest and best
protected wild ecosystems are so badly compromised that we can no longer
fence them off and hope for the best. Starting in the early 2000s, the
recovery program employed ancient and contemporary technology: Net
guns, fired from helicopters, were used to capture bighorn outfitted with
collars that carried both GPS and VHF radio transmitters; professional
hunters, meanwhile, tracked and darted every mountain lion in the area to
outfit them with collars that carried VHF radio transmitters. Biologists at
computer monitors began to watch bighorn movements. Anytime a lion
killed multiple bighorn in a short period of time, those hunters used VHF
radio telemetry and specially bred lion hounds to find and kill it.
Once bighorn herds grew large enough to spare members, biologists
moved them around — to establish new herds in longvacant habitat and to
inject biological diversity into smaller herds like the one on Mount Gibbs.
This was done through operations that read like science fiction about
humans trapped in a game reserve managed by alien overlords.
In March 2013, according to Tom Stephenson, the program director, a
fixedwing aircraft circled above an established herd on Mount Langley, a
14,026foot peak. Technicians onboard that airplane used radio telemetry
to guide a lowflying Hughes 500 helicopter toward five pregnant female
sheep known from previous DNA testing to carry diverse genetics. The
helicopter herded the pregnant sheep up a mountainside. A man leaned
from the helicopter and fired a net gun that tangled up one female after
another. Another man, known as a “mugger,” jumped out and tackled the
netted females, hobbled and blindfolded them, and then wrapped them in
bags that dangled from the underside of the helicopter.
The sheep were flown to a parking lot for blood draws that allowed
disease testing and more DNAsequencing, as well as ultrasound testing for
bodyfat analysis and skeletal measurements of their fetuses. Next, they
were trucked some 100 miles north, transferred into bags hanging below
another helicopter, flown up near Mount Gibbs and freed to give birth
among sheep they’d never met.
The view through those binoculars, in other words, lovely as it might
be, will also be a deeply human cultural product. People have always
manipulated the natural world. The most primitive farms are human
managed ecosystems; European aristocrats fenced off game reserves in the
Middle Ages; Western American land managers have argued for more than
a century over how to protect livestock from predators; and government
agencies have long dumped hatcheryraised trout into streams so that we
can have fun catching them. Radio collars and speciesrecovery projects
have been around for a while, too: In California alone, starting back in the
1980s, biologists saved both the peregrine falcon and the California condor
from extinction.
More and more, though, as we humans devour habitat, and as
hardworking biologists — thank heaven — use the best tools available to
protect whatever wild creatures remain, we approach that perhaps
inevitable time when every predatorprey interaction, every live birth and
every death in every species supported by the terrestrial biosphere, will be
monitored and manipulated by the human hive mind.
Conservation Metrics, for example, a California technology startup, is
developing software to process immense data sets — from remote camera
traps or, say, DNA samplers that might one day sit in wilderness streams
and filter DNA fragments as a way of counting species in a given watershed.
Mark Hebblewhite, a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana,
integrates realtime moisture and temperature data from satellites with
data from accelerometers attached to birds’ wings to keep tabs on bird
flocks in migration. Drone aircraft allow Tim Boucher, a Nature
Conservancy scientist, to map wilderness terrain down to an astonishing
fivecentimeter resolution.
As for manipulation, African game managers use similar drones to
herd wild elephants away from farms where they might get shot. A still
more intriguing example comes from Western Europe, where large
predators were mostly killed off by the Renaissance. Fifteen years ago,
biologists in Trentino, Italy, traveled to Slovenia to capture 10 European
brown bears, smaller cousins of grizzlies. These bears were released into the
Italian Alps with extraordinary success; 10 bears are now 50.
“It’s exciting to have these large, iconic carnivores roaming Central
Europe where they were extirpated centuries ago,” said Francesca Cagnacci,
a researcher on a followup project.
Predictably, a few of the brown bears in Italy began to eat farmers’
chickens, tear up commercial beehives and generally wreak havoc. Wildlife
managers initially responded by outfitting problem bears with collars that
allowed precise mapping of their movements. Then a pilot project tested
sensors placed around local farms and other temptations. These sensors
detect a signal broadcast by collars attached to bears and other wildlife, and
then communicate with one another in a wireless network that delivers
deterrents in random patterns: bear spray fired by hidden guns, followed
the next time by sirens and bright lights, and then by robotic dogs lurching
out of robotic doghouses accompanied by the prerecorded sound of barking
bear hounds. If all goes according to plan, the entire system — collars,
sensors, deterrents — will be operational at the end of the summer.
Like most people, I would miss the unmanipulated wild if it entirely
disappeared, and I like a point that Mr. Hebblewhite makes about
technological breakthroughs tempting us to overestimate our own
cleverness. Even with the latest digital tools, he notes, ecosystems, and
specifically the challenge of restoring broken ones, remain profoundly more
complex than any phenomenon or system that humans have ever mastered.
“Putting astronauts into space, that was child’s play, by comparison,” he
says. “The only thing rivaling an ecosystem for complexity is the human
brain.”
Mr. Hebblewhite also argues that conservation success stories like the
bighorn — or the return of wolves to Yellowstone — contribute to what he
calls the “Lego fallacy, the idea that ecosystems are like those Lego sets
where you build the Millennium Falcon and if a piece goes missing all you
have to do is find a replacement and pop it back in.”
Put another way — and a vast majority of conservationists would agree
— the best strategy is still just to avoid destroying habitat in the first place,
and sometimes to let developed places become wild again. Take the return
of wolves to Central Europe, made possible by the fact that humans no
longer hunt and trap and poison them with the same dedication they once
did. “All on their own, wolves found corridors to recolonize most of the Alps
and Central Europe,” Ms. Cagnacci says. “They are now in Germany,
Denmark and even close to Holland! It’s like: ‘What!? Wolves in Holland!’
And it happened because people left the mountains and the forests to live in
cities. It was an unconscious rewilding, and it is more successful than the
bear reintroduction.”
ONCE you break something and try to put it back together, you have to
decide what exactly you want the restored version to look like. If you
happen to be a government agency in a democracy, that means
reassembling ecosystems based on the desires of competing interest groups.
In the Rockies, where grizzlies, wolves and elk support tourism and real
estate values, wildlife managers who track all those animals have to
contend with homeowners who don’t want the family dog ripped in half and
hunters who wonder why, when it comes to eating elk, we’d want to give
wolves priority over humans in picking the tastiestlooking bulls. The Sierra
Nevada Bighorn Sheep Recovery Program eventually had to stop killing
mountain lions because too many Californians hated the idea of
government hunters shooting those beautiful cats, regardless of the benefit
to bighorn sheep. Decisions like these, based on public opinion, might
someday dictate the subtlest interactions between animals everywhere.
Still, surveillance and manipulation of the wild sure beats doing
nothing, especially when technology can make conservation easier. Take
the recording devices that have become the spyware of the backcountry. As
recently as a few years ago, researchers trying to count great gray owls in
Yosemite had to hike into the forest, hoot, wait for response hoots from
actual owls, and do their best to tell those owls apart. Now the same
researchers can set out sensors that record every noise in the forest.
Computers then crunch this data (a week’s worth runs to a jawdropping 23
terabytes) and identify the voices of distinct owls. Machinelearning
software may soon make this easier by identifying the sound, say, of a
particular female owl responding to a particular male bringing food to the
nest, or of a juvenile begging for food, either of which would indicate the
presence of a nesting pair.
Remote cameras have also proliferated in wilderness backcountry and
these, too, are a big help to wildlife conservation. In January 2015, for
example, the field biologists Stephanie Eyes and Toren Johnson snowshoed
out to retrieve the memory card from a motionsensor camera in an
obscure corner of Yosemite. According to Sarah Stock, a Yosemite biologist,
that camera had been baited with scent tucked into a white athletic sock
nailed to a tree, part of an effort to lure and identify rare highaltitude
carnivores like pine martens and wolverines.
THE pair pitched their tent, crawled in, plugged that memory card into
a small handheld camera, and saw images of the first Sierra Nevada red
fox known to have entered Yosemite National Park since 1916, when a
ranger killed the last one documented there. This recent sighting prompted
a petition to the federal government to list the socalled greater Yosemite
population of the Sierra Nevada red fox as threatened. That, in turn, set in
motion a recovery effort in the park, directed by Ms. Stock, that has already
deployed more cameras. With luck, these catsize canids might become a
common sight along Yosemite’s trails.
Then there is the tantalizing possibility raised by the GPS satellite that
picked up a signal from the collar of gray wolf OR7 as he wandered from
Oregon into California in 2011. There had not been a wolf sighting in
California since 1924, so OR7’s walkabout — and the fact that he wore a
collar — was responsible for the listing of gray wolves as a California
Endangered Species. OR7 eventually meandered back to Oregon to start a
family. He is now the breeding male of the socalled Rogue Pack in
Southern Oregon. Just last year, however, a wildlife surveillance camera
picked up images of a different wolf pack in Northern California. That
discovery led to the development of plans for protecting the pack and
accommodating wolves elsewhere in the state, should they proliferate.
In densely populated California, as wolf numbers grow, the obvious
next question will be, what about grizzly bears? Grizzlies are the California
state animal, after all, featured prominently on the California state flag —
despite the fact that no grizzly has been sighted in California since wolves
disappeared, in 1924. Bernie Tershy, a conservation biologist at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and a cofounder of Conservation
Metrics, points out that California has immense reaches of plausible grizzly
habitat, public sentiment that favors wildlife conservation and a robust
technology industry. If huge predatory carnivores can be made to coexist
with humans anywhere, it has to be here. Unsightly collars on all those
predators might well diminish the romance, but that would be a small price
to pay for the pleasure of their enduring company on this earth.
“I loved working in really remote parts of the world where the wildlife
was there just because it was there and no one was managing it,” says Mr.
Tershy, who spent years as a field researcher. “And I love seeing bears
without collars, but they’re going to have to get along in densely populated
areas just like people do.”
Daniel Duane, a contributing editor for Men’s Journal, is
writing a book about the Sierra Nevada.
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A version of this oped appears in print on March 13, 2016, on page SR1 of the New York
edition with the headline: The Unnatural Kingdom.