What's wrong with the Jaguar Recovery Plan?

Que interesante- If you haven't seen the article Jaguars Don't Live Here Anymore, it's well worth a read. In it, Dr. Alan Rabinowitz lays out the definitive critique of current jaguar politics in the U.S.

When I recently blogged about jaguar recovery, I lamented the dearth of information about jaguar habitat requirements in the southwest. But I still thought that the recovery plan would be considered a conservation victory. Rabinowitz, who has studied jaguars and several other species of large cats for nearly 30 years, presents a different take. He argues that the southwestern U.S. is marginal jaguar habitat, and as such, is not capable of supporting a viable population.

This is an important point in light of the much-anticipated, and much-litigated, development of a jaguar recovery plan- announced earlier this month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Full on recovery of the species could involve long, drawn-out, expensive efforts like re-introducing the cats to places where it would be hard, if not impossible, for them to thrive.

If it's not feasible to establish jaguar populations in this country, this use of funds, resources, personnel, and jaguars could be misdirected. Dr. Rabinowtz suggests that our energies could be better spent conserving jaguar habitat in areas where the animals do live- south of our border. Viable jaguar populations span from Mexico to Argentina, and the cats face a myriad of threats along the way; habitat fragmentation, persecution by humans, deforestation, political borders.....

If the creation of a federal recovery plan encourages friends of the jaguar in the U.S. to focus on an unrealistic goal instead of helping conserve what is left of jaguar habitat, maybe it isn't such a good thing... I stand corrected.

Photo Caption: Macho B, February 2008

Leading by Example- Green Solar Development in California

If you've been following the debates over development of renewable energy in southern California, you've heard it all; NIMBY, PIMBY, Feinstein this, monument that. You've read all about "green" energy development and conservationists pitted against one another in the expansive, sunny arena known as the Mojave Desert.

But have you heard about eSolar? They're taking the lead in developing solar in environmentally conscientious ways. They built a "concentrated" solar thermal power plant using advanced technology and smart planning to leave a smaller footprint than anyone else in the biz. And they developed the plant on previously disturbed private lands rather than destroying pristine desert habitat. Develop solar and preserve natural landscapes? Yes, it can be done. May the other developers follow in their (small) footprints.

Keeping Elk off the Road- Wildlife Crossings Coming to I-40 Soon

In Arizona, hundreds of elk are hit by cars every year. Locals are well aware of the situation--they see the carnage on the sides of the roads every day. Now a stretch of I-40 near Flagstaff is about to get safer. AGFD has joined forces with the ADOT, FHWA, US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the Arizona Elk Society to build wildlife crossings along the road, allowing elk to safely pass underneath. The crossings will reduce collisions between elk and vehicles and provide connectivity for elk, along with other wildlife, between wildlands on either side of the interstate.

According to research by USGS biologists, I-40 serves as a barrier more formidable than the Grand Canyon to certain wildlife species, including mountain lions.

Even if you're not concerned about things like habitat connectivity, you should be concerned about wildlife-vehicle collisions. The resulting accidents are not only deadly to animals, but costly for drivers and tax payers alike. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that the average cost of an individual elk-vehicle accident to society is $18,561 --the number includes a monetary value estimate of $3,000 per elk. I have no idea how they came up with that, but even if you don't buy it, the remaining 15K per accident adds up.

Arizona Game and Fish biologists are getting high tech, just as they have for similar projects on I-17 and SR 260. They're capturing and fitting elk with GPS collars to determine exactly where crossings are needed the most. Then ADOT will incorporate the crossings into plans for improvements to the interstate. This a great combination of technology and biology that will benefit elk, people, and other wildlife that will use the crossings.

Can Jaguar Populations Recover in the US?

Everyone loves jaguars. Except perhaps central american pig farmers, and early American settlers. The settlers' campaigns to eradicate these big cats were so effective that its not surprising many modern Americans don't even know that the jaguar used to roam these hills.

In pre-Columbian America, Jaguars spanned across the southwest from Texas to California. Its hard to say what the northernmost reach of their range was, but in northern Arizona they were found as far north as the Grand Canyon, where records indicate a female and 2 cubs were killed in 1943. Aside from occasional records documenting their deaths, there's very little historical information about the jaguars of the US. How large were their individual territories? What was their main source of prey? Did they need to live near water? Did they migrate seasonally? How many were there? The questions remain unanswered to this day.

While I was researching mountain lion ecology at the Grand Canyon, by far the most common question that people asked me was, "How many mountain lions are there?"....How many are there in the canyon at this moment, or how many generally or historically reside inside the National Park, or are how many use the Park as part of their territory at least some of the time? No matter how you clarify the question, I couldn't whittle the answer down to a number. People ask this question with the inherent assumptions that A) there must be a proven, reliable way to get this information, B) that someone must have done it, and C) they must still be doing it so that we have a current count.

Censusing wild animals is not a straightforward task, unless the population is so critically endangered that the last remaining individuals are known, named, tracked, and under constant vigilance. When biologists gather information about the habitat requirements of a species (what kind of vegetation or land cover do they prefer, are they constrained to certain elevations, terrain or slope, proximity to water, distance from roads, abundance of prey....on and on), they can use that information to determine how much land meets those criteria. Coupled with statistics about how much land is needed to support an individual or a population, they can do some math to determine how many individuals a given tract of land could support. Theoretically.

For example, if we knew what constituted "good" black bear habitat in Northern Arizona, and the approximate home range requirements for bears in this area, we could use maps and data to determine how much black bear habitat exists within say, Grand Canyon National Park. Then we could walk around making pompous statements like "Given current conditions, Grand Canyon National Park could support as many as X bears." But even that would be a long shot.

Not only are we lacking the data needed to make those kinds of inferences, but those algorithms don't take into account population dynamics, current threats, mortality and natality rates, fragmentation, isolation, or even history. Given that grizzly bears were decimated here, and black bears nearly so, we don't even know if the population has recovered enough to have reached any kind of equilibrium. In short, we don't know how many bears are in Grand Canyon National Park, or northern Arizona for that matter. Yet agencies responsible for their management have been known to toss out numbers like so much confetti at a wedding. Generally its a good bet that anyone who has concrete numbers rolling off their tongue pulled those numbers straight out of their arse.

The state of information about jaguars in the U.S. is in even worse shape. Things were looking up early in the century when remote cameras snapped photos of jaguars in southern Arizona. People got excited. The cats were here. Then people got excited again in February 2009, when biologists fitted a jaguar with a satellite collar promising a multitude of fine-scale data about habitat use. This was the virtual jackpot. But days later the situation was even more grim than before. Macho B was dead.

The agencies followed up Macho B's death with a press conference, a witchhunt, and a memorial. The ceremony in Tucson morphed into a bit of a protest, with advocates publicly demanding the creation of a federal recovery plan for jaguars. The plight of Macho B has generated a lot of attention, and rightly so. He was the last known wild jaguar in the United States. Upon his death, the southwest suffered a major loss. People love jaguars.

The public outcry, backed by threats, lawsuits, and demands for retribution- lit a fire under US Fish and Wildlife Service officials who recently announced that they're going to develop a recovery plan for the jaguar. This is big news. This should be a victory for the species whose needs, and mere existence in the US, have long gone ignored. But its only a first step.

According to Wikipedia, for any permanent population to thrive, protection from killing, an adequate prey base, and connectivity with Mexican populations are essential. That means work for government officials, conservationists, and biologists alike. Agencies need to draft regulations for protecting jaguars, biologists need to learn more about their habitat and prey requirements, and somebody needs to figure out how to make the border permeable for wildlife and connected ecosystems in the face of the Great Wall of Mexico.

We would also need to educate people about living with jaguars before they get here. Just look at the way we kill every mountain lion that wanders within half a mile of a house, city, horse, or dares to show its hide somewhere its not expected. Now imagine that was an even bigger cat, about whom we know even less, and you can see that the threat posed by freaked-out citizens would be pretty great.

An integral part of any recovery plan is designating critical habitat for the species. That could be hard to do given the above mentioned dearth of information about jaguar habitat requirements in the US, which means more research is needed about whether the southwest is good jaguar habitat at all.

The Arizona Game and Fish department is currently soliciting input for the revision of the state wildlife action plan. This could be an opportunity for the public to ask the state to take a proactive stance and develop a solid jaguar management plan that dictates the need for further research; collaboration with other states, countries, and jaguar experts; and a plan for addressing conflicts and mitigating threats to the species.

While Macho B's death was a major blow to Arizona's jaguar population, a federal recovery plan could be a major boon toward better management of the species in the US. But the recovery plan alone won't "pave the way" for jaguars. We've got lots more to do; legislate, research, educate, collaborate, and more. This is our opportunity to start planning for coexisting with jaguars. Its time we stop pointing fingers and start laying the groundwork for the future. Afterall, people love jaguars.

Two Lions in the Hand Is Better than....Trapping Lions Part 3

(Trapping Lions Part 3- click here to read Part 2 first)

While we were waiting for P4, aka P-Daddy, to succumb to the sedatives we blowdarted him with minutes earlier, I decided to check the next trap in our line. We had seen a second set of lion tracks headed in that direction. I didn't want to miss anything, so I bypassed the winding canyon and scrambled over a ridge to the west. The nearest trapsite was at the top of a tributary where the monsoon rains had carved out a nice little spot that lions liked to mark over the centuries...

The snow was coming down, melting as it hit the ground. I trekked through the mud across the plateau toward the trapsite. If there was another lion in a trap, I didn't want to waste any time getting to it with the wet weather.

We took the weather into account when we laid out our trapline. The traps were set in places where an animal could seek shelter, underneath trees or a rock ledges. I made my way through the towering Ponderosa Pines lining the tributary and scrambled into a little box that flowed during floods. The foot-hold snare was anchored by a small boulder in a concave rock wal, eroded away over the past few millennia by waterfalls that come to life during the violent monsoon storms. The trap was empty. I de-rigged the snare and set the safety. I wouldn't want P4 to get caught here after we release him.

I scrambled back to Rock Cave along the rim so I could peer into the canyon where I'd last seen the lion tracks, but didn't see anything. Lions know how to stay out of sight. When I got back to Rock Cave, P4 was sprawled out on the slope in front of the cave. He'd rolled over on his back with his front legsup in the air, definitely sedated. Eric and I approached and we released his paw from the snare. We carried him to the back of the cave to protect his warm, now defenseless body from the weather.

We laid P4 on a thermarest to keep him war, and started. We checked his vitals, measured his length- from his massive head to the black tip of his tail. We estimated his age based on his gums and weighed him by tying his paws together with rope attached to a hanging scale tied to a log that was about 10 feet long. Eric and I each hoisted up a side and took a reading from the scale.

We chose the largest GPS collar we had and affixed it securely around his neck, but with enough room for some "play." You don't want to choke them. We'd been saving this collar for a big male that could accommodate it. It had a larger-than-usual battery, meaning it would last longer than the standard one year. To date, we'd collared 3 other lions. Two out of 3 of those collars functioned properly. The third collar was on a young male called P2. It stopped working about the day we placed it on him, and we hadn't heard from it, or him, again.

The GPS collar would attempt a GPS location several times a day for up to two years. It was up to me to radio-track P4 and download the stored GPS points remotely to a receiver once a month. I would search for a radio signal on foot, by car, and from a fixed-wing that circled up, down, and around the Grand Canyon, making me give up eating breakfast all together. With the GPS locations in the receiver, I could upload them to my laptop and map them using ArcGIS, and set out on foot to investigate "clusters," areas where several GPS points near eachother indicated that he settled down to feed on a kill, take a nap, lie in the sun or do whatever lions do... it was up to me to find out.

Over time the GPS data would paint a picture of the lion's home range, tell us what habitat he prefers, how large his range is, where he hunts successfully, what he's eating, whether his range overlaps that of other collared lions, where he crosses roads, and whether he uses the same trails and areas that hikers, visitors, or residents of the park do. Someday, they might even tell us where and how he dies.

We hung out in close quarters under the rock outcrop for over an hour., then gave P4 an antidote to counteract the anesthesia and started packing up our gear. Normally, this would be the post-climactic part of the day. Trapping done. We would check any remaining traps, clean the equipment, and head home to clean ourselves up and celebrate our catch with the traditional tequila. On this kind of special occasion, we were known to order a disappointingly bland overpriced pizza from "We Cook," a luxury in this remote corner of the world.

The tequila was Eric's tradition, he thought it brought luck. He wrote on the bottles with a sharpie to indicate how much we drank in anticipation of, or to mark the occasion of, catching each lion. The empties stood guard over the top of the refrigerator in my Park Service trailer. We'd invite friends and neighbors over to pour over the photos and relate our trapping story... But this day was not over. We hiked across the canyon so we'd be well placed to see P4 off. He hopped up on all four paws, gave a cursory glance around, tail swishing, and swiftly disappeared, bounding up slope and out of sight. We wished him well and started heading west. We still had another trap at Bob Cave to check.

Click here to go to Part 4...

Photo caption: Emily and P4, March 2005, Rock Cave.

Trapping Lions at the Grand Canyon, Part 2

(If this is your first time here, click here to start at Part 1)....

I was hiking along the eastern edge of a small plateau- well, small compared to the Grand Canyon anyway. I was following the ridge above a canyon on my left that would soon curve sharply to the right. If I kept going in the direction I was headed, I would end up at the tip of the plateau, with Rock Cave about 20 meters below me.

I wanted to find a vantage point that didn't put me quite so close to the cave, at least not right away. I hiked down into the canyon, crossed the drainage, and started a up the other side so that I was about mid-slope on the far side of the canyon, that would put me in a prime position to see under the ledge that makes the cave without having to climb right in.

All my senses were in high gear. My rapid pulse was deafening inside my head. I already knew that there were mountain lions around the bend, but not how many. Hopefully one would be in the cave, caught securely in a foot-hold snare. But where would the other(s?) be.... Just minutes earlier, I could hear the scratchy, echoey caterwauling of mountain lions calling to eachother. The sounds were like nothing I've heard before. They seemed to echo almost before they began.

But the came to an abrupt halt just as soon as I put my lips up to my hand-held radio to call my partner. In the presence of their greatest predator, they hushed.

I know, you're thinking, "mountain lions are solitary animals, why would there be more than one?" Lions tend to travel solo, unless they're still with their mother, have recently left their mother (young siblings will sometimes hang when they first leave their mom), or they're mating. A pair of mating lions will romp around together for a couple of days, copulating over one hundred times a day. Honestly. The first explanation that came to me was that this could be a family of lions. I have some photos of a mother and three cubs taken with a remote camera earlier that winter at Pine Cave, near enough that they could conceivably use this area too. I hope it's mom in the trap, I hope it's mom in the trap....

As I headed toward the bend, I was scouring the canyon for any sign of movement. I didn't know how I would react if I came face to face with a group of lions. I've probably seen lions in the wild upwards of 15 times, but they've all in traps at the time. Some were in foot-hold snares, some had been run up trees by dogs, others were in cage traps- there was one that crawled into a small cage made for bobcats that I got to help with when I was visiting a friend in southern California.

I spent all of my time day in and day out tracking lions, documenting their kills, their tracks, their latrines, taking their pictures with remote cameras and sometimes even video, but I never saw the lions themselves. Which is normal, their job is to hide. They are silent predators whose evolutionary advantage is their tendency to ambush their prey. They blend into their surroundings and stay out of sight. Well, most of the time. Theoretically, if you see a mountain lion, it's most likely not about to attack you. If you do get attacked, chances are you'll never see it coming. Generally speaking. Of course there are always exceptions to the rules.

I've read all the literature about how to react when you see a mountain lion. Don't run, make yourself look big, throw rocks and sticks, yada yada, but none of the literature addresses how to react when you see a bunch of mountain lions. Like if, for example, you walk into the midst of an adult female with three yearling cubs.

I walked softly, cautiously around the bend, barely even breathing, with all of my attention focused on the opposite slope. Suddenly I heard a noise as my eyes were directed to a creature moving so fast it was nothing but a blur across the canyon- a mountain lion quickly retreating from the slope in front of the overhang toward the back of Rock Cave. It happened so fast that all I really saw were the muscular hind quarters and a long tail swishing as the cat struggled to balance while it had one paw in the snare.

I saw only the one lion, and it looked big-- too big to be either the mother or any of her cubs. My theory about the family being in the area was presumably way off. What, or who, had I heard then?

I hiked back toward a two-track road to meet up with Eric and help him carry in the capture equipment. When you capture a wild animal, you become responsible for its welfare. You're taking its life into your hands. There are plenty of things that could go wrong. The animal could get hurt in the trap, they could have an averse reaction to the drugs, they could become hypothermic or hyperthermic, they could be attacked by another predator while they're in a sedated state. All kinds of unforseeable accidents could occur while their judgment or physical abilities are impaired. I heard about one study where a lion wandered off before its sedative had fully worn off. The lion fell head first into a small puddle only a few inches deep, passed out, and drowned.

We didn't take these risks lightly. Eric was a wildlife capture specialist with over 600 successful captures under his belt. He had an excellent track record with keeping captured animals alive, which is actually kind of a big deal. I mean, if anything goes wrong, you could end up in a Macho B scenario . Even worse, you'd have to live with yourself afterwards. Me? I was still in training as far as I was concerned.

We carried a large blanket we had sewn handles onto that was good for laying the lion on a clean surface and for carrying him; a thermarest to keep the lion off the cold ground on that chilly morning; a medical kit that contained everything from the sedatives to a thermometer for taking the lion's temperature, anally; the blowpipe and darts; cameras; a hanging scale; capture forms, and more.

We set our gear down in the canyon and hiked up toward Rock Cave to get a good look at the lion. We needed to gauge the lion's size and approximate weight so that we could prep a couple of darts with an appropriate dose of our mixture of med-ket to sedate him. We hiked back down to prep the darts. The cat in the snare was a large male, so large in fact, that we immediately dubbed him "P-Daddy."

Each cat we captured was given an alphanumberic code for name, starting with "P," for puma, and ending with a number that indicated which number capture this was for us on this particular study. Eric wouldn't hear of actually naming them, he thought it was better not to- in order to try to not to get too attached. Scientists must remain objective, or at least try to anyway. In this study, P-Daddy would technically be called P4. Eric and I had captured other lions together in various parts of California, but those are other studies all together.

Rock Cave wasn't really a cave at all, but a large rock overhang jutting out of the slope, boulders closing in on the west side that made it into a cave-like enclosure. As we advanced uphill, we split up slightly, hiking towards separate sides of the cave opening, with me in the lead. Eric had the blowpipe loaded and ready. My job was to try to keep the lion's attention focused on me, so that Eric would have a good clean shot while his eyes were focused on me. I walked closer, little by little. Here, kitty kitty.

P4 put on a good show. He growled and snarled, he laid his ears back (that's lion speak for "back off"), and he crouched back a bit so that he could spring forward to try to scare me off. I've always heard that old adage that wild animals are more scared of us than we are of them, and I believe it, even in regards to lions. They just might have a different way of showing fear than we've been taught to believe. A cat in a trap really wants you to leave it alone, and when they realize they can't get away, they act mean and tough to try to scare you away. Eric used a blowpipe to dart P4 in the right shoulder. He lunged toward Eric. He didn't get very far, he could only cover was about a 6-foot radius from where the snare was anchored to the cave floor before the cable stopped him.

We backed off, heading down into the canyon where we could keep an eye on P4 from a distance, but far enough away for him to relax and let the sedative take effect. I've heard that an animal's adrenaline can sometimes reduce the efficacy of the sedative, so its better not to keep them agitatedk. On our way up the slope, we hadn't taken our eyes off of P4. But on the way down, Eric and I were scanning the ground. He still didn't quite believe that I had heard lions vocalizing earlier that morning. That is, until he noticed the second set of tracks.

"Hey," he said, "whose tracks are these?"

There were two sets of lion tracks in the snow at our feet, one set belonging to P4, squared away in the cave, and the other belonged to a cat who apparently headed west down into the canyon. Eric volunteered to stay with P4 and nominated me to head down the canyon, following the tracks in the snow....

See part 3 for more....

Photo caption: P4 puts on a show. March 2005, Rock Cave.

Is Environmentally-Friendly Energy Development Possible?

The DOE would like to help make it so. According to this article, they're doling out funds in support of the Western Governor's Association to help 11 western states plan for developing renewable energy resources without harming the environment. Each state will receive a chunk of funding earmarked specifically for identifying important wildlife habitat and corridors. Developing energy while protecting resources- Now that's smart planning!