WSB: Thermal drones help biologists dart deer

March 24, 2025 by Joshua Rapp Learn

William Dunker knew where the deer was despite the thick bush and rough terrain on Afognak Island in Alaska. Even so, it was a difficult operation. The Sitka black-tailed deer on the Kodiak Archipelago just southwest of Anchorage were skittish around humans. If Dunker darted this one, it might run into a nearby waterway and drown as the tranquilizer took effect. Or it could run up a steep cliff and fall off, getting injured or even meeting its end.

Making matters worse, it was October, and the island was full of large Kodiak bears (Ursus arctos middendorffi) eager to put on fat for the coming winter hibernation. A tranquilized deer would make an easy meal for a hungry bear. So might Dunker himself.

Dunker, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and his team were tranquilizing the animals so they could place GPS collars on them and learn more about their seasonal movement and foraging behavior. Once he was close enough to a deer, he would often make fawn distress calls in an effort to elicit a response that would reveal the deer’s location. But he was worried that predators may also home in on the sound. “He felt he was just bait, going into the field,” said Shannon Finnegan, who was working with Koniag Native Corporation at the time.

But despite being in the truck, Finnegan had an extra set of eyes in the sky—in the form of a thermal drone—watching for bears and guiding Dunker to the deer to dart.

“It just made the whole procedure more efficient,” Finnegan said.

Shannon Finnegan operates a drone in the Kodiak Archipelago. Credit: Shannon Finnegan

Spooking Sitka

The Sitka black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis) population in the Kodiak Archipelago is important for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Alaskans, who harvest the animals for meat and for sport. Scientists already know its population fluctuates each year based on climate conditions and other factors. Wildlife managers want to learn more about the best ways to respond to these population swings. For example, could they modify habitat to lower the impact of unsuitable weather years on the species?

But first, they needed to learn more about the population. Finnegan, Dunker and their colleagues published their findings in a study recently in the Wildlife Society Bulletin.

They set out by road in a truck on Afognak Island with the goal of fitting 25 individuals with GPS collars. They didn’t have much luck, initially—they couldn’t find many deer to target, and those they did see got spooked easily, taking off before Dunker could dart them.

“After three days, we were getting very disheartened,” Finnegan said.

But then, the team realized that they had a drone. Finnegan had an operator’s license, but she wasn’t super enthusiastic about its prospects. “We kind of fell into the drone world reluctantly on my part,” she said. “I thought they were a bit overrated.”

Nonetheless, the team gave it a try. “As soon as we started doing that, our whole operation changed,” Finnegan said.

Suddenly, they could see that deer were all around them—the thick vegetation found on much of the island just hid them. “There were a lot more animals near us than we realized,” she said.

Out of the 10 deer they initially collared for their study, the team ended up capturing eight with the help of the thermal drone.

“We’ve had a lot more success capturing the deer faster than they had been able to do in the southeast [of Alaska],” she said.

Drone advantages

The team fitted a quadcopter—a drone with four helicopter-like propellers—with a thermal camera, so not only could they spot deer, but they could also be selective on the type they wanted to target for their study. For example, they could focus in on adult females, pregnant females or adult males. They could take a GPS signal of the deer and guide Dunker on the ground via radio as he closed in. Finnegan could also tell him to get the dart ready once he was close enough, even if he couldn’t yet see the target.

Once Dunker was close enough, he conducted fawn distress calls, which would occasionally elicit a response. And after he took the shot, Finnegan could follow which way the deer ran. Usually, wildlife managers wait 10 minutes before approaching the animal after the dart hits, but sometimes the animal goes down more quickly. By following it via drone, Finnegan could notify Dunker exactly when it was safe to approach.

Drone tracking could also help in other situations. Deer will sometimes run into a river or up a steep cliff, which could present serious danger for the animal if they pass out in a deep waterway or fall to their death. While that didn’t happen in this study, Finnegan said that drone operators could warn people on the ground if something like this may be happening. The tracker in the field could then try to scare the animal off in another, safer direction or get to the animal before it drowns.

Drones helped researchers profile the kind of deer they wanted to trap for collaring, such as this female. Credit: Shannon Finnegan

Having eyes in the sky could also help keep the team safe from bears. Finnegan recalls that Dunker would sometimes ask five or six times if there were any bears as he homed in on a target deer. From the air, she could sweep the area while the team conducted its fieldwork on the sedated deer, watching for predators until the deer came back to consciousness.

Finnegan said that thermal drones might have other applications in wildlife management, too. It could help track problem bears that enter towns in Alaska, for example, making it safer for the professionals who set out to subdue them. She also points to efforts in Oregon where wildlife managers have been using drones to haze wolves (Canis lupus) away from livestock.

She was hesitant to use the tool in the beginning, but she hopes that, like her, others will get more comfortable with the gear.

“That mindset is starting to change,” she said.

This article features research that was published in a TWS peer-reviewed journal. Individual online access to all TWS journal articles is a benefit of membership. Join TWS now to read the latest in wildlife research.  

‘State of the Birds’ reports trouble in U.S. species

March 24, 2025 by The Wildlife Society

A new report examining bird populations across the U.S. has found dozens of species are in trouble. The North American Bird Conservation Initiative, “a forum of government agencies, private organizations and bird initiatives,” compiled the “2025 State of the Birds” report, which examined more than 700 bird species in the U.S. Of these, experts listed 229 that were of high or moderate concern. They placed some 42 species on “red alert” due to their conservation status, including the greater prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) due to its low genetic diversity and lack of connectivity between populations. “Bird populations are continuing to decline, and one-third of species in the U.S. require urgent conservation attention,” report co-author Amanda Rodewald, an ecologist at Cornell University, told Scientific American. The report also found drought in parts of the country has hit many duck species hard.

Read more at Scientific American.

JWM: To keep sea otters safe, stay away

March 21, 2025 by Dana Kobilinsky

While some people may find it fun to watch sea otters climb up their kayaks, keeping their distance will better help the population to thrive.

“In California, people and sea otters like the same places to live,” said Heather Barrett, a sea otter biologist and science communications director for Sea Otter Savvy, a research nonprofit that focuses on sea otter conservation, specifically human-sea otter conflicts, such as disturbance. But while people love sea otters, “there’s a cost of cute,” she continued.

On coastlines in California, like Monterey Bay, plenty of different-sized boats come into close proximity to wildlife, including protected species of concern, like the southern sea otter (Enhydra lutris nereis). Barrett and her colleagues wondered what the energetic cost was for sea otters responding to disturbances from vessels that got too close. And how do you define too close?

Sea otters spend most of their time at sea but haul out sometimes to keep warm. They also blow warm air into their fur every time they groom to maintain their insulation. “They basically create an air suit in their fur,” she said.

To maintain a high body temperature, they also burn through calories quickly—sea otters have the highest metabolic rate relative to their size of any marine mammal. They rest a lot to conserve their energy, but they wake up hungry. “Because of the fact that they’re burning through so many calories, they have a voracious appetite,” she said. “They eat over a quarter of their body weight every day.”

Barrett led a study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management as part of her master’s thesis looking at how their human disturbances affected their ability to perform some of these important activities.

To conduct the study, Barrett and her colleagues took a hands-off approach. With help from Sea Otter Savvy community scientists, the team observed southern sea otters at three sites along the coast of California, including Monterey, Moss Landing and Morro Bay, for five years, watching how close vessels got to the animals. They also noted whether the sea otters became active or stayed inactive in response to vessels.

Then, the researchers ran a model to determine at what distances most otters were disturbed as well as how different sizes of boats affected them. They also looked at differences in responses for adult males, females and females with large pups, and then coupled those results with previously recorded sea otter metabolic rates to calculate energetic costs.

In Monterey, overall human disturbance increased sea otters’ energetic costs by 7.2% for adult males and 5.4% for females with or without pups. The Moss Landing site saw 5.8% for males, 4.4% for females and 4.3% for females with pups. Finally, Moro Bay saw energetic costs increase by 5.2%, 4% and 3.9%, respectively.

Barrett said it’s important to note that male values can appear higher as males are larger animals. What’s more, for females with large pups, the values don’t take into account that they live at a 66% higher cost than the energetic baseline of females with no pups. When considering this, the team further calculated the proportional daily increase of a female with a large pup relative to the female with no pup. They estimated an increase of 8.8% in additional energetic costs for a female with a large pup at Cannery Row in Monterey. Additional costs like these can have physical impacts on reproductive females, such as lower body condition and overall health.

The team found that on average, the likelihood of a group of sea otters becoming disturbed was less than 10% when small crafts were more than 100 feet—or eight kayak lengths—away. They started showing evidence of becoming active at 60 feet away. This type of disturbance interferes with the otters’ ability to rest and conserve energy they need for activities like nursing and finding food for pups.

Barrett acknowledged a limitation in her study. For example, if an otter became alert but not active, the team counted that as inactive, which Barrett said could be an area for future study. “Alert is technically an inactive behavior, but that could still have a really big stress response,” Barrett said.

She said it’s not always realistic to give otters wide berth, especially in waterways like rivers or estuaries. “At some places in California, it’s physically impossible to stay 100 feet away,” she said. “We’re dealing with reality and waterways that may be only 80 feet wide.” As a result, Barrett stressed remaining vigilant of sea otters’ behavior and adjusting where your boat is going if you sense disturbance. She recommended following Sea Otter Savvy’s guidelines of staying over five kayak lengths away.

Overall, Barrett said she wants tourists to be excited about sea otters, but distance matters. “Are you capable of respecting them more than you love them?” she asked.

This article features research that was published in a TWS peer-reviewed journal. Individual online access to all TWS journal articles is a benefit of membership.  Join TWS now to read the latest in wildlife research.  

Hummingbird chicks mimic poisonous caterpillar

March 21, 2025 by The Wildlife Society

For the first time, scientists have documented a hummingbird chick that may mimic a poisonous caterpillar to dissuade hungry predators. In 2024, researchers stumbled upon a one-day-old white-necked Jacobin chick (Florisuga mellivora) in Soberanía National Park outside Panama City, Panama. The baby bird was covered in long brown feathers, which at this point appeared like the hair of several poisonous caterpillar species in the region that can be dangerous or even lethal to predators. When approached, the chick wagged its head back and forth in the same way that many caterpillars do when threatened. As most hummingbirds hatch naked, researchers were surprised to see the chick covered in feathers. They were also surprised to see the shaking behavior, which researchers hadn’t previously reported in any other hummingbird species. “We know so little about what nesting birds do in the tropics,” said Jay Falk, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and University of Colorado Boulder, in a press release. “But if we put more effort into observing the natural world, we might discover these kinds of behaviors are very common.”

Read more at CU Boulder Today.

NEPA loses its regs

March 20, 2025 by Cameron J. Kovach

On Jan. 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law. As a procedural law at just over four pages long (original text), it’s hard to imagine Congress at the time fully comprehending and anticipating the crucial importance of NEPA over the next 55 years. However, a look at the bill’s 1969 Congressional Conference Report reveals just how cognizant they were.

In the conference report, Sen. Henry Jackson states, “Mr. President, it is my view that S. 1075 [NEPA], as passed by the Senate and now, as agreed upon by the conference committee, is the most important and far-reaching environmental and conservation measure ever enacted by the Congress.” He further elaborates that it “is a congressional declaration that we do not intend, as a government or as a people, to initiate actions which endanger the continued existence or the health of mankind: That we will not intentionally initiate actions which will do irreparable damage to the air, land and water which support life on earth.”

From an implementation standpoint, NEPA is simple. It requires all federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions before making decisions. It does not require that agencies choose the least damaging option—only that they consider the environmental effects of their proposed action or inaction. For The Wildlife Society, NEPA provides a crucial path to ensuring that agencies consider the best available science and likely consequences from a range of management options when making decisions that affect wildlife and natural resources.

For the first eight years of NEPA, the law had no associated regulations. That changed when then-President Jimmy Carter issued Executive Order 11991, which directed the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to “issue regulations to federal agencies for the implementation of the procedural provisions of the Act.” Since the original text of NEPA was quite sparse, the 1978 regulations created by CEQ established many elements now core to the NEPA process. These include environmental assessments, required analysis of a no-action alternative and required analysis of mitigation measures. A congressional amendment embedded within the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 added most of these regulatory elements to the statutory text of NEPA.

Challenging NEPA regulations

Since the 2023 NEPA amendments, multiple federal courts have found that CEQ has no rulemaking authority. In a ruling on Feb. 3, 2025, on the case Iowa et al. v. CEQ, the judge vacated a 2024 CEQ regulation and opined that “NEPA is not ambiguous. The plain text of the statute does not give CEQ authority to issue binding regulations. NEPA only authorizes CEQ to make recommendations to the president…. For 40 years, CEQ’s authority has been assumed, but these assumptions by the courts and others do not constitute binding precedent.”

While the ruling on that case only applied to vacating the 2024 CEQ regulation, it swung the door wide open to broader changes regarding the authority of CEQ to enact regulatory changes. Then, in walked President Trump. On his first day in office for his second term, President Trump issued an Executive Order titled Unleashing American Energy. Within that order, which calls for the “immediate review of all agency actions that potentially burden the development of domestic energy resources,” President Trump directs CEQ to develop new guidance for implementing NEPA and propose rescinding CEQ’s remaining NEPA regulations within 30 days.

By Feb. 19, 2025, CEQ had issued a memorandum to the heads of all federal agencies on the implementation of NEPA, and by Feb. 25, CEQ had published in the Federal Register an interim final rule to remove all CEQ regulations for implementing NEPA from the Code of Federal Regulations. Ultimately, none of these actions have any effect on the actual text of the law, which remains intact. However, both the memorandum and the interim final rule will significantly alter the implementation of one of our nation’s most significant environmental laws, potentially dawning a new era for NEPA.

According to the publication of the interim final rule, a comment period will remain open until the rule becomes effective on Mar. 27, 2025.  However, the authors of the rule emphasize that “CEQ may not possess the authority to issue rules binding upon agencies” and that the “interim final rule is a procedural and ministerial step to implement the president’s directive.” Further, they state that while they encourage public comment, they will “not undertake any reconsideration of the substance” of the rules being removed, nor are they soliciting specific comments on the content of those rules. Since CEQ is operating under the belief that they do not—nor did they ever—have rulemaking authority, the agency is refusing to “take any position on the agency’s prior interpretations of NEPA’s procedural requirements.”

What happens next?

Unless a court finds that CEQ’s interpretation of the statute is flawed, agencies moving forward will rely solely on the amended NEPA text as the primary authority when conducting environmental assessments. Without centralized and binding CEQ regulations, each agency will now be responsible for interpreting and implementing its own NEPA processes as consistent with the law, though they may still consider the nonbinding guidance issued by CEQ. This could become a challenge as agencies will not only be adjusting to a new NEPA framework but also doing so amid ongoing staff shortages and workforce restructuring. Further, without a specific agency responsible for evolving and refining the regulatory framework of NEPA, it will now remain static until Congress either authorizes rulemaking authority for CEQ or updates the law through amendments as needed.     

What about the new guidance from CEQ? The CEQ memorandum seeks to assist federal agencies in implementing NEPA by providing guidance on establishing or revising agency procedures to meet the statute’s requirements. Though nonbinding, the guidance document and the executive order upon which it is predicated contain concerning language about the future role of science in NEPA implementation. Agencies are encouraged to modify or adopt implementing procedures that take “into account the agency’s unique authorities and mission.” They are also to prioritize “efficiency and certainty over any other policy objectives” and prioritize environmental documents by the entity proposing the project. In addition, the document guides agencies to establish a minimum federal financial threshold for what constitutes major federal actions warranting NEPA review and to exclude “environmental justice analysis,” cumulative effects of proposed actions and “methodologies that are arbitrary or ideologically motivated.” Finally, the document states agencies should “adhere to only the relevant legislated requirements for environmental considerations” and “guarantee that all executive departments and agencies provide opportunity for public comment and rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific analysis.”

Counter to TWS’ Position Statement on the use of Science in Policy and Management Decisions, the new CEQ guidance and executive order place emphasis on achieving a specific action without clear consideration of the best available science, the cumulative impacts of the action, or the interdisciplinary assessments needed to gauge the impacts of an action on the quality of the human environment. Emphasis on methodologies that are not arbitrary or ideologically motivated also introduces subjective qualifications to what constitutes science that agencies can consider. This could result in agencies ignoring science that contradicts a desired outcome, especially concerning climate change, which is typically assessed at the cumulative level and often framed as being tied to political ideology. Further, the notion of establishing a minimum federal financial threshold for what constitutes a major federal action opens the door to minimally regulated, privately funded actions on public land, avoiding NEPA assessment altogether. Even the reference to public comment and rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific analysis in the same sentence raises concerns. During the first Trump Administration, TWS commented on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opening up a Journal of Wildlife Management study to public comment. The expansion of the term “peer review” to potentially include general public comment opens pathways for individuals to promote alternative “hypotheses” that have no empirical or theoretical support in order to raise doubts about sound scientific information coming through the rigorous process of scientific peer review.      

So, while the text of NEPA remains intact, the stated direction of the Trump Administration and the explicit guidance of CEQ indicate a desire to curtail and qualify science used in environmental assessments, thus raising the question of whether implementation of NEPA in the future will continue to meet Congress’ original intent to “not intentionally initiate actions which will do irreparable damage to the air, land, and water.” Only time will tell the true effect of these proposed changes and their impact on the legacy of NEPA. In the meantime, these actions are the initial steps of a developing and troubling trend regarding deregulation of the federal government as signaled in the Feb. 19, 2025 executive order titled Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Deregulatory Initiative.  

Zoologist rediscovers grasshopper species believed extinct

March 20, 2025 by The Wildlife Society

A zoologist has rediscovered a grasshopper thought to be extinct after its last documented sighting in 1946. The Appalachian grasshopper (Appalachia hebardi) is a flightless species about 1.5 inches long that camouflages with its surroundings—perhaps part of the reason people haven’t seen it in so long. Scientists had only documented it in five counties in Virginia and in the neighboring states of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Andrew Rapp, a zoologist with the Natural Heritage Program of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, had seen some reports on iNaturalist that he thought could have been the species. He went out to investigate, and after surveying several locations, he found a female. “It’s very restricted in its range, but I think that there were just not enough surveys in the right particular habitat, the right time of year,” Rapp told the News & Observer. The Virginia agency announced the discovery alongside reports of a new species of cave beetle and other finds.

Read more at the News & Observer.

Bird strategies connected to different climate challenges

March 19, 2025 by Dana Kobilinsky

Some birds live fast and die young. Others live life in the slow lane and reach ripe ages. Researchers found climate affects birds that use both of these strategies in different ways. These findings have implications for birds’ ability to persist as the globe warms.

“The question now is, which ones have the capacity to adapt fast enough, or to shift their ranges and move to track the changing climate, and some of them may not,” said Kelly Kapsar, a data scientist with the Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution and Macrosystems (IBEEM) at the Michigan State University.

Kapsar, a postdoctoral researcher with IBEEM at the time, co-authored a study with an interdisciplinary team of scientists published in Ecology Letters—all part of the MSU Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program—tapping into publicly available data sources like remote sensing data on climate and bird distribution data around the world. Their goal was to find out how climate relates to these different life history strategies in nonmigratory birds.

“We’re trying to find these deep, evolutionary signatures in terms of birds’ life history,” she said. “In order to get those big signatures, you have to have a large sample and look globally to see through all of the noise and find those patterns.”

But manually finding those patterns wasn’t easy, so Kapsar and her colleagues turned to supercomputers at the university to help them out and organize the massive amounts of data. Then, the team used a statistical model to determine how climate is associated with long-lived and short-lived species.

When it came to climate, the researchers paid attention to inter- and intra-annual variability. Inter-annual variability refers to changes between years, like a cold year versus a hot year. Intra-annual variability refers to changes within years, like having cold winters and warm summers.

The team found that inter-annual variability was associated with a slower pace of life. These species, like the sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), can hedge their bets and skip reproduction one year if the weather isn’t suitable. In areas with high intra-annual variability, species like backyard cardinals live fast. “They get all their reproducing done,” Kapsar said.

Kaspar said birds with both strategies are experiencing a faster rate of change than they have experienced in their evolutionary time. In addition, they are facing extreme climatic events like heat waves or droughts. Unlike migratory birds that can move to track food or avoid the stress of a cold winter, nonmigratory species don’t have that option. For example, long-lived species adapt more slowly than short-lived birds. On the other hand, species that only live a few years are out of luck if they experience multiple bad years in a row.

“We can rely on this basic understanding about how they’re distributed today, with respect to inter-annual and intra-annual variability that helps us make insights about the fact that some are going to be way more susceptible than others, just because they inherently don’t have the capacity to respond quickly enough,” Kapsar said.

There’s also variability within species, said Phoebe Zarnetske, a professor at Michigan State University and director of IBEEM who led the study. For example, tropical species that have less variation in body size are more susceptible to environmental change, she said. “Species that are all basically the same size or have very similar trait values for a certain trait don’t have as much capacity to withstand these changes,” she said. “Whereas species that are made up of individuals with a wide range of body sizes, for example, there are more individuals that can deal with conditions in one part of the range versus the other.”

In addition to Kapsar and Zarnetske, the study was led by Casey Youngflesh and co-authored by Adriana Uscanga, Peter Williams, Jeffrey Doser, Lala Kounta.

Targeted efforts bring species back

March 19, 2025 by The Wildlife Society

Targeted conservation actions are bringing species back from the brink of extinction, despite a worldwide biodiversity crisis. Researchers gathered data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List to determine how different species have moved categories following conservation measures. In a study published in PLOS Biology, they found that conservation actions have positively affected listed species. “We found that almost all the species that have moved from a more threatened category to a less threatened category have benefitted from some sort of conservation measures,” said lead author Ashley Simkins, a PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, in a press release. “It’s a strong signal that conservation works.” However, they did find that some of these successes are because the species live in isolated areas where conservation actions can be fully implemented. What’s more, the researchers found that six times more species are declining than improving.

Read the study in PLOS Biology.

TWS2024: Free-ranging farm dogs can harm native wildlife in India

March 18, 2025 by Joshua Rapp Learn

Free-ranging dogs can have an outsized impact on wildlife in India—they outcompete smaller native canids like Indian foxes and prey on the eggs of critically endangered species like the great Indian bustard.

“Domestic dogs are the world’s most abundant and widespread carnivores,” said TWS member Soham Mehta, a master’s student at Columbia University in New York City.

There are an estimated 60 million dogs in India, and they detrimentally affect an estimated 80 native species, including 31 considered threatened and four that the International Union for Conservation of Nature considers critically endangered.

But not all free-ranging domestic dogs behave the same way. Mehta, who was an undergraduate student at the University of Vermont at the time, wanted to take a closer look at how farm dogs and village dogs may use the land differently—and ultimately, have different effects on the native ecosystem around them.

In ongoing work at the 2024 TWS Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, Mehta piggybacked off of work conducted in Shirsuphal, a village in Maharashtra in central west India, by Abi Vanak from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Vanak has studied free-ranging dogs there for years and has an ongoing, long-term project there GPS-collaring dogs. “He is the dog guy,” Mehta said.

When a dog isn’t just a dog

For his honors thesis, Mehta examined data from 31 dogs collared with GPS devices in 2018. Of these, 20 were farm dogs and 11 were village dogs. They categorized dogs based on the way that they interact with humans, and the categories aren’t always mutually exclusive. Village dogs are typically unowned dogs that live inside a village and subsist on human resources there like garbage. Farm dogs, on the other hand, are loosely domesticated by farmers, who feed them but not necessarily consistently the way that North American pet owners might. The dogs in this category are often kept to protect livestock and deter crop-raiding wildlife, and farm dogs often range rather freely.

Village dogs like this one in Shirsuphal don’t stray as widely into wild areas. Credit: Soham Mehta/University of Vermont/Columbia University

The area around Shirsuphal doesn’t have any protected areas, but it does have a lot of wild grasslands interspersed by farmlands and villages.

Analysis of the data revealed that farm dogs ranged much more widely than village dogs, which mostly stayed in the urban areas. The farm dogs wouldn’t just stay within the confines of the farm areas—they would often foray into grasslands without human homes.

“Farm dogs are more likely to be a threat to wildlife [when] they freely move between farmlands and grasslands,” Mehta said.

Free-ranging dogs often roam outside of farm areas. Credit: Soham Mehta/University of Vermont/Columbia University

Dogs threaten native Indian wildlife

This is likely a problem for native species like Indian foxes (Vulpes bengalensis), which rely on these grasslands. Dogs also prey on Indian gazelles (Gazella bennettii) in these areas.

A better understanding of these differences is important for wildlife managers seeking to limit the impacts of free-ranging dogs on native wildlife, Mehta said.

His research shows that farm dogs likely present more of a danger to native wildlife than village dogs do.  Since people somewhat keep farm dogs, wildlife managers could target education programs at farmers to teach them how to better keep their dogs from straying too far, especially in villages closer to national parks or other protected areas.

It’s a challenge, he said, since dogs aren’t entirely associated with one owner in India, as opposed to the U.S. or Canada, where farm dogs have a definite owner. More regular feeding may help limit the wandering of these farm dogs, Mehta said.

The April issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management is now available

March 17, 2025 by The Wildlife Society

The Journal of Wildlife Management is a benefit of membership in The Wildlife Society. Published eight times annually, it is one of the world’s leading scientific journals covering wildlife science, management and conservation, focusing on aspects of wildlife that can assist management and conservation.

Join today for access to The Journal of Wildlife Management and all the other great benefits of TWS membership.

As grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) populations have returned in the western U.S., conflicts between the bears and people have increased. For example, grizzlies sometimes prey on livestock. In the featured article for this issue, researchers look at how people perceive these conflicts and what solutions would be. Their findings provide managers with insight into grizzly-livestock conflict and conflict reduction.

Other articles look at plains (Bison bison bison) and wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) diets at Elk Island National Park, factors affecting densities of endangered fishers (Pekania pennanti) in British Columbia and the energetic cost of human disturbance on sea otters (Enhydra lutris).

Log in to read the April issue today.