Alaska is testing a doglike robot to scare off wildlife at Fairbanks International Airport. Officials hope to deploy the robot—named Aurora—in the fall to discourage migrating birds and other animals from settling near airplanes.
Alaska obtained the $70,000 Boston Dynamics robot through a U.S. Agriculture Department grant. The robot has removeable panels that could allow it to be disguised as a coyote (Canis latrans) or fox as it makes hourly patrols to chase off waterfowl and other animals.
If the project works in Fairbanks, the state may send similar robots to more rural airports.
“The sole purpose of this is to act as a predator and allow for us to invoke that response in wildlife without having to use other means,” Alaska Department of Transportation program manager Ryan Marlow told state legislators.
Header Image: Alaska is planning to use a robot dog to keep wildlife away from airplanes at Fairbanks International Airport. Credit: Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities via Instagram
Raptors take advantage of plentiful black-tailed prairie dogs as they search for food along their winter migration routes, but plague and habitat loss are making the prey harder to come by.
“They’re losing a reliable food source, which potentially means they’re going to have to move more across the landscape,” said Courtney Duchardt, an associate professor at Oklahoma State University who has been studying prairie dogs for 10 years.
In a study published in the Journal of Raptor Research, she and her colleagues delved into a dataset collected between 1998 and 2002 in the Southern and Central Great Plains to find out what interactions the ecosystem engineers were having with bird species.
An adult prairie dog on a colony in southwestern Oklahoma. Credit: Courtney Duchardt
Researchers knew that some raptors, like ferruginous hawks (Buteo regalis) and golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), prey on black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), but Duchardt and her colleagues found some surprising raptors were likely using a diet of prairie dogs to sustain themselves through the winter.
“In winter, [raptors] are going to be more flexible,” she said. “I think that’s probably why we saw a fairly strong effect, because in winter you just need food. You’re not as worried about your breeding habitat or your nesting habitat.”
A ferruginous hawk with a recently killed prairie dog is captured on a game camera in Thunder Basin National Grassland in Wyoming. Credit: Lauren Porensky
Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), which typically breed in riparian, tree-covered areas where prairie dogs are scarce, turned to the species as they wintered in the Great Plains. So did rough-legged hawks (B.lagopus), which breed in northern Canada but winter in the U.S.
“If you’re a predator, knowing where your food is and having that be predictable is great,” Duchardt said. “And all of those are true with prairie dogs.”
But Duchardt said that the opportunistic food resource might have once been even more abundant. Now, prairie dog populations have declined due to plague infections and the loss of grassland habitat.
“Obviously, there are other food resources, but this is a static and consistent diurnal food resource that doesn’t hibernate,” she said. “That is fairly rare.”
As enthusiasts prepare for Monday’s solar eclipse across a swath of North America, some scientists will be paying less attention to the movements of the sun and moon and more to the activities of wildlife.
“In 2017, another total solar eclipse crossed the United States from coast to coast, giving scientists a chance to study how animals responded across the path of totality,” Audubon writes. “And this year, more projects are set to add to this growing body of evidence.”
During the 2017 eclipse, observers submitted findings to the “Life Responds” citizen science project in the iNaturalist application. A team from the Cornell Lab or Ornithology—using weather radar data—found daytime birds came to rest as darkness fell. And NASA gathered audio recordings across the eclipse’s path. Efforts like those are expected to return again this year, including a 2024 Life Responds project and a NASA-backed Eclipse Soundscapes Project.
“We have a pretty good idea of what might generally occur,” Brent Pease, an ecologist at Southern Illinois University whose lab is partnering on the Eclipse Soundscapes project, told Audubon. “And here’s an opportunity for us to quantify that.”
Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) are moving northward in Canada, raising concerns about how they—and their polar bear (Ursus maritimus) hybrids—may affect caribou (Rangifer tarandus).
Local hunters and biologists say the numbers of grizzlies and so-called “grolar bears” are on the rise, prompting local predator hunts to reduce their numbers.
Steve Baryluk, regional biologist for the Beaufort Delta with the N.W.T. government, said more grizzlies are seen in the region each year. “They’re pretty adaptable to a lot of different environments where they can make do with what they are able to find there,” he told the CBC.
Nine hybrid bears have been genetically identified. Researchers are now working on Victoria Island to see what the grizzlies prey on.
“There’s concerns that they may be targeting some of the caribou species that are under Species at Risk concerns at the moment, so we want to try to get a better handle on that,” he said.
Clark’s nutcrackers rarely forget a seed cache location. But many of the whitebark pines they depend on for food in Glacier National Park have disappeared, leaving the birds nearly a distant memory themselves.
“Glacier National Park is the epicenter of whitebark pine decline,” said Vladimir Kovalenko, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Whitebark pines have been suffering from a number of threats across their range, including climate change, wildfire and destruction by mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae). In Glacier National Park, white pine blister rust, a fungal pathogen that is also affecting the trees across their range, has hit particularly hard in recent years.
Kovalenko, who was a master’s student at the University of Montana at the time of this research, and his colleagues wanted to see how declines in these trees were affecting the population of Clark’s nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) in the area. For a study published recently in Ecology and Evolution, the team compared nutcracker occupancy estimates to pine presence in different parts of the park.
Never forget
The Clark’s nutcrackers look unassuming—mostly gray with black and white wings. Their calls, similar to the screech of other corvids, cut through the forest. These birds have some of the most magnificent memories in the animal kingdom. They can hide pinecones in hundreds of unique caches, remembering where they put nearly all of them.
To estimate the population of the birds, the researchers used a combination of point count surveys and passive recording of nutcracker calls. They gathered data for three summers from 2020 to 2022 during the peak whitebark pinecone harvest season.
Whitebark pines are almost entirely reliant on nutcrackers to disperse their seeds. Credit: Vladimir Kovalenko
The team combined the data gathered from these two methods, and since these nutcrackers are rare in Glacier National Park, they used models to get a more accurate population estimate that takes the possibility of missed detections into account.
The researchers then compared the population estimates from the models to forest characteristics, including what types of trees were where. This analysis reinforced findings from previous research, such as the birds’ preference for dense whitebark pine copses.
“Clark’s nutcrackers were spending more time in areas with larger and more mature trees,” Kovalenko said.
Disappearing food source
Older whitebark pines produce more cones than younger, smaller trees. It usually takes over 50 years for these trees to begin producing cones, and upwards of 100 years to produce a particularly large crop of cones. As these old pines disappear, the nutcrackers may fly elsewhere, or switch to other food sources.
This lack of birds may also create a situation where whitebark pines themselves are unlikely to reproduce. Despite their sharp memories, Clark’s nutcrackers don’t remember every single cache. And they also sometimes die or leave the area before they can collect their hidden cones. As such, the birds act as seed dispersers for the trees. In turn, the whitebarks are almost completely reliant on nutcrackers for dispersal.
A whitebark pine cone. Credit: Vladimir Kovalenko
As mentioned in the cover feature of the March/April issue of The Wildlife Professional, if fewer trees means fewer birds, that also may mean fewer trees in the future. “There are fears that it’s going to produce this positive feedback loop,” Kovalenko said.
Kovalenko said this research reinforces the importance of conserving old growth whitebark pines. This kind of work might help retain Clark’s nutcrackers on the landscape, but other species like grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) also eat these pinecones. So what’s good for Clark’s nutcrackers is likely to be good for a host of other species.
Resident and transient killer whales often overlap in the Pacific off the West Coast of North America, but they don’t interact. Now, researchers believe the two aren’t just different populations. They’re different species.
In a study published in Royal Society Open Science, researchers determined they should be divided between resident killer whales (Orcinus ater) and Bigg’s killer whales (Orcinus rectipinnus), named for Michael Bigg, the Canadian scientist who first noted differences between the two in the 1970s.
The scientists found that resident killer whales travel in tight-knit family pods and eat smaller prey, like fish, and they have smaller skulls designed for that. Bigg’s killer whales travel in small groups and have larger skulls, allowing them to prey on seals and whales.
“They’re the most different killer whales in the world, and they live right next to each other and see each other all the time,” said Barbara Taylor, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries marine mammal biologist who was part of the science panel that assessed the status of southern resident killer whales. “They just do not mix.”
Southern resident killer whales are listed as endangered.
The Taxonomy Committee of the Society of Marine Mammalogy is expected to decide if it will recognize the new species this summer.
Curly-tailed lizards are eating smaller anoles that play a key role in distributing resources from the ocean to the land.
As organisms that evolved in oceans over eons began to slowly move onto land, they took organic material with them. While researchers may understand this concept on a broad level, they have less information on the specific role species like lizards play in redistributing oceanic material to land. These materials are important sources of fertilizer for plants and connect land and marine ecosystems.
Oriol Lapiedra, a principal investigator with the Ecological and Forestry Applications Research Center (CREAF) in Spain, had been studying Cuban brown anole (Anolis sagrei) behavior for quite some time. While invasive in Florida, these lizards are native nearby in the Bahamas. They often eat small crustaceans found on seaweed that washes up on the beaches, as well as amphipods and isopods that eat the rotting vegetation. Northern curly-tailed lizards (Leiocephalus carinatus) also live in the Bahamas and prey on anoles.
Researchers introduced lizards to small islets in the Bahamas. Credit: Oriol Lapiedra
Anole populations are often in flux due to large tropical storms that blow entire populations of them off of small islets. Lapiedra has been interested in how the behavior of the surviving lizards might change with the presence or absence of predators.
Lapiedra observed that “on the islands with curly-tails, you don’t find [anoles] on the ground.” But he wanted to test this empirically.
On a series of eight islets off the coast of the larger Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, Lapiedra and his colleagues experimentally reintroduced brown anoles in 2016, as detailed in a study published recently in Ecology Letters. The researchers implanted small identification tags about the size of a grain of rice under the skin of the anoles.
Oriol Lapiedra captures a lizard in the Bahamas. Credit: Oriol Lapiedra
A week later, the team released northern curly-tails on half of the islets—one for every 12 anoles, leaving the others as controls.
The team returned a year later to examine the anoles that were left on the island, as well as their offspring. After capturing the anoles, the researchers measured their body mass as well as the height of their perches. They also clipped a small portion of their tails to analyze the stable isotopes that would help determine the lizards’ diet.
The behavior of the persecuted
The team found that the diet of the anoles was different on islets with curly-tails compared to those without them. Ocean-based vegetation, like seaweed, has different carbon isotope signatures than land-based vegetation. The isotope analysis revealed that the anoles without the lizard predators ate more arthropods that fed on seaweed than the anoles that lived on islets with curly-tails.
Lapiedra said this is likely because the anoles don’t want to risk traveling far on the ground to exploit the seaweed on shore when curly-tails are around. While brown anoles are semi-arboreal, typically staying in plants a few feet above the ground, they often feed on arthropod prey they spot from above. With the curly-tails around, they tend to stay higher up in the plants, eating insects and spiders they find there. Lizards that do take the risk on the ground are quickly preyed upon.
“Curly-tails are extremely fast ground predators, but they can’t do anything on vegetation,” Lapiedra said.
The perch data correlated with this theory—anoles on the islets with predators were typically found higher up in the vegetation than the islets without them.
Northern curly-tailed lizards prey on anoles. Credits: Oriol Lapiedra
The body condition of anoles was generally poorer on islets with curly-tails as well. But some anoles still seemed to risk getting eaten to get to the resource-rich seaweed. Lapiedra’s analysis found that females that took the risk seemed to reap the rewards—they had better body conditions than those on the same islands that fed on prey higher up in the bushes and trees. Females may also be more vulnerable to predation as they lay eggs on the ground.
Lapiedra said that the difference in anole behavior on these two islands likely has a trickle-down effect on the ecosystems there.
The presence of curly-tails may benefit plants, for example. By keeping anoles in trees, they are forced to eat more arthropods that may feed on these plants. As a result, plants may grow faster without arthropods to eat them. At the same time, anoles on islands without curly-tails may transfer more marine-based resources by eating arthropods close to the shore and depositing them through their waste deeper inland.
TWS member Stacey Dauwalter always wanted to hunt, but she had a hard time setting aside the time to learn.
“Every year, I’ve been like, this is the year I’m going to put in the work,” said Dauwalter, the Wildlife Health Program Coordinator with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.
The busy time in her lab coincided with hunting season, though, and those years kept coming and going. But when the Wild Sheep Foundation launched its program Women Hunt®, it was the perfect opportunity to put aside the excuses. In the fall of 2021, Dauwalter harvested her first white-tailed (Odocoileus virginianus) doe.
“I wanted to feel confident and have the skills to know that if I shoot routinely, I can stay on top of it,” Dauwalter said. “That’s what I wanted to get out of the course, and I got so much more than that.”
Women Hunt® is the brainchild of Renée Thornton, who, like Dauwalter, always wanted to hunt but didn’t know where to start. After hunting black bears (Ursus americanus) for the first time in her 40s, Thornton was hooked.
Part of the Women Hunt® instruction includes a culinary class, teaching participants how to prepare the meat they harvested. Credit: Women Hunt®
After meeting—and marrying—Gray Thornton, president and CEO of the Wild Sheep Foundation, Thornton left her corporate executive career, moved from Alberta to Montana, and started the organization’s Women Hunt® program.
Women Hunt® partnered with the FTW Ranch, a 14,000-acre West Texas ranch that already hosted a shooting school and had developed a new hunter course, since rebranded as Field to Fork. Women Hunt® worked to modify the program for 12 new women hunters to develop hunting skills and learn about the important roles that hunting can play in wildlife conservation and management.
“I look at what Renée does, and she absolutely changes lives for the better,” Gray Thornton said.
The Wild Sheep Foundation Women Hunt® 2024 application period is open May 1 to May 31.
A pair of little brown bats have been found infected with the deadly white-nose syndrome in Colorado. It is the second species in the state known to have contracted the fungal disease.
The state Wildlife Health Lab confirmed the disease after receiving a bat on March 5 that was collected by a wildlife rehabber in the town of Longmont. Two weeks later, a second little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) was confirmed with the disease in nearby Boulder.
The fungus that causes white-nose syndrome was previously spotted in three little brown bat summer roosts in the state, but none of the bats had previously been confirmed as sick with the disease.
White-nose syndrome was first discovered in Colorado in March 2023 in a Yuma bat (M. yumanensis) collected by the National Park Service near La Junta. While the fungus has been found elsewhere in the state, these are the only three bats known to have contracted the disease.
Dan Neubaum, species conservation program manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said the recent discovery was “unfortunate” but not surprising given the spread of the disease among bat species in other states.
Of the 19 bat species native to Colorado, at least 13 are believed to be susceptible to the disease.
White-nose syndrome was first documented in New York state in 2006. Since then, it has been confirmed in 12 North American bat species in 40 states and eight Canadian provinces.
When Edwin Jacobo was studying migratory birds for his graduate project in Southern California riparian forests, he spent most of his time trudging through cold water in the mountains. In April and March, he would pull on his old waders and set out at 5:30 in the morning to conduct point counts and mist netting for species like western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana).
The waders were so old, they ended up with holes that patches couldn’t cover up. “I tried to fix them, but it just didn’t work,” said Jacobo, a PhD candidate at Washington State University who had just immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico at the time. Money was tight, and equipment was too expensive. “So I just decided to not use waders at all,” he said.
But the cold interfered with Jacobo’s ability to focus and conduct his research. “It was pretty miserable, to be honest,” he said. “I was shivering all the time.”
Just when things were getting unbearable, Jacobo’s advisor told him about the Trail Blazer Grant, a TWS program to help students and early-career professionals purchase professional gear to conduct fieldwork. He secured the funds and was able to purchase brand new waders.
Edwin Jacobo used the Trail Blazer Grant to help him purchase waders for a migrator bird project. Photo Courtesy: Edwin Jacobo
“There’s a big monetary barrier to becoming an established professional in this field, simply because you need gear to do specific training, and if you don’t get that training, then you aren’t qualified for a position,” said Amanda Veals Dutt.
The chair of The Wildlife Society’s Early Career Professionals Working Group, Veals Dutt helped develop the grant with the Student Development Working Group. “This is an easy way for our working groups and TWS as a whole to really help start to break down some of those barriers,” she said.
A personal endeavor
The idea and framework for the Trail Blazer Grant was conceived through the combined efforts of past Student Development Working Group officers but was finally brought online in 2023 by then past chair Darwin Mayhew. Although the pandemic’s impact on the working group prevented Mayhew from being able to do as much as he wanted with the working group when he took over as chair in 2022, the framework of the Trail Blazer grant that had been handed down to him reminded him of his own challenges.
Starting a career in wildlife biology, Mayhew faced learning differences, but soon discovered that growing up “without much money” created a new set of obstacle for getting into the wildlife field.
“I grew up, myself, without having very much money and I didn’t want people prevented from fieldwork because of any limitation, visible or inviable,” he said.
Typically, students and early-career professionals get the research tools they need from their lab or employer, like camera traps or radio collars. But what about the basics, like boots, binoculars and backpacks? For biologists just starting out, basic gear can be out of their price range.
“Early-career professionals represent about a third of The Wildlife Society’s members, but I think we’re actually probably one of the most underserved groups, simply because we kind of get forgotten since we’re no longer students,” Veals Dutt said. “We no longer have a lot of student-specific travel grants or scholarships. And we are not established professionals. We don’t necessarily have multiple years in a position and solid financial status built up.”
Since it went live in 2023, the Early Career Professionals Working Group has supplied $500 for two $250 grants for early career professionals and students. The Student Development Working Group contributes $1,000 for two $250 grants for students and five $100 grants also for students. The outdoor company Vortex also donated five binoculars for the first year of the grant.
Interested in becoming a sponsor? TWS is seeking tax-deductible monetary and in-kind donations of gear. You may email TWS’ development manager Lauren Ruotolo at LRuotolo@wildlife.org for more info.
While the idea was solid, the working groups had to think about who qualified for the grant and how to choose recipients. They wanted everyone who was underrepresented to have access, but that proved challenging. The first year, the grant ended up being open only to TWS members who were part of either the SDWG or ECPWG, but this left some members—like those on six-month trial memberships, which are often utilized by the neediest students and early career professionals—falling through the cracks. As the grant evolved, it became available to all members, with priority given to those we are also members of one of the working groups.
Isa Mattioli purchased the funds to purchase spotting scopes, a field bag and a headlamp with the help of the Trail Blazer Grant to help complete their surveys for Pismo clams. Photo Courtesy: Isa Mattiolio
Choosing who received the funds was another challenge. How do you compare one person’s hardship to another’s? As a result, they decided to make it a lottery system. If recipients had some level of need, they all had the same chance of getting the funds, although they set aside specific slots to go to early career professionals, who have had less than 36 consecutive months of full-time, non-entry level employment.
The Wildlife Society and others have shared information about applying to the grant on social media to make people aware.
The ease of application helps, some recipients said. “I think that one of my motivating factors in applying was I looked at the page and was like, ‘oh, I could literally do this right now,’” said TWS member Isa Mattioli, an undergraduate student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, who received the grant. “The reimbursement process was really easy. It really helped me buy field gear that was really important to starting my senior research project.”
Funding the future
Mattioli, who uses they/them pronouns, used the funds to purchase spotting scopes, a field bag and a headlamp to help complete their surveys for Pismo clams (Tivela stultorum) on California’s Central Coast, where sea otters (Enhydra lutris) prey on the clams. “I think that this grant really helps to attempt to level the playing field and gives people in underrepresented groups less of a worry about finances,” they said.
Kelsey Shepherd, a graduate research assistant at Iowa State University, also benefited from the grant. Not only did the grant help her purchase waterproof boots to help her get through rugged terrain in tallgrass prairie to study the federally endangered rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis). She was also able to buy special sunglasses that she needs. “I have a genetic condition, and I’m blind in one eye,” she said. “I was able to protect my eyes from the sun.”
The chair-elect of the Student Development Working Group, Laura Young, has now taken on keeping the grant going. She hopes to improve the grant so that more people can take advantage of it at the right time during field season. “We are looking at potentially doing multiple deadline rounds because of different field seasons,” she said. “Some people don’t necessarily know what field gear they need until they’re hired for something. The deadline selection process may have already passed before they get hired.”
The working groups also hope to get even more applicants. “We had a pool of 77 applicants across our two working groups for the 2023 grant,” Veals Dutt said. “My hope is that we can get more folks to apply and just have this be a really solid continuing grant that we can offer.”
Is affording the right field gear a struggle? You may qualify for the Trail Blazer Grant provided by the Student Development and Early Career Professional working groups! Applications are open now through April 30.
