Wildlife Vocalizations is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences.
As a deaf person, I use American Sign Language to communicate.
Growing up, I experienced many communication barriers and forms of discrimination, but I never let them stop me from doing what I love. I have faced some situations where people told me that I could not do things just because I am deaf. I do not accept the words, “No, you can’t.” I work hard to prove wrong the people who tell me that. Although we, deaf people, are faced with challenges others do not understand, we can do anything except hear.
Grace Soechting holds a black-chested prinia (Prinia flavicans) while conducting research in Africa. Credit: Courtesy of Grace Soechting
However, one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my profession was not having an ASL interpreter with me for three weeks when I was in Africa doing small mammal research and vegetation measurement. There were a lot of communication barriers. For example, conducting fieldwork was difficult because there was a lot of verbal communication, so I had to find another way to receive information or ask questions by using gestures or notes on my phone. These forms of communication take a lot of time and effort and are not as effective as using an interpreter because often major points are missed or skipped over.
Grace Soechting holds a tortoise shell.
Credit: Courtesy of Grace Soechting
Although at times I struggled to understand, I was very fortunate that I had great people in the group who tried their best to keep me updated with everything going on and to communicate with me. I ended up having fun and had a great experience working on the research in Africa.
Climate change is affecting bird populations in many ways, but its effects on birds occupy North America farmland may be particularly severe. Researchers found that extreme temperatures on agricultural lands across the United States were reducing avian reproduction.
In a study published recently in Science, the team analyzed data from more than 150,000 bird nests across the U.S. They found that birds nesting near farmland were half as likely to have at least one fledgling successfully leave the nest when temperatures spiked. Forests seemed to provide a protective buffer, with shaded areas that increased nest success. Even urban areas offered tree cover that helped the birds fledge.
When they looked at how heat waves affected nesting success in urban areas, the researchers found less of a negative impact than on farms, probably because nests were often in city parks and residential areas that can have high tree cover.
“This suggests that places like backyards and parks may provide important bird habitat that is somewhat more buffered from climate extremes in the future,” said Katherine Lauck, co-lead author of the paper and a PhD candidate in ecology at University of California Davis.
By the year 2100, their models predicted that nesting success in agricultural areas would decline by an additional 5% on average under current greenhouse gas emission trajectories.
The Department of the Interior has opened two new National Wildlife Refuges: the Wyoming Toad Conservation Area and the Paint Rock River National Wildlife Refuge in Tennessee.
This announcement came during National Wildlife Refuge Week, which is observed during the second week of October each year.
“Nature is essential to the health, well-being, and prosperity of every family and every community in America,” said Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland in a statement announcing the new refuges. “National Wildlife Refuges help connect Americans to a diverse array of public lands, while also serving as a crucial means of protecting wildlife and conserving habitat,” The new additions expand the total number of refuge units to 570.
The Wyoming Toad Conservation area is the bigger of the two new units, comprising 1,078 acres the DOI purchased using the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The Department of Interior cited the importance of this refuge for the Wyoming toad (Anaxyrus baxteri), which is one of the most endangered amphibians in North America. The Wyoming wildlife refuge will also help provide habitat for migratory birds and mammals such as pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) and white-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys leucurus). In addition, the refuge will expand public access to the Laramie River and increase opportunities for outdoor recreation, such as hiking, wildlife observing, hunting and fishing on public lands.
The Paint Rock River National Wildlife Refuge comprises 87 acres, which The Nature Conservancy and The Open Space Institute donated. The refuge serves as an effective means to connect state and NGO conservation land set aside to conserve the Paint Rock River watershed, which is home to 100 species of fish and 50 species of mussels.
The Wildlife Society has long advocated for the importance of the National Wildlife Refuge System, and support for adequate funding for the NWRS is a TWS policy priority for the 118th Congress.
The Wildlife Society has commented on issues affecting the National Wildlife Refuge system, such as hunting and fishing access, and feral horse management. As a member of the Cooperative Alliance For Refuge Enhancement (CARE), TWS has also provided valuable input in regard to refuge planning, appropriations and staffing issues. As an organization dedicated to representing the interests of wildlife professionals, TWS is committed to tackling the staffing crisis issue in refuges, which leaves these critical conservation areas without biologists to manage wildlife populations properly.
Approximately 800 staff positions have been lost since 2011, a 25% loss in capacity that leaves refuge staff limited in their ability to manage large areas of habitat. There is also a shortage of law enforcement officers within the NWRS; across every refuge, individual officers currently patrol an average of 440,000 acres. It can take hours for a wildlife officer to get to the scene of incidents like poaching or injured recreationists. Although this expansion of the NWRS comes as a welcome announcement, The Wildlife Society stresses that additional funding and support from Congress is needed to address staffing shortages and ensure that the NWRS is managed to its full potential.
The soundscapes of national parks are changing, and those changes could affect how wildlife species communicate, find food and move about on the landscape. In new research being presented at the annual meeting of The Geological Society of America, Whitney Wyche, a Mosaics in Science Diversity intern, discusses how the soundscape of Glacier National Park has changed since 2004.
At that time, aircraft noise posed a growing concern—particularly scenic helicopter rides. A 2019 study found the noise had remained about the same.
Since then, new restrictions have reduced the aircraft noise, but increased park visitation has brought other changes to the soundscape.
“Monitoring how Glacier National Park’s soundscape has changed will help inform park management on what threats to the natural soundscape need to be mitigated,” Wyche said.
New technology may better detect polar bear dens in the Arctic. Researchers found that an imaging system using Synthetic Aperture Radar had a 66% percent detection rate, compared to a 45% accuracy rate using current Forward Looking Infrared systems.
Den detection is important as energy industry activity increases in the Arctic. Denning is a vulnerable time for polar bears, when the young are particularly dependent on their mothers. Affecting bears’ ability to raise their cubs can result in significant population declines.
Publishing their findings in the journal Ursus, researchers found the new system is better able to penetrate the snow.
“The system can ‘see’ both the top snow surface, the den roof surface and inside the den cavity,” said co-author Bernhard Rabus, an engineering professor at Simon Fraser University.
Jennifer Merems’ remarkable leadership in promoting diversity in the wildlife profession, born from her personal experiences, has earned her The Wildlife Society’s Diversity Award this year.
Merems, a doctoral candidate in the department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has contributed to making the wildlife field safer for women. She worked with TWS president at the time Carol Chambers, to put together a chapter-wide training session on sexual harassment in STEM fields.
The idea was born from her past experience. When Merems was a PhD student, she received sexist comments after presenting research on the impact of wolves on elk in Wisconsin to a group of hunters. “She returned hurt and righteously angry,” said Merems’ advisor Timothy VanDeelen, in a nomination letter. “We processed it a bit, but then in a manner that has my everlasting admiration, Jen, leveraging her own motivation and experience, channeled her hurt and anger into efforts to raise and address the problem of sexism and exclusion in our own professional circles.”
Merems started within her own lab group. She reaching out to women professionals whose discussions and experiences could inform their group about sexism in the field. Then, she and her lab organized a plenary on the topic of sexism and inclusion for the TWS Wisconsin Chapter. They also put on the sexual harassment training at this meeting, which was led by University of Wisconsin colleague Erika Marin-Spiotta.
“It is rare to see such dedication and creative hard work on an issue as urgent as increasing diversity in the wildlife field,” VanDeelen said. “It is rarer still, by a wide margin, to see that level of effort and dedication on the part of an early career professional with pressing professional concerns of her own.”
Merems contributed to diversity in the field in other ways since she was a student. She has been involved in TWS’ Women of Wildlife program since she joined TWS as a student in 2013, and she has promoted diversity through training and outreach to Native American high school students when earning her master’s. Merems, herself, has Mexican and Native American familial connections.
Merems has also had a challenging past, having lost her mother at a young age. “Despite these challenges and their emotional burdens, Jen has shown a commitment to lifting up others throughout her career by serving on many diversity, equity and inclusion committees and efforts, hiring underrepresented students as technicians, and ensuring that those technicians had fair wages and working conditions,” said Anna Brose, Merems’ colleague in the VanDeelen lab.
Now that she is an early career professional, she continues to work on diversity in the wildlife profession. She has accepted a leadership position in TWS’s Early Career Professional Working Group, where she has championed diversity activities. She has also co-chaired the Wisconsin chapter’s diversity committee.
Now, as the Wisconsin chapter’s secretary, Merems has organized and participated on a panel discussion to expand inclusion in the profession by addressing racial and disability challenges. She also attends monthly calls with TWS’ Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Awareness Working Group.
“I think that Jen should be recognized, congratulated and admired for her work,” VanDeelen said.
Low-cost metal detectors no bigger than a flashlight can help researchers detect metal fishing hooks ingested by turtles.
“I can see this being helpful when you start getting into turtles of conservation concern,” said TWS member Vanessa Lane, an associate professor of wildlife ecology and management at the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Georgia.
Lane had long noticed a high density of yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta) at Paradise Public Fishing Area, where many anglers fish. She had accidentally hooked turtles herself in the area while fishing, and wondered whether these turtles were ingesting a lot of the hooks.
Working with undergraduate students, Lane tested whether a small metal detector might be able to detect ingested metal inside these turtles.
Wildlife researchers trapped turtles using special nets. Credit: Vanessa Lane
In a study recently published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, the team captured 426 yellow-bellied sliders and three other species. They used the handheld metal detector on all of them, waving it like a wand over their bodies. First, they wanted to see if they could detect any metal. Then, they used a more accurate instrument on the end to pinpoint the exact location of the metal in their bodies.
They got positive beeps from 37 yellow-bellied sliders from the metal detector.
“We had one turtle that had three hooks in it,” Lane said. “So, they didn’t learn their lesson.”
Undergraduate students Dalton Ridgdill (left) and Parker Guedes (right) pass a handheld metal detector over a Florida softshell turtle (Apalone ferox). The researchers place sticks in its mouth to avoid bites. “It’s safer to give them something to chew on while getting examined,” said Vanessa Lane. “Think of those sticks as a turtle pacifier.” Credit: Parker Gerdes
They took all of the turtles to the laboratory and ran them under an X-ray to verify whether they had ingested hooks. They also X-rayed a random sample of 69 other sliders that didn’t have a positive reading from the device.
The X-rays revealed that only five of the 37 turtles that the handheld device detected metal in were false positives—about 14%—while none that tested negative showed signs of ingested metal. Overall, this meant the accuracy of the field devices was about 95%.
“It was pretty dang cool how accurate this thing was,” Lane said.
A turtle found with three ingested hooks inside its body. Credit: Quailwood Animal Hospital
Lane said that it’s possible that the false positives weren’t necessarily false. It could be those turtles had ingested low-density metal that doesn’t show up on the radiograph like aluminum. This means the metal detector would beep at something like the tab from a soda can, but the X-ray wouldn’t find it.
But overall, the results show that handheld, relatively cheap metal detectors can be useful for finding ingested fishhooks and other objects in turtles.
Yellow-bellied sliders aren’t in any conservation danger—their populations are unlikely to be affected by a few swallowed fishhooks, she said. A veterinarian they consulted for this study also said that most of them seemed relatively healthy—other studies on sea turtles have shown they can pass the hooks through their system. Iron can also oxidize and dissolve in animals after a period.
A turtle with a hook sticking through the side of its neck was treated. Credit: Vanessa Lane
It’s possible that some of the sliders that ingested fish hooks died before researchers captured them, so these numbers may not represent the total amount of turtles that ingest fish hooks, Lane cautioned.
This technology could have wider applications, though—especially with species of conservation concern in the area such as alligator snapping turtles (Macrochelys temminckii), which may be affected by ingesting the metal. Researchers might also use this with fish of conservation concern like some sturgeon species or hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis).
“I think this will work with any small animals with metal ingestion,” Lane said.
The turtles were ultimately released, since the veterinarian said that cutting open their shells to remove the hooks would likely be more harmful than the metal appeared to be inside the reptiles. However, a couple that were found with hooks embedded in their cheeks or the outside of their necks were treated.
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.
Early results suggest that a vaccine can help protect California condors from a deadly strain of avian influenza. In a trial, 10 condors received an initial injection, followed by a booster shot three weeks later. Biologists say 60% of the birds showed an antibody response that should protect them from the highly pathogenetic avian influenza.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to release about two dozen vaccinated California condors (Gymnogyps californianus) by the end of the year in California and Arizona. The agency is trying to determine if condors in the wild also should be captured and inoculated.
“We’re all kind of waiting with bated breath to see what the final results are going to be,” Tiana Williams-Claussen, wildlife director for the Yurok Tribe, which has worked to reintroduce the raptors, told the Associated Press.
The deadly virus poses an additional risk to the endangered birds, which face threats from lead poisoning and other factors. Fewer than 350 California condors exist in the wild.
A decade-old study in Pennsylvania is producing some surprising discoveries about white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and the forests they occupy.
There was Buck 8917, which took an unusual mile-long walk to a distant hill, then died on that hill two years later. There was Doe 12866, which set off on a six-mile hike toward the town of State College, where she gave birth behind a housing development. And there have been important discoveries about the plants deer depend on throughout the year.
“Now in its 10th year, the study has tracked more than 1,200 white-tailed deer around 100 square miles of Pennsylvania forest,” writes the New York Times. “It aims to be the most sweeping effort ever undertaken to understand North America’s most widespread large animals, as well as the impact they have on the vegetation and soil in our nation’s forests.”
Researchers share their findings from the Deer-Forest Study, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry and Penn State, on a blog, which has attracted a loyal following.
“What good is the work we do if we can’t share it in a way that people understand?” TWS member Jeannine Fleegle told the Times. “Trees are boring. Vegetation and soil chemistry? Not very fun. So, we ride on the deer’s coattails.”
When Claire Huang was out on the marsh in the Chesapeake Bay working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on fish tagging, she’d see tons of herons, terrapins and blue crabs. She used those sights as inspiration to enter the logo contest for the design featured at The Wildlife Society’s Annual Conference in Baltimore next year.
“A lot of my inspiration comes from spending time in the field in the region, and just an appreciation for the coastal marsh habitats here,” said Huang, a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow at NOAA based in Washington D.C. Huang first started studying fish species in the Chesapeake Bay region with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center several years ago, so this location is special to her.
This year’s Annual Conference takes place Nov. 5-9 in Louisville, Kentucky, with a logo that features a squirrel’s silhouette over mountains. (See it on the T-shirt design here.) Next year, with the conference taking place in Baltimore, the logo would have to fit the region.
The logo for TWS 2024 in Baltimore. Credit: Claire Huang
Huang heard about the logo contest from a friend who sent her the social media post. As an ecologist and conservation scientist, Huang knew TWS’ mission matched her own, and she also fosters a love for art and illustration. “It’s one of my passions to combine art and science for science communication,” she said.
Huang wanted to highlight the biological diversity of the Chesapeake Bay region in her logo. “It’s a rich ecological region that not a lot of people necessarily think about,” she said. She chose to include species from different families. Huang’s logo includes the great blue heron (Ardea herodias), river otter (Lontra canadensis), diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) and blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), all species native to the state that play important roles in maintaining the food web.
The blue crab was one species she specifically wanted to highlight, she said, since it’s so important to Maryland’s identity, history, and economy.
While she was out on the boat doing field work, Huang would also find herself scoping her surroundings for a good color scheme to use for her design. “One of the most beautiful things about the Chesapeake Bay is the intersection of the aquatic environments with the land and where water merges with the marshes,” she said. “I think the contrast between the color of the water, the marsh grasses and the sky really tied in the theme of connectivity within the ecosystem.”
Huang also incorporated the silhouette of the Chesapeake Bay into her logo to tie everything together. “When people go to Baltimore, I hope what this logo invokes is that this is connected to a larger ecosystem in the mid-Atlantic region,” she said.
Huang was excited to learn that she won the logo contest with her design. She has been honing her graphic design skills recently and feels that winning the contest affirms that her practicing is paying off. “The work that I’ve being doing is being recognized by an organization that I respect,” she said. “My values and my personal mission as a biologist really align with The Wildlife Society.”
In addition to a cash reward, Huang was also gifted a six-month TWS membership. “I’m very excited about it,” she said. “I really value the networking opportunities and resources through professional societies. It’s such a lovely coincidence that this happened through this art contest.”
Huang’s logo will be featured throughout the 2024 conference in Baltimore, in marketing and advertisements of the event, as well as on conference T-shirts.
