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).
Crucial research projects on species in the western U.S., like elk, mule deer, sage-grouse and wild horses, could potentially be compromised under the Trump Administration’s federal workforce cuts. The Department of the Interior told the U.S. Geological Survey and Cooperative Research Units (CRU) to develop plans to cut their budgets from 10% to 40%, according to TWS CEO Ed Arnett, who was interviewed in an article for High Country News. CRUs, a collaboration between universities and state and federal natural resource agencies, conduct important work on species of concern from mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and elk (Cervus canadensis) to endangered Mojave desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) and greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). “My concern is really high. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission has over $4 million worth of projects, either ongoing right now, getting close to wrapping up, or new projects,” the commission’s director, Tim McCoy, told High Country News, adding that some of those projects include declines in wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) numbers and how to manage invasive carp. “Our co-op unit is pretty integral to our ability to do and answer the real applied science questions, like declining populations.”
Retired leaders of agencies that work on wildlife conservation and management fear the loss of capacity, leadership and collaborative relationships caused by the ongoing slew of mass terminations.
“What we’re seeing is the start of a trophic cascade for the conservation institution,” said John Organ, retired chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Cooperative Research Unit (CRU) Program. “These cuts, which are just the beginning, are going to have impacts well beyond the federal government. It’s going to impact state fish and wildlife agencies, NGOs and ultimately, biodiversity on this continent.”
The Trump Administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have fired, laid off and offered buyouts to thousands of federal workers as part of their stated goal of reducing “federal bureaucracy and waste” and reducing the size of the government. Though the administration has not published official numbers, news outlets have estimated 3,400 employees have been fired from the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and 1,000 from the National Park Service. According to the National Wildlife Refuge Association, 420 have been fired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
Many of these job losses, which make up part of the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) “large-scale reduction in force,” were probationary employees fired en masse in February. Although OPM updated its memo to federal agencies on March 3 based on a judge’s recent ruling, the future of the thousands of fired federal workers—and the wildlife they manage—is murky.
Past leaders in federal and state agencies are concerned that this loss could have long-lasting impacts on visitor experiences on federal lands; hunting and fishing; the agricultural economy; and wildlife conservation and management across the country, among other issues.
“This profession is arguably not even 100 years old, but we have a system in place that has restored wildlife throughout the country in a spectacular fashion,” said TWS member Steve Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 2002 to 2005 under President George W. Bush. “This is shaking that entire system.”
John Organ with three Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) kits while working for USFWS. Courtesy of John Organ
Economic losses
Losing federal staff isn’t just about interruptions to wildlife management. These employees can affect public opportunities for recreation and the economy at large.
“The termination of staff in the National Wildlife Refuge System is going to affect the ability of the public to utilize those resources, whether they want to hunt, fish, birdwatch or just enjoy nature,” said Organ, a former TWS president and 2020 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award recipient.
These impacts could go beyond the tourists and others who use these parks. TWS member Kathy Granillo, a former USFS biologist and regional refuge biologist for the Southwest Region of the USFWS—where she provided biological expertise to 45 refuges for 17 years—worries the federal cuts will even affect the communities around public lands that rely on tourism, wildlife viewing, hunting and fishing for their local economies. “The communities around these wild places are going to feel the economic impact,” she said.
According to a report by Southwick and Associates in 2016, the $38.5 billion of direct spending on conservation efforts—61.5% of which comes from the federal government—generates $92.4 billion of total economic activity. That means every dollar spent on conservation in the U.S. has a positive return of 2.4 times its original investment. Additionally, the economic contributions of conservation support over 655,000 jobs with $41.2 billion of income—including salaries and wages—while adding $59.2 billion to the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The resulting economic activity returns $12.8 billion in the form of tax revenues to the state, local and federal governments, which, in effect, represents a “conservation rebate” relative to the public’s investment.
Also, further economic impacts could affect American agriculture, especially if layoffs hit some of the agencies under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wildlife Services and other staff at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service are responsible for managing wildlife conflict with livestock and crop damage. Meanwhile, the National Resource Conservation Service has contracts with farmers to address issues like crop predation. “The impact of that on the landscape cannot be overestimated,” Organ said.
Kathy Granillo holds a Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) pup at a captive facility on Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, where staff work on reintroducing the species to the wild. Credit: USFWS
Conservation dollars in limbo
On Feb. 14, Allison Keating was fired from her new position as wildlife biologist at the USFWS’ Office of Conservation Investment (OCI), where she was responsible for managing 64 grants with state fish and wildlife agencies across the northeast. These tasks will now be distributed among the remaining employees, but between the hiring freeze and the layoffs in her department, Keating said her team was cut by 25%.
Last year, OCI disbursed nearly $990 million in funds collected through the Pittman-Robertson Act, which levies an excise tax on firearms, ammunition and some archery equipment. The program operates as a reimbursable program, distributing annual grants that support the conservation of wild birds, mammals and their habitats. States often use funds for habitat management and restoration, species surveys, protection of endangered species, hunter education and the operation and maintenance of wildlife management areas for hunting and recreation.
“A lot of these states rely heavily on this dedicated funding for their agencies to operate, for their staff to get paid, and for the on-the-ground conservation and management to get done,” Keating said. “The Pittman-Robertson Act was established in 1937, and hunters, sportsmen and target shooters have been the foundation of conservation in our country since then. And all of that is at risk right now.”
The states that rely on the grants are “going to be stretched very thin,” Williams said. “I don’t know how [the OCI] is going to handle that workload, but I’m afraid it’s going to have repercussions in every state in the country.”
Steve Williams conducting field research for his master’s degree around 1980 at what is now White Horse Hill National Game Preserve. Credit: Steve Williams
A decimated workforce
Probationary employees—those who just started their positions and, for some, just entered the workforce—felt the brunt of federal job loss. But these often new hires are “the ones that are actually implementing management plans and interacting with the public,” said Granillo. Entry-level wildlife biologists, technicians and trail crews handle the day-to-day operations that keep public lands safe and accessible to the public.
Granillo is worried about the closures of public areas, decline in visitor experiences, and even more serious effects, like slower responses to wildfires. Although the Trump Administration said USFS firefighters would not be fired, Granillo said that trail crews are often the first line of defense in terms of fire suppression and management. On the basis of the new executive order banning DEI in the federal government, a program training female wildland firefighters has been terminated, and some federal employees have reported canceled, or unrenewed, seasonal contracts.
All three former leaders are concerned about the loss of future leaders in the profession. “[The federal government] has lost a lot of good people who have committed their lives to wildlife conservation,” Williams said. He is especially concerned about the indiscriminate dismissal of newly promoted employees within their probationary periods. These employees had been recently promoted due to their knowledge, skills and wisdom and should have been among those that make up the future leadership of these agencies. Their loss may lead to an erosion in leadership. “I don’t know how you put a price tag on that,” he said.
The uncertain future of cooperative relationships
Since 1935, the USGS CRU program has helped solve real-world natural resource management problems while training the next generation of wildlife management leaders. Organ, who served as chief of the CRU program, described the units as “the lifeblood of actionable science for state and federal agencies and the source for trained professionals for natural resource conservation.”
CRUs are cooperatives between USGS, state fish and wildlife agencies, universities and private natural resource organizations. Organ worries that job cuts, which have already begun in the CRU program, could curtail the important work they do. “States rely on the science provided by CRUs to address the on-the-ground issues,” he said.
Organ currently serves on the Massachusetts Fisheries and Wildlife Board, which oversees the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, an agency that collaborates with its local CRU. One such project deals with the detection and monitoring of chronic wasting disease (CWD), a deadly prion disease that infects deer species. Scientists haven’t yet detected the disease in Massachusetts, but Organ worries that staff cuts and contract terminations will mean that wildlife biologists won’t have the science they need to keep CWD out of the state.
“This is the beauty of the conservation system we have in North America: it’s a public-private coop. We’ve realized, over almost 100 years of the wildlife profession, that no one agency or group can do things by themselves,” Organ said. “But we’re losing a huge leg of that stool, and so that’s going to mean a lot of pressure on our other partners.”
Williams agrees. “I don’t know how you put it all back together if you take a major portion of the federal assistance and federal cooperation away,” he said. “I’m sure they’d love to, but it’s just the economic reality.”
Doing more with less
Natural resource managers have always faced limited resources and budget cuts. “From the refuge system perspective, those folks have always done a lot with a little. They’ve scrimped, saved, and run those refuges without enough people on board,” Williams said.
Before the cuts, Granillo said that refuges had already lost 30% of their funding over the last fifteen years. Williams said that the recent cuts—and whatever firings and budget cuts might come down the line—are “stressing out an already stressed-out workforce.”
At Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, where Granillo was the refuge manager for the last 12 years of her career, she said optimal staffing was calculated to be 17, but she never had more than five employees. “We excel at doing more with less,” she said.
Over her 40-year tenure in the federal government, Granillo said that workforce planning was an ongoing conversation, where agencies determined how to handle budget cuts rather than “this bull in a china shop approach.” She added that agencies themselves are the best poised to make cuts in the least disruptive way possible.
Williams agreed that there should be routine audits to ensure that programs are effective, and if need be, he supports changes on a deliberate, evidence-based evaluation of the workforce. “If someone’s not performing, you work with them to improve and let them go if you have to,” he said, but the recent approach by the federal government is far different.
Shaking up the system
Organ, Williams and Granillo are all worried about the prospect of future staff and funding cuts and what that could mean for already weakened agencies.
Organ is concerned for the National Wildlife Refuge System itself, saying that the mass firings are putting “tremendous constraints” on the active management of wildlife refuges—which was the purpose of why the refuges were created in the first place. “That’s going to have a negative effect on biodiversity, and in particular, endangered species and species of greatest conservation need,” he said.
Even with remaining employees, Organ said that morale has never been lower, and that affects productivity and performance.
On March 13, a federal judge ordered that all fired probationary employees from six agencies—including the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, which house the USFWS and USFS, respectively—be reinstated immediately. In his ruling, the judge said he believed that OPM’s directive to lay off probationary employees was unlawful. Keating said she’s “cautiously optimistic” about what this news might mean for herself and other recently hired or promoted federal employees. “This is encouraging for a lot of the probationary employees that were fired, but we’re waiting for more information. There are a lot of unknowns right now,” she said.
Williams calls the treatment of wildlife professionals “truly heartbreaking.” He knows many of those affected. “They’re good people, they’re professionals, and they’re in it out of commitment and dedication,” he said.
Granillo’s advice to the young people who are looking for jobs and opportunities in the industry: patience and perseverance. “We will survive this,” she said.
Feral cats are responsible for the death of many native wildlife in South Australia. In a study published in Australian Mammalogy, researchers used DNA to uncover if cat (Felis catus) predation was the cause of death for native animal species. This method was easier than tracking native animals and determining the cause of death from carcass remains, bite marks on collars, or taking a carcass back to a lab to perform a necropsy. “Because we’re working in really remote areas, it is difficult to access vets for necropsy,” said Katherine Moseby, a co-author of the study. “So taking a DNA swab of the dead animal was a really good way to identify if predation was the cause of death. And then we decided to compare the DNA outcomes with evidence in the field to determine if the latter was a reliable method of determining cause of death.” The team found the observation methods were not the best indicators of predation by feral cats. They also found that in two sites where a total of 389 animals—brush-tailed possums (Trichosurus vulpecula), western quolls (Dasyurus geoffroii), greater bilbies (Macrotis lagotis) and bettongs—were translocated, cats killed 74.
I was laid off from Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park, a piece of land on the border of Texas and Mexico that is the only National Park Service site that memorializes the Mexican American War.
Many battlefields do not experience what Palo Alto does, where habitat restoration activities directly match with the cultural resources of the battlefield.
Restoring the battlefield to native cordgrass and removal of encroaching trees was important, especially to the threatened and endangered species that live in the coastal grasslands of South Texas.
Losing staff, such as myself, really hurts small parks that now cannot get as much of anything done to save critical habitat for species like the Aplomado falcon (Falco femoralis).
McGrath conducts survey work for the black spotted newt. Conducted at Palo Alto National Battlefield in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Helen Dhue
What’s more, this loss of staff makes a small park more vulnerable to the urbanization that surrounds it, especially with SpaceX in the backyard.
The SpaceX Launch Facility is not far away from Palo Alto. You can watch the launches from the battlefield. The launches shake the surrounding area, and you can often feel it for miles. There’s an environmental concern for the park due to noise pollution from the rockets but also debris from launch that could get blown in a certain way depending on wind direction.
I came to South Texas to work for what little public land Texas has and to learn more field skills over a long period of time in a new and unique ecosystem. That opportunity was ripped away from me, an early-career professional in an increasingly competitive field.
It is important to have scientists working for the park in order to restore the battlefield and provide access to one of the few free public lands in Texas, which many migrant birds rely on and generates tourism to the region.
Cat McGrath checks a coverboard as part of a survey for the state endangered black spotted newt (Notophthalmus meridionalis) at Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park in Brownsville Texas. Credit: Helen Dhue
Wildlife Vocalizations Lost is a series about how federal job loss in the wildlife profession may impact conservation and wildlife management. It’s a part of our regular series, Wildlife Vocalizations, which is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences.
Submit your story for Wildlife Vocalizations Lost or nominate your peers and colleagues to encourage them to share their story. For questions, please contact tws@wildlife.org.
Google has released SpeciesNet, its artificial intelligence model for wildlife identification, to the public. Google first launched its model in 2019 on its cloud-based tool, Wildlife Insights, which has helped scientists around the world identify species in trail camera images. While remote cameras are useful tools for monitoring hard-to-study species in remote areas, they capture large amounts of data that take a lot of time for scientists to sift through. Now that the tool is open-source and available to the public, developers, academics and other researchers can use SpeciesNet in their own wildlife monitoring and management projects. Google said that SpeciesNet was trained on over 65 million publicly available images and can classify animals in up to 2,000 categories at higher taxa right down to the species level.
The Wildlife Professional is an exclusive benefit of membership in The Wildlife Society. Published six times annually, the magazine presents timely research news and analysis of trends in the wildlife profession.
Don’t miss another issue! Join today to start receiving The Wildlife Professional in your mailbox and all the other great benefits of TWS membership.
Conservation on private lands is essential to have healthy wildlife populations. Yet private landowners still face obstacles like lack of funding for wildlife conservation and the challenge of ensuring their conservation legacy is passed down through the generations. In the March/April issue of The Wildlife Professional, we explore different ways private landowners are making a difference, whether that’s through timber companies making sure the correct trees are there for red-cockaded woodpeckers or private landowners focusing on sustainable grazing to protect ocelots in Texas.
Our special focus for this issue focuses on horse and burro management.
Watch for the issue in your mailbox, or log in and check it out online.
Dungeness crabs, Pacific herrings and red abalones are some of California’s marine species most vulnerable to climate change. Researchers modeled the effects of projected climate change on 34 marine species, such as dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister) and red abalones (Haliotis rufescens), across two timeframes—2030 to 2060 and 2070 to 2100—for a study published recently in PLOS Climate. The team evaluated both their exposure to projected oceanographic changes and their hypothesized vulnerability. “The results are striking,” said Timothy Frawley, an assistant project scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences and project co-lead, in an interview with the university. “Some of California’s most economically and culturally important fisheries are assessed as being among the most vulnerable to projected future environmental changes.” Researchers hope that fisheries managers can use the study to prioritize conservation and management strategies.
Emma Balunek was combing through hours of trail camera footage in northeastern Colorado when she saw something surprising. Amidst the swift foxes, pronghorn, ravens and endless golden eagles was an unlikely pair: an American badger and coyote.
The coyote stood still on the right side of the frame, watching as the badger scurried in from the left. They had come to a rock pile together on their way to hunt prairie dogs. “The badger handles the belowground work, and the coyote handles the aboveground work,” said John Benson, Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and TWS member.
A conservation photographer on the hunt for a graduate research project, Balunek dug up everything she could on badgers (Taxidea taxus) and coyotes (Canis latrans) collaborating with each other. She found that Indigenous people have long known about the relationship, telling stories of badgers and coyotes that become unlikely friends. Westward expansionists also recorded the association in their journals in the 1800s, with a smattering of scientific publications and one-off observations in the last several decades. “That’s when I realized we didn’t know much about the relationship from a scientific standpoint,” Balunek said.
Working with Benson, Balunek has set up camera traps across five sites from New Mexico to South Dakota to answer questions about how, when and why the animals are cooperating. Although scientists have had long-standing interest and acknowledgement of the association, Balunek said there hasn’t been a large-scale focused research effort to try to document it. “We’re trying to get as close as we can to documenting the full extent of where [the association] occurs.”
Credit: Emma Balunek
Because Balunek couldn’t set up cameras everywhere that coyotes and badgers coexist in the wild, she decided to enlist the help of people like herself who might have seen the unlikely pair while spending time on the prairie. Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) and black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes), for example, are two commonly studied species that both live in the habitat where Balunek expects this relationship might occur. “Many researchers may have seen badgers and coyotes together, but it doesn’t really move beyond that,” she said. This is likely because the low number of observations makes the phenomenon hard to study, something she hopes to change by monitoring hot spots with her trail cameras and crowdsourcing opportunistic encounters from other researchers and citizen scientists.
More questions than answers
In her ongoing work, Balunek will map citizen scientist data, published records and her own observations showing where coyotes and badgers have been seen hunting together. She has set up an online form where people can submit historic and current observations through the fall of 2025. Balunek and Benson expect to see the relationship occur where the pairs can hunt small, burrowing animals like prairie dogs and ground squirrels in tandem, but they’re interested to see if the pairs hunt together in some places across this range but not others. So far, they’ve received submissions from Wyoming, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, Texas, Montana, Oregon and even some from Mexico and Canada.
The researchers are hoping to uncover not only where associations happen but also how they change at different times of the day and throughout the year. Learning more about these factors could offer insight into how each species benefits—or doesn’t benefit—from the association. Some scientists argue that badgers get the short end of the stick, doing the dirty work while coyotes get off easy. “The badgers are digging, digging, digging; there’s dirt flying everywhere, and the coyote is just sitting in the back,” Emma laughed. “But [badgers] are so good at digging.”
Credit: Emma Balunek
A three-year telemetry study conducted in Jackson, Wyoming, published in 1992, showed that coyotes were 34% more successful in hunting ground squirrels when hunting with a badger. It was harder for the researchers to quantify hunting success on behalf of the badgers because they eat their prey while underground and are therefore out of sight to researchers. Scientists did note that the badgers spent a longer time underground when hunting with a coyote, though, so they assumed the badgers were more successful at capturing and eating their prey while there was a coyote standing watch aboveground to corner any fleeing prey.
Inspiring curiosity for the prairie
Balunek said that their preliminary results show that the animals hunt together year-round and are changing their normal daily schedules so they can hunt together. “If the badger is normally active at dawn and dusk and during the night but will hunt with a coyote during the day, that’s possible evidence to suggest that the badger is gaining something from this relationship,” she said.
Although the mutual benefit may seem too incredible to believe, scientists have documented similar interspecies cooperative hunting in other species, like the grouper fish (Plectropomus pessuliferus) and the giant moray eel (Gymnothorax javanicus) in the Red Sea. In a similar fashion, the animals use their complementary hunting styles: the moray eel flushes prey from coral reef crevices while the grouper chases down prey in the open water.
Benson said you have to consider the costs of the association, too. Badgers are notoriously fierce: “Both species have been documented killing the other,” he said, although on both sides this is usually adults preying on the other species’ offspring.
“It’s important scientifically, but also interesting from a storytelling perspective, to consider the risks that these animals are taking—which suggests there must be a decent benefit,” Benson said. “It’s probably some level of an uneasy alliance.”
Credit: Emma Balunek
Research is just part of Balunek’s project, though. Comentored by Michael Forsberg of the Platte Basin Timelapse, a project in partnership to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that aims to inspire care for the environment through the power of story, Balunek is working to bridge the gap between science and the public. “It’s a really neat program where we can both learn something scientifically but also tell the story to a broader audience,” said Benson, who advises Balunek on the research side of the project.
Credit: Emma Balunek
Man-made rockpiles in Colorado, which first drew Balunek into the unlikely relationship of the coyote and badger, play a central role in many of her storytelling projects and trail camera videos. “The grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems,” Balunek said. “Using this interesting relationship is one way we can catch people’s attention and teach them about why the prairie matters.”
If you’ve seen the badgers and coyotes together, Benson and Balunek encourage you to submit your observations—past or present—here.
This photo essay is part of an occasional series from The Wildlife Society featuring photos and video images of wildlife taken with camera traps and other equipment. Check out other entries in the series here. If you’re working on an interesting camera trap research project or one that has a series of good photos you’d like to share, email Olivia at omilloway@wildlife.org.
Butterflies throughout the United States have declined 22% between the years 2000 and 2020. In a new study, researchers brought together butterfly monitoring data from 35 different citizen science programs. This included records of over 12.6 million butterflies across the continental U.S. Using this data, the researchers determined butterfly abundance for 342 species. Each year, they found, butterfly abundance decreased by about 1.3% throughout the country. Butterflies in the southwest faced the most severe declines. Of the species the team studied, 100 declined by more than half. “Our national-scale findings paint the most complete—and concerning—picture of the status of butterflies across the country in the early 21st century,” the authors wrote. But the authors said that with conservation strategies, populations can become more sustainable.
