Wildlife Vocalizations: Bright Olunusi

March 8, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

The contemporary era presents unique challenges for wildlife conservation, especially for younger generations like mine.

From the heart of rural Nigeria to the academic halls of Boston University, I have witnessed the multifaceted threats facing wildlife and the intricate dynamics of human-wildlife interactions. One pressing issue that resonates across these diverse landscapes is the escalating demand for bushmeat or other wildlife byproducts. That could be in the form of pangolin scales or elephant tusks. These are emblematic of broader challenges like habitat loss, climate change and socioeconomic disparities.

Growing up in Ijebu Ode, Nigeria, I saw firsthand how traditional bushmeat consumption practices have evolved into a lucrative trade. Factors driving that trade ranged from cultural preferences to economic necessity.

Olunusi displays a taxidermized zebra head from Kainji Lake National Park, Nigeria at a cultural festival in Niger State Nigeria in 2018. Olunusi was an intern at the National Park at the time. Image Courtesy: Bright Olunusi.

The reliance on wildlife trade often stems from limited educational opportunities and climate-induced disruptions to agriculture, leaving communities vulnerable to exploitation and perpetuating a cycle of dependence. In urban centers like Ibadan, Nigeria, this demand persists, exacerbating the strain on already diminished wildlife populations.

My academic pursuits further illuminated the global dimensions of wildlife conservation. While studying at Boston University, I grappled with the complexities of human-wildlife conflict in developed regions, where urban expansion encroaches upon natural habitats, triggering confrontations and necessitating sometimes lethal interventions. Climate change emerges as a common thread, exacerbating these tensions by altering ecosystems and driving species out of their historical ranges.

Olunusi holds a pangolin at a Wildlife Bushmeat Market in Nigeria in 2019. Image Courtesy: Bright Olunusi

In addressing these challenges, my generation must embrace a holistic approach that recognizes the interconnectedness of environmental, social and economic factors. Environmental education initiatives, particularly targeting underserved communities, can foster awareness and empower individuals to pursue sustainable livelihoods. Economic empowerment programs offer viable alternatives to wildlife trade, promoting resilience in the face of climate-induced disruptions.

Moreover, concerted efforts are needed to enhance climate adaptation strategies and mitigate the drivers of habitat degradation. This requires collaboration across sectors and borders, harnessing the collective expertise of governments, policymakers, researchers, businesses and communities. From implementing land-use planning measures to promoting renewable energy solutions, every sector has a role to play in safeguarding our planet’s biodiversity.

A headshot of Olunusi in her graduation cap. Image Courtesy: Bright Olunusi.

At its core, wildlife conservation is a shared responsibility that transcends geographical boundaries and cultural divides. It demands collective action and a steadfast commitment to preserving the integrity of our ecosystems for future generations. As stewards of the Earth, we must heed this call to action, recognizing that our choices today will shape the fate of wildlife and humanity alike. Together, let us rise to the challenge and strive to create a more sustainable and harmonious coexistence between humans and the natural world.

Wildlife Vocalizations is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences. Learn more about Wildlife Vocalizations, and read other contributions.

Submit your story for Wildlife Vocalizations or nominate your peers and colleagues to encourage them to share their story.

For questions, please contact tws@wildlife.org.

Header Image: Olunusi teaches a diverse group of people from all continents of the world about human wildlife conflict in Massachusetts, using coyotes (Canis latrans) as a case study. This presentation took place in the Maldives in December 2023 and was a sponsored summer program on climate change. Image Courtesy: Bright Olunusi.

Avian flu is adapting to spread to marine mammals

March 8, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

The recent avian flu strain has adapted to spread between birds and marine mammals, posing a threat to wildlife conservation, researchers found.

In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers used genomic testing to characterize the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 in marine wildlife in South America. They found the virus was nearly identical in samples of four sea lions and a seal, as well as a tern.

“This confirms that while the virus may have adapted to marine mammals, it still has the ability to infect birds,” said first author Agustina Rimondi, a virologist from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina. “It is a multi-species outbreak.”

The virus has affected wild bird populations and domestic poultry around the world. Since 2022, H5N1 in South America has killed at least 600,000 wild birds and 50,000 mammals, including elephant seals and sea lions in Argentina, Chile and Peru.

Read more from the University of California Davis.

The March/April issue of The Wildlife Professional

March 7, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

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.

Mountains play some unique ecological roles, with diverse ecosystems that host a gamut of species that can shift from bottom to top, rainy side to dry side, sun to shade. For species on the move due to climate change, mountains can offer a refuge. But mountains often experience a higher rate of climate change than other areas. In the March/April issue of The Wildlife Professional, we explore these mountain ecosystems and the ways that species are responding to the changes taking place around them.

Our special focus looks at some unique ways that wildlife professionals are reaching out to the public, from innovative social media posts to virtual wildlife contests to involving the public in research work. John Koprowski, the 2022 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award recipient, shares how a purple bike can transform our relationship with the natural world. And TWS Member Engagement Manager Mariah Beyers shares some of the many reasons to be charmed by the 2024 Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Watch for the issue in your mailbox, or log in and check it out online.

Canada considers allowing limited sandhill crane hunts

March 7, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

The Canadian Wildlife Service is considering allowing limited sandhill crane hunting in northern Ontario. The proposal would allow hunters to harvest one crane per season in the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands and allow hunting in agricultural fields in several other areas.

Sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) have been increasing in numbers in the region, but with their return has been an increase in damages to farmers’ fields. No date has been set for a decision. The earliest a hunt could take place is fall 2026.

Read more from the CBC.

Can bats and tequila coexist in Mexico?

March 6, 2024 by Dana Kobilinsky

When Mexican farmers harvest agave for tequila before the plant flowers, bats don’t have a shot at pollination.

The core of the plant, which looks something like a pineapple, is what’s used to create tequila. All the sugar needed for fermentation is concentrated there. Because agave puts all its energy into producing its towering, flower-filled spikes, farmers collect the cores before the plants bloom. Once the agave flowers, it dies.

But bats, like the Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis), need these flowers to feed.

Irene Zepata-Moran, a PhD student at the University of Wyoming, led a study published in Environmental Research Communications looking at how to balance the needs of blue agave farmers with the needs of bats and biodiversity.

Some tequila producers who cultivate their own agave do leave plants aside to benefit bats. That allows them to place special holograms on their bottles to show consumers that they are bat-friendly—and to charge more for an environmentally friendly product.

But many farmers don’t produce their own tequila. They supply their crops to tequila houses. For them, there’s no incentive to let plants flower.

To find out how farmers can be involved in more sustainable agave production, Zepata-Moran interviewed farmers and tequila producers and provided them with a choice experiment.

Known as a jimador, a Mexican farmer harvests agave plants to produce tequila. Credit: Celso FLORES

She offered them a series of hypothetical options. Would they enter into a program to leave part of their crops untouched for monetary incentives? What about nonmonetary incentives, like training to use greenhouses to grow seeds produced by bat-pollinated flowers? Would they enter into a program to increase their crop yields?

Currently, farmers grow new agave by using clone offshoots or planting a clipping from another plant. But leaving some plants untouched and letting bats do the work can increase the genetic diversity of the plants and improve the health of the crop.

“Genetic diversity in blue agave crops has decreased over time,” said Zepata-Moran, who completed the study as part of her master’s dissertation. “What happens when we don’t have genetic diversity in the population is they are more prone to diseases.”

In general, the farmers preferred monetary incentives. “They like to be compensated,” she said. In this scenario, farmers would be paid for the plants they couldn’t sell to tequila producers because they let them bloom.

They also had a willingness to let plants flower if it increased their yield. Zepata-Moran said she heard from some longtime farmers who were seeing smaller plant cores and other problems, likely due to low genetic diversity.

Before strategies like these could be put into place, Zepeta-Moran said, there needs to be more research on the role this iconic crop plays in the farmers’ heritage and how their yields could improve with more bat-friendly techniques.

“There is a cultural value that exists in terms of tequila production and agave production,” Zepata-Moran said. “It’s something that people are proud of.”

Birds aren’t keeping up with earlier springs

March 6, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

Plant green-up times are shifting, but birds’ spring migrations aren’t keeping up. In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found climate change is altering the plants’ timing, affecting birds’ ability to reach the food they need during breeding. Using satellite images, researchers compared green-up timing with bird migration data from the citizen science app eBird for 150 bird species that nest in North America.

“The findings “emphasize the mounting challenge migratory animals face in following en route resources in a changing climate,” the authors wrote.

Read the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Q&A: How to conserve wildlife without conflict

March 5, 2024 by Joshua Rapp Learn

Imagine a world of conservation without conflict, where landowners, state and federal agencies, and environmental organizations all got along, working toward the common goal of helping imperiled species thrive.

It’s easy to see such a notion as a pipe-dream in a world fraught with endless lawsuits and protests. But one organization believes such a step is possible—in fact, they have made great achievements in the conservation world operating on such a principle in just over five years.

Leopoldo Miranda-Castro is the executive director of Conservation Without Conflict. Credit: Conservation Without Conflict

Conservation Without Conflict, a coalition involving state and federal wildlife managers, environmentalists, energy and forestry companies, and other private stakeholders, was founded in 2017 on the principle that while stakeholders often dispute the shape and regulations surrounding at-risk species, they usually agree on the basic tenet of conserving our natural world. Rather than seeing conservation as a conflict between opposing parties, the coalition seeks to find ways to encourage collaboration. Members include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ducks Unlimited, Southern Company, the National Wildlife Federation, Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute, and many others.

Fresh from the coalition’s 2024 summit meeting in Arlington, Virginia last week, The Wildlife Society caught up with executive director of Conservation Without Conflict, Leopoldo Miranda-Castro. Our conversation below is edited for style and brevity.

How did the summit go?

The summit was really good—there was a lot of energy in the room. We had probably about 45 different organizations and individuals there. One of the things I wanted to accomplish was to reenergize the coalition. Because of COVID, we couldn’t meet for a few years, so we wanted to bring everybody back.

What progress has Conservation Without Conflict made?

Some of our biggest accomplishments so far are bringing people together to discuss potential issues, identifying barriers, and knocking down those barriers. Those could be policy barriers or disincentives. They could be on-the-ground issues—you name it.

Specifically, one of the big things that the coalition members have recently been able to accomplish was the first-ever partnership between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and industrial timberland owners, Resource Management Service, LLC (RMS). That included a private lands agreement to voluntarily reintroduce reticulated flatwoods salamanders (Ambystoma bishopi) onto their land in the Florida panhandle. That’s the first time the USFWS’ tool for conservation partnerships has been used for those purposes. That is a deal I’m extremely happy about. It took many, many years, and finally they were able to crack that code and implement it.

What were some of the conflicts you have had to work through?

One of them is how to protect private landowners’ privacy when they enter into agreements with the government, and especially when dealing with listed and at-risk species. A lot of landowners are looking for that kind of information. How do we minimize the risk to those landowners in terms of liability or any other type of risk? When proactively sharing site-specific data with the government, that data may be available to the public, including organizations that may use it in ways that may affect these landowners. For example, environmental groups may file a lawsuit to try to force landowners to do things the way these groups want. Lowering those risks to a level that private landowners can manage them and benefit species—and keeping those working lands working—creates kind of a win-win situation. Before the RMS timber company agreement, those were concerns from the private landowner’s perspective. We hope that that model, now that there’s a precedent, could be expanded across the nation. It’s a really simple tool.

What role will Conservation Without Conflict play moving forward?

We closed out the summit by asking the participants about next steps and actions. We had short-, mid- and long-term actions. Short-term and mid-term goals include increased communication and supporting more on-the-ground conservation.

But I’m really excited about long-term ideas, like bringing up young professionals and students—people who are starting their careers right now—into the Conservation Without Conflict collaborative framework. Eventually, we’ll be able to change the culture of conservation within the NGO community, landowners, industry and agencies. Our vision is that collaborative conservation will be the default approach to conservation, instead of conflict and litigation.

Even longer term, we plan to develop some curriculum programs in academia where we can have minors and majors where Conservation Without Conflict frameworks can be applied and learned as part of an actual degree. Eventually, we’ll get there, and we’ll be able to affect long-term change.

What’s at stake if we don’t start minimizing conflict in the conservation community?

We will continue to be too polarized. At the end of the day, it will affect working lands because we will eliminate incentives to have healthy economies and healthy human communities. And also, the species will suffer because they will be caught in the middle of conflict. We’re going to have a lot of regulations and paperwork. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still important to have good regulations. But we need to have regulations that actually make sense and that provide incentives to everybody, including private landowners on working lands, to do the right thing, because they are already doing it—that’s why the species are still there.

Colorado to update Front Range mountain lion plan

March 5, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

As encounters between humans and mountain lions grow on the Front Range, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is drafting a new management plan for the cats. The proposed plan would streamline 13 units into two, and rather than seeking to suppress mountain lion (Puma concolor) populations in some areas and stabilize them in others, it would seek to stabilize them across the region.

The plan follows a similar update to mountain lion management for western Colorado completed in 2020.

Read more from the Colorado Sun.

As Arctic summers lengthen, some polar bears are at increased risk of starvation

March 4, 2024 by Dana Kobilinsky

As climate change increases, the time polar bears spend off the ice and on land in many parts of their range has increased. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) rely on sea ice to reach their primary prey—seals. With longer summers, the bears are enduing more time on land, where food has lower energy content.

“We know that polar bears are increasingly relying on summer land use across many parts of their range due to climate warming,” said Anthony Pagano, a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The modeling work that’s been done indicates that there’s going to be even more bears relying on summer land use in the future with forecasted climate warming and declines in Arctic sea ice.

Those models indicate that bears’ periods on land near Hudson Bay, Canada, are likely to increase by about five to 10 days per decade with future warming.

But scientists weren’t sure what polar bears (Ursus maritimus) were actually doing with their time on land. Some suspected polar bears were probably resting to conserve their energy while waiting for the sea ice to return. Other observations showed the bears were feeding on a range of prey, from duck eggs to caribou (Rangifer tarandus), to survive. Some bears are also known to feed on vegetation like berries, seaweed and grasses.

Polar bears lost about 1 kilogram per day while on land. Credit: David McGeachy

Along the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada, polar bears are spending about 130 days on land—some three weeks longer than they spent in the 1980s. Using GPS-enabled video collars and accelerometers on 20 polar bears during a three-week period, Pagano led a study in Nature Communications to determine what they did to survive the summer. He and his colleagues also looked at carbon dioxide production to determine how much energy the bears were expending.

In particular, they wanted to know if the land offered enough food to hold them over until the sea ice returned and they could access seals again.

The collars showed the researchers whether the bears were active or inactive, what they were eating and how much they were consuming. When it was dark and the bears didn’t show up on video, the accelerometers helped the researchers know what the bears were doing. The team also measured the bears’ energy expenditure and changes in their body mass.

“We found that the bears are using a variety of behavioral strategies when they’re on land,” Pagano said. Some bears were sedentary, resting up to 90% of the time and mostly fasting. They had low energy expenditure, similar to bears that are hibernating.

But most of the bears—about 70%—were active, feeding on birds and caribou carcasses. Most adult females were primarily feeding on berries. Some bears chewed on caribou antlers and bones, grasses, seaweed and other vegetation. “They’re really eating almost anything that they came across that was edible,” he said.

Whether they were resting or finding food, however, they were all losing body mass at similar rates—about 1 kilogram a day.

Three bears made long swims in search for food. Two of them found marine mammal carcasses, but they couldn’t carry them back to shore or eat them while swimming. One was lucky. It found a carcass—either a seal or beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas)—and bulked up 30 kilograms. But that was a rare find, Pagano said.

The changing conditions are already taking their toll. The population has faced a 30% decrease—from about 1,200 bears in the late 1980s to about 800 bears around 2010. Fewer young appear to be reaching adulthood, and the outlook for them is growing worse.

“Those bears aren’t going to be able to accumulate as much body fat in preparation for coming on land,” Pagano said. “If they’re trying to survive these increasing periods on land, it’s going to be particularly challenging for them.”

Scientist, conservationist Estella Leopold dies

March 4, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

Estella Leopold, a scientist and conservationist and the last surviving child of wildlife management pioneer Aldo Leopold, has died at the age of 97.

Leopold was a paleoecologist who continued her father’s conservation ethic throughout her lifetime. The youngest of five children, all of whom pursued careers in the natural sciences, she helped establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado and Mount St. Helens National Monument in Washington.

Leopold earned a Ph.D. in botany from Yale University in 1955 and worked for the United States Geological Survey in Denver for 20 years. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974. In 1976, she moved to Seattle and spent most of her career at the University of Washington, studying ancient pollen deposits. In 1982, she joined with her siblings to establish the Aldo Leopold Foundation, serving for several years as president and board chair.

Over the course of her lifetime, Leopold published more than 100 scientific papers, even after her retirement in 2000. In her 80s, she directed her writing to a more general audience. Her 2016 book, Stories from the Leopold Shack, provides tales behind of some of the essays in her father’s iconic A Sand County Almanac. Last January, family and friends joined her to celebrate the release of her latest book, Aldo’s Wife, Estella Bergere: My Remarkable Mother.

At the end of her life, she was hoping to publish a revised edition of that book. “She was really not ready to go,” Dee Boersma, a colleague at the University of Washington, told KUOW.

Leopold died Feb. 25. A private memorial was scheduled for March 3 in Seattle.

Read more from the Aldo Leopold Foundation and KUOW.