Wildlife Vocalizations: Geriann Albers

Understanding people is key to wildlife management and conservation. This feels like it is becoming cliché—we may have even sailed right past cliche at this point.

I know so many people, me included, who entered wildlife management because they care about wildlife. I still regularly hear from younger professionals and college students some variation of the old gem, “I don’t want to talk to people, so I’m going to work with wildlife.” This is a fallacy. 

In North America, we manage wildlife in the public trust. You can’t manage wildlife in the public trust if you don’t want to engage with the public. I just read an article that my colleague, Mitch Marcus, sent me about the demise of the prairie chicken in Indiana (Jones 1992). It features this biologist’s recollection: “In 1958, one high state official—I won’t tell you his name—told me: ‘Madden, shoot a cock and a hen, mount them, put them in the state museum, if people want to see a prairie chicken.’”

We don’t have prairie chickens in Indiana anymore—we lost them in the 1960s. If people don’t care, they won’t waste their valuable time and energy conserving, managing or supporting wildlife. This means many, many jobs in this profession must center on people to be effective at managing and conserving wildlife.

I feel like my education was set up for wildlife, though, and not people management. I took courses on mammalogy, environmental chemistry, aquatic and terrestrial habitats, statistics and GIS. But where were the human psychology classes? How am I supposed to engage people if I don’t know how to research or communicate with people? How do I learn to be a good supervisor so my team can be as effective as possible? Where were those courses?

I had one agricultural economics course during undergrad, and it didn’t teach me about microeconomics. In fact, the only thing I remember from that class was that two of the teaching assistants were from New Zealand and smoking hot. I don’t need to know about GDP (gross domestic product) for this profession. But in the years since that course, I’ve learned how helpful it is to learn about microeconomic principles and how to predict human behavior in the context of managing wildlife in the public trust. 

How do you collect adequate social data? How do human brains take and process information? Where are the lines between what education can help us achieve and when we need to leverage marketing techniques to change behavior? These are all things I’m learning now, 15 years into my career. It would have helped me to learn at least some of it sooner, or at least open my mind to considering these questions.

If I could go back to my undergrad days, I think I would have tried to incorporate a few courses on human psychology and microeconomics, maybe even one on marketing. It would have given me a foundation that would serve me well. If you’re already out of school, though, it’s not too late to add these topics to your ever-growing knowledge bank. Books by Daniel Kahneman; the Planet Money 2020 summer school podcast series; the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; or taking an evening political polling class can all help build that foundation in any point of your career. The better we are with people as wildlife professionals, the more successful our profession will be with wildlife management and conservation.

Wildlife Vocalizations is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences. 

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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.