Out-of-Control Wildlife Trade Is Shackling a Key Climate Solution

Reining in the unruly global trade in wild species could help mitigate the climate emergency, experts say.

According to trade records, people plucked more than 400,000 Central Asian tortoises from the wild to sell internationally between 2012 and 2021, mainly for the pet trade. About half of the animals across that decade were imported into the United States, where the going price for the reptiles — also known as Russian tortoises — is a mere $100-200.

These same tortoises, according to scientists, could have provided priceless climate benefits to the planet in the wild. A study published last year identified many animals with a high potential for protecting and enhancing carbon storage in natural landscapes. Tortoise species who make their homes in semi-arid places, such as Central Asian tortoises, were among them.

Examples like this illustrate why several organizations attending the most recent United Nations climate conference, COP28, called on policymakers to include wildlife conservation in climate action plans due to the critical role wild animals can play in climate mitigation.

International Animal Rescue, for instance, ran a COP28 campaign asking policymakers to “give wildlife a seat at the table.” Ahead of the conference, the organization’s chief executive Gavin Bruce wrote, “By conserving wildlife and their habitats, forests are protected, ensuring that millions of tonnes of carbon remain stored in the flora and deep peat below.”

It’s that interaction between wildlife and habitat that makes a difference for the climate. As ecologist Simon Mustoe put it in his 2022 book Wildlife in the Balance, it “takes two to tango” when it comes to the functioning of ecosystems. Accordingly, “lose wildlife, you lose the basis for any environmental remediation to work,” he tells me by email.

In other words, Mustoe says that to weather the environmental crises of our time, we must protect and restore wild animal populations.

To achieve this, experts say the legal trade in wild species needs an overhaul.

Exploiting Climate-Valuable Species

“The exploitation of wild animals is one of the greatest threats to the survival of species,” says biologist Sandra Altherr, cofounder of the nonprofit Pro Wildlife.

In 2023 Altherr teamed up with other researchers to study the sustainability of the legal wildlife trade. Their paper stressed that trade can be sustainable if it’s well managed. But they found little proof of sustainability in most trade.

Their paper highlights 183 cases of legal yet seemingly unsustainable trade, including the blacktip reef shark. Exploited for meat, fins, and public aquariums, the shark’s population has plummeted by an estimated 30-49% over three generations. This is bad news for the climate, as the carbon storage study named blacktip, lemon and tiger sharks as key species in enhancing the uptake of CO2 in reef ecosystems.

Several sharks swim beneath the waves while the camera captures the break between the sky and the water. — Photo: Hannes Klostermann / Ocean Image Bank

Likewise, corals and reef fishes are heavily exploited for the aquarium trade. Research suggests these animals are important for both climate mitigation and adaptation, with herbivorous reef fish enhancing carbon storage and coral infrastructure providing storm protection amid extreme weather events.

Legal Doesn’t Mean Sustainable

Altherr warns the examples in the paper may only scratch the surface.

“Our case studies are only the indicative tip of the iceberg,” she says. “We assume that far more wildlife species, probably thousands, are utilized on a non-sustainable scale.”

Understanding the full scale and impact of the wildlife trade is difficult. Illegal trade is, by its nature, hard to quantify, while the legal trade in species is mostly understudied despite being gargantuan in scale.

Moreover, the legal trade is subject to varying oversight. Most countries are party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates international trade in some 6,610 animal species, along with tens of thousands of plants. The treaty separates species into different categories — the Appendices — based on their known risk of extinction, and trade rules vary accordingly.

Altherr says the legal wildlife trade is often assumed to be sustainable. But she and her co-authors argued this assumption is flawed, as most trade lacks the supportive evidence to demonstrate sustainability.

“Of particular concern is the lack of data on export volumes, wildlife populations utilized and the lack of evidence-based impact assessments of the trade,” says Altherr.

Strengthen Records and Assessments

The study’s authors identified several policies on legal trade that are ripe for strengthening. Those who profit most from the trade should fund improvements, they argued, which would place the burden of costs at the feet of importers, largely in richer nations.

The recommended reforms include instituting rigorous monitoring of exploited animals’ populations in the wild to inform decision-making. The authors also called for the creation of a centralized database for all international trade in wildlife — CITES and non-CITES species — structured toward enhancing traceability, transparency and, ultimately, sustainability.

CITES already maintains a database for the trade it regulates, but it frequently contains discrepancies and can fail to align with other data sources, such as customs records.

CITES also requires countries to produce “non-detriment” findings for species before trade occurs — which means assessing the impact of the trade on wild populations. However, the current system doesn’t provide for mandatory scrutiny of all assessments, nor is there an obligatory format. As a result, non-detriment findings do not exist in some cases and where they do, they vary from complex to extremely rudimentary.

Although it’s impossible to quantify, Wildlife Conservation Society vice president of international policy Susan Lieberman says she suspects that non-detriment findings are lacking in a “significant proportion” of cases.

Countries’ non-detriment findings face scrutiny if importing nations request to see them and when CITES selects states for a review of their trade in particular species. Research indicates that these probes can fail to lead to clearly improved sustainability.

Lieberman says the process is “slow, it’s bureaucratic and it works,” although not enough species are subject to reviews.

The paper suggested that the centralized database could involve formalizing countries’ reporting of non-detriment findings, allowing them to be better examined and studied. Lieberman believes more scrutiny is essential. “The only way the system can really work is if countries would have to share their NDFs,” she says.

Protect Threatened Species

CITES is also slow at bringing at-risk species under its regulatory wing. It takes over 10 years on average for CITES to list species in its Appendices after the International Union for Conservation of Nature identifies them as threatened by international commerce, according to analysis released in 2019. The researchers found that 28% of 958 threatened IUCN Red List species likely jeopardized by global trade lacked CITES protections as of 2018.

Since then, other research has identified hundreds of animals and plants on the Red List, which itself can contain outdated and incomplete information, that appear to warrant CITES protections.

wildlife skins — Skins confiscated from the illegal wildlife trade. Photo: Bill Fitzpatrick/FWS (public domain)

CITES parties are working to better identify candidates for listing, with varying views on what measures are necessary. The authors of the listing gap research called for the creation of a “near- automatic pathway” that would ensure CITES promptly considers protecting species the Red List has identified as threatened by international trade. Co-author Eyal Frank, an environmental economist, says “At a minimum, every species that is threatened with extinction should be brought up for discussion and potentially a vote for inclusion in Appendix I or II” where global commerce is a contributing factor.

The inclusion of species in CITES’ Appendices leads to various outcomes, such as bans on commercial trade in highly endangered species taken from the wild. Vast amounts of trade — commercial and non-commercial — continues under the treaty but it is subject to some controls, such as permit requirements. Critically, the listing of species in CITES makes trade in those wild animals visible to a certain extent.

Frank believes closing the listing gap is a pressing issue, along with “transitioning as soon as possible to a digital system of export and import certifications.” Currently, most CITES parties use a paper-based permitting system that is highly susceptible to fraud and error, despite the availability of an electronic system.

Scrutinize Wildlife Farming

Other issues include illegality and unsustainability in wildlife farming. Trade in animals alleged to be born or bred in captivity makes up a significant proportion of CITES-regulated commerce.

In principle, wildlife farming is meant to limit extraction of animals from the wild. But a recent paper found that captive breeding operations commonly put pressure on wild populations. Although examples of sustainable farming exist, unsustainable practices include supplementing captive-bred populations with wild-caught individuals and fraudulently laundering wild animals through operations.

The authors highlighted evidence suggesting large-scale laundering of wild birds took place from the Solomon Islands between 2000 and 2010. This included hornbills, another group of animals the carbon storage study identified as important for nature-based climate mitigation.

Similarly, the captive breeding of tigers has been mired in allegations of illegality and concerns that it further imperils wild individuals. According to a 2023 study, tigers can also provide climate benefits when safeguarded in the wild. It found that India’s establishment of protected forest reserves for tigers helped the country to avoid more than a million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 2007 to 2020.

Caged tigers at a tiger farm. Photo: Karl Ammann / The Tiger Mafia. Used with permission.

The wildlife farming paper’s authors called for increased oversight of captive-breeding operations by regulatory authorities. Among other things, they recommended that CITES create a database of farmed species, spotlighting which ones are arduous to breed in captivity. When it is cheaper and easier to capture individuals of a species from the wild than breed them, the risk of illegal and unsustainable practices is higher. A database — and its use in decision-making — could help root out wrongdoing.

The Future Is Wildlife

Overall, Altherr insists that authorities need to start acting with much more caution. Rather than conservationists having to sound the alarm about issues with trade when it is already occurring, she says “we need a reversal of the burden of proof.”

“Instead, only what can be proven to be traded sustainably should be authorized for trade,” says Altherr.

Limiting trade in this way would help to tackle excessive exploitation — a major driver of the biodiversity crisis — and have climate benefits. It would also reduce harms to the world’s species as they grapple with other pressing threats, such as habitat loss, pollution and global warming.

As several researchers have argued, ensuring trade is sustainable would also benefit people who depend on it for their livelihoods by protecting their incomes into the future.

For ecologist Mustoe, people the world over have a lot to gain — or lose — from how wild animals fare moving forward.

“It’s the interaction between animals that drives all ecosystem services and life support,” he says. He highlights that wild animals operate across the planet at every level — from the microscopic to the megafauna — providing invaluable environmental benefits alongside climate upsides, such as purified water sources, pollinated food crops and reduced disease risk.

“The single simplest thing we can do to pave the way for a future that’s more comfortable for humanity on all levels — food security, water security, climate security, disease security, everything — is rebuilding wildlife,” says Mustoe.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Previously in The Revelator:

Reptile Trade Blues

Facts Alone Won’t Save Us

Science helps us understand the threats we face, but bold policies to fight climate change and extinction depend on our language, art, and experience with the natural world.

It’s midnight on the east coast of Australia, sometime in November 1998. I have just turned 11 years old, and I am lying on the cold, wet boat dock of my family home, counting streams of light as they race across the clear black sky. The Leonids meteor storm, a once-in-33-year phenomenon, has reached perihelion and is casting its spectacle down upon my youthful imagination.

This solitary commune with nature, this relinquishing of control and drifting along on the sensory experience, became a pastime I promised to chase throughout life. Between childhood and adolescence, I found myself sitting atop bleached white sand dunes on Moreton Island studying emergent patterns in schooling fish or floating above the Great Barrier Reef seeing colors I’d never known. And then there were the seemingly countless years in the corner of our sprawling backyard, observing the rhythms of hibiscus harlequin bugs. Life seemed to move to the tempo of the natural world as I daydreamed beneath the towering Norfolk pine trees that lined my stretch of the Pacific Ocean.

Now, as a musician in New York, most of my days are spent leaping between rehearsals, recording sessions, teaching, and performing. This contemporary, metropolitan existence hasn’t proven the most conducive to contemplative encounters with the natural world, but that world finds its way in.

A few years ago, my artistic work began to shift to create space for a fresh perspective on our relationship to the environment. I created projects that put natural processes at the core of their design: site-specific sound and light installations powered by native plants, music composed using earthquake data and the rhythms of historic thunderstorms. Most recently I’ve been working on sound installations at the nexus of art, science and policy, collaborating with scientists from the European Joint Research Centre and policy officers from the European Commission Directorate-General for Environment.

Sam Nester — Nester plays trumpet overlooking Ka Lae. Provided.

Besides moving me closer to my youthful experiences, working with scientists on the leading edge of ecological degradation research has taught me vital lessons.

Most pressing, environmental policy no longer has the luxury of remaining slow. We face the greatest challenges in human history, and it’s crucial that policymakers at all levels of government create enforceable regulations that produce environmental improvements immediately. The 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has painted a bleak picture of the damage already caused by the climate crisis and asks for urgent action. Most concerning is that the IPCC has produced six reports since its initial findings in 1990, all of which prioritize reducing CO₂ emissions — and yet reduction has not occurred.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. While it’s unlikely we will achieve the 2015 Paris Climate Accords goal to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels, every decimal point in global temperature maintenance acts to decrease the severity of the coming impact. It is not an all or nothing equation: 1.7°C is indeed better than 2.0°C. As the age-old adage goes, “The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.”

Another lesson: Instead of bold policies, we’ve put all our faith in technology to solve the problem. I too hope technology will save us, but a diversified approach holds the potential for a safer future. Let’s continue to advance technology to turn the tide on climate change, but let’s also look to the immediate implementation of nature-based solutions. These not only give us more time to tinker with ideas for geoengineering, such as Klaus Lackner’s CO₂ scrubbing artificial trees, but may help slow biodiversity loss. While it’s possible that novel technologies will help lower global temperatures, every extinction within the biodiversity crisis leading to that day is permanent — there is no bringing back the Labrador duck or the western black rhino.

Most surprisingly, my experience has taught me that science is not enough.

It may seem opportunistic for an artist whose work highlights the natural world to write this, but these are not my words alone. Frans Timmermans, former vice president of the European Commission, made the following statement in his closing remarks at the 2023 European Environment Network Conference:

Due to our training and empirical backgrounds, we think that if we’ve got the facts right, and we’re right, that automatically that will have the power to convince everyone. Sadly, we learn everyday that’s not the case…If we are unable to translate what we discover, what we see, what scares us because it is having an impact, what we know needs to be done, if we are unable to translate that in images, in words, in concepts that relate to the people who give us the support to take the measures we need, we will fail.

There is indeed a serious failure in climate and biodiversity crises messaging. We’ve lived too long with the notion that nature is inferior to us and here to serve us, and the economic fearmongering surrounding solutions to these crises has added a weight that doesn’t seem to engage action but confuses and overwhelms. In his 1990 work Le contrat naturel (incidentally, published the same year as the first IPCC report), French philosopher Michel Serres discussed making peace with the world in order to save ourselves – the creation of a contract between Earth and its inhabitants. But we cannot create a contract with that which we do not know or may have forgotten.

In 2007, and again in 2012, the Oxford Junior Dictionary (designed for seven-year-old children) removed a significant number of words related to nature in favor of words such as broadband, chatroom, and voicemail. The editors deemed these more fitting for the modern-day childhood experience. This sparked Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris to publish The Lost Words: A Spell Book, in the hopes of returning British children to the splendor of the world outside the virtual. Meanwhile, some 1,800 miles away in Lapland, the Indigenous Sámi children who inhabit northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula have 300 words for snow.

It was Baba Dioum, the Senegalese forestry engineer, who famously made the comment that “in the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” It is science that helps us understand, but it is our language, our art, and our personal experiences with the natural world that teach us to love and reconnect. Without these we have little hope in transforming the public policy that will secure the future many of us want.

The arts’ ability to facilitate meaningful introspective encounters with the material and abstract experiences of this world can, and does, inspire action. I think of Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch installation of 2014, in which glacial ice was collected from Greenland and allowed to melt in public spaces around major European cities. His work disrupted the daily pulse of urban life and offered the public an immediate experience of the climate crisis, creating a tangible encounter with what can still sometimes feel at a distance from our northern metropolitan existence. Echoing the words of Dioum, Eliasson and Minik Rosing issued an essay to coincide with Ice Watch in which they made the argument that:

Facts are one part; just as guilt does not inspire initiative, people will not act on facts alone. We are inspired to act by emotional and physical experience. Knowledge can tell us what we should do to achieve our goals, but the goals and the urge to act must arise from our emotions.

Affecting people, influencing emotion, and changing minds is what art does. It was the urge to stir emotion that pushed Agnes Denes to design her 1982 Wheatfield – A Confrontation, in which a two-acre field of wheat was planted in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park). The golden straws of grain stared down Wall Street and the World Trade Center for months while being tended to and ultimately harvested. The work was a symbol of food, waste, commerce, trade, ecology, and economy, on land worth $4.5 billion.

And then there’s Chris Jordan’s Midway: Message from the Gyre. In a series of photographs from 2009, Jordan shows the bodies of juvenile albatross who died from consuming plastic waste on Midway Atoll. These moving and disturbing images have confronted the world with the extent to which our modern mass consumption has affected the environment. The project demonstrates that even a small ring of volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean, some 2000 miles from the nearest major landmass, are no longer safe from plastic.

Plenty of works simply celebrating the beauty of nature are also having an influence. Ruup, designed by Birgit Õigus, are giant wooden megaphones that amplify the sounds of forests and are returning audiences to a slow appreciation of the subtlety of bustling ecosystems. In London’s Kew Gardens, Wolfgang Buttress’ Hive, an immersive sound and light installation, takes real-time data from a beehive to hum an ever-changing, generative experience of life inside a bee colony.

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Our great modern memory loss of how intimately intertwined human lives are with the natural world has reached its zenith. When I arrived as one of 20 artists at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in 2022, an opening speech concluded with the comment that “it has gotten so bad, we called in the artists.”

Europe isn’t alone in recognizing the potential for the arts to play a role in creative solutions to the climate crisis and our growing disengagement with nature. On Jan. 30 of this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts, announced an inaugural Artist-in-Residence Program. This initiative aims to integrate artists into the effort to reveal new ideas for water restoration and climate resilience and help advance the goals of the National Estuary Program and Urban Waters Federal Partnership. There’s a growing recognition that art, in addition to connecting with the public, helps push those who make and implement policy.

In recent years my work has afforded me audiences with more than one Australian prime minister, a handful of U.S. senators, ambassadors, a director-general of Europe, and even a sitting U.S. president. There is power in art to reach the hearts and minds of a wide array of people and help direct attention to the beauty of the natural world, the terror of our present relationship to her, and offer potential solutions for a brighter, more connected future.

As I look to the year 2031 — one year after the European Commission will have either succeeded or failed in its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% and also the year comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle is once again due to reach perihelion on its 33-year orbit — I wonder how the global experience of the Leonids meteor storm will land. As a child watching the storm unleashed a vast universe of wonder in me, and there is potential for that same experience again.

But as our planet continues to warm, the number of extinction events increase, and we become further estranged from the rhythms of the natural world, future inspiration from the majesty of nature will be predicated on the swift implementation of enforceable policies that consider the totality of global life and longevity beyond the immediate potential effects on an economic experience some believe they are accustomed to.

Planning for 2031 or 2064 or 2097 rather than the end of this financial year seems to create a special kind of conflict in our human minds — but time can be measured in many ways. The Leonids will light up Earth’s sky for thousands of years regardless of our speed to action — how long do we want to be here to see it? How many generations of Sumatran elephants or vaquita porpoises or monarch butterflies are left? How many words for snow will be lost?

Previously in The Revelator:

The Extinction Crisis in Watercolor and Oils: Using Art to Save Plants

The Monumental Effort to Replant the Klamath River Dam Reservoirs

As the dams come down, crews prepare for miles of new vegetation to rise up. That starts with thousands of tiny acorns.

On a cool October morning, Joshua Chenoweth and Alauna Grant crane their necks and peer into a canopy of round-lobed oak leaves.

“This one is loaded,” says Chenoweth, taking in the twisty limbs and furrowed gray bark. “Oaks are slow growers; that’s an old tree.”

Chenoweth, senior riparian ecologist with the Yurok Tribe, is leading the effort to replant newly revealed reservoir footprints as four dams are removed from the Klamath River in northern California and southern Oregon. To prepare for the mammoth endeavor, his crews have been collecting native seeds from around the project area. Today they’re gathering acorns from white oak trees along Scotch Creek, a tributary of the Klamath.

Two hands cup a bounty of acorns — Photo: Juliet Grable

The oak leaves are still green, but the shrubs along the creek have turned shades of rust and russet; adjacent, where western meadowlarks call, is a field of straw. While Chenoweth heads upstream to scout more trees, Grant, assistant crew lead, stays behind to collect. She works quietly and methodically, examining each acorn, discarding any with obvious holes or cracks or that yield to the pressure of a finger. Later the nuts will be soaked in a five-gallon bucket and the “floaters” discarded.

Grant, a member of the Karuk Tribe, joined the vegetation crew in 2020, after the paint store where she was working went out of business. Though it can be tough — “You gotta keep drinking water and get your shade breaks,” Grant warns — she loves working outside and giving back to the Earth.

“I’m excited to see what the river is going to look like,” Grant says. “It’s going to be such a different landscape. It will actually be a river again.”

Two people standing in the foreground ahead of a mountainous landscape — Photo: Juliet Grable

The region’s Tribes, which include the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Shasta and Klamath, have long depended on the Klamath River’s abundant salmon runs. Their members have been among the most passionate and effective voices advocating for the removal of the dams, which have cut off fish habitat and impaired water quality for over a century.

Now that it’s happening, the removal of the four dams of the Lower Klamath Project is being hailed as the biggest dam removal in U.S. history. Even more significantly, it’s one of the largest restoration projects ever.

Resource Environmental Solutions, spearheading the restoration, tapped Chenoweth for his experience revegetating two former reservoirs on the Elwha River in southwest Washington. This week his goal is to collect 500 pounds of white oak acorns, which he hopes will translate into 30 to 40 viable nuts per pound — and then 15,000 to 20,000 potential new trees. Acorns don’t store well, and the ones his crew is collecting now must be planted within a year.

“I’m hoping to grow 5,000 to 10,000 in nurseries, which would be ready to plant in 2025,” he explains. “If I could have an equal number to seed [directly] in the reservoirs, maybe I could get another 10,000 to germinate.”

For a project of this scale, Chenoweth must think in thousands — or tens of thousands. RES is responsible for revegetating 2,200 acres of formerly submerged lakebed, along with several miles of tributary creeks.

The acorns are just one element of this effort. Since 2018, RES has contracted crews to collect seed from around 100 different native plant species.

It would be impossible to directly collect enough seed to cover such a vast area, so several commercial nurseries have partnered with RES to “amplify” seed. By growing plants specifically for their progeny, a single seed can yield hundreds or even thousands more. So far RES has secured 80,000 pounds of “pure live seed” — about 15 billion individual viable seeds.

“Seed mixes tailored for different locations across the project area will cover the bulk of the reservoir footprint,” says Dave Coffman, geoscientist and project director at RES. They will supplement seeding with trees such as blue elderberry and Klamath plum, shrubs like buckbrush, and an array flowering plants.

Their approach is “replanting by community” — grouping species that will help each other thrive by holding in moisture and buffering from the wind. Planting densely will also help keep invasive weeds like medusa head and reed canary grass from taking over the reservoir footprints, which will essentially be blank slates once drained.

Early on RES hired Siskiyou BioSurvey, a group of nine botanists based in Ashland, Oregon, to help identify appropriate native species and find good collecting locations. Some plants have been chosen for their cultural significance or importance to pollinators. Hedgerow Farms, a nursery near Davis, California, is growing thousands of milkweed rhizomes for the project. Milkweed is the host plant of monarch butterfly caterpillars, and the flowers attract a range of bees and butterflies.

“The faster we can bring pollinators to the reservoir footprints, the faster the rest of the plantings become successful,” says Coffman.

The plantings will help stitch together the landscape, but the river will do most of the work all by itself, he adds. “The approach is one of process-based restoration, where over time the river will do what the river does.”

Planting the First Acorns

On Jan. 16 Chenoweth’s crew gathers at Iron Gate reservoir to begin seeding along the shoreline. Less than a week before, the gate at the base of Iron Gate, the lowest of the Klamath River dams, was cracked open, and a slurry of water, sediment and rocks began gushing out, initiating the draining — or drawdown — of a reservoir first filled in 1962.

Chenoweth explains the strategy: “Acorns first; then we’re going to seed it. Next, we’ll plant shrubs and trees starting on February 3.”

A long shot of crew members in yellow and orange vests alongside a riverbank — Crews at Iron Gate. Photo: Juliet Grable

Five botanists from Siskiyou BioSurvey are here, and Chenoweth’s crew has staffed up. Most of the dozen or so planters are members of the Yurok Tribe.

“Let’s keep all foot traffic in the flagged zone,” Chenoweth calls as the crew files down to the shore. The seeds of nonnative weeds love to cling to muddy boots.

The shoreline has already dropped several feet, exposing a band of sticky mud skimmed with green — strands of an aquatic plant, exposed and dying, that emit a pungent, briny odor.

They start on a north-facing shore with the acorns some of them collected last fall. “To me it’s a big symbolic moment to have a member of the Yurok Tribe put the first acorn in the ground in the reservoir footprint,” says Dave Meurer, director of community affairs at RES.

Richard Green, field technician and Yurok Tribe member, demonstrates the technique. The mud is so soft he can drive the nut in without using his hori-hori knife. He plants the acorns, swollen from an overnight soaking in water, sideways, then covers them with sticky mud.

Others join him, and soon clusters of bright blue and red flags dot the drab shoreline. Once 30 clusters are planted, a crew member walks into the center and takes a GPS reading; then the crew pulls the flags and repeats the process farther along the shore.

A crew member plants the latest in a field of Orange flags. — Photo: Juliet Grable

Chenoweth leaves one crew to plant acorns and takes another to start seeding. They’re using a mix that includes yarrow, fescue, wild rye and bunchgrasses — hardy natives that will thrive in this rocky upland zone. Grant and another crew member demonstrate the hand-broadcasting technique: keep moving and take advantage of the wind. As she tosses handful after handful, the tiny seeds disappear into the mud.

From Overlook Point, in their high-vis vests, the crew are bright specks on the fissured shoreline. Though RES may turn to seeding from the air via helicopter if they start running out of time this spring, they will rely on hand sowing as much as possible.

“We know for a fact, based on experience, that we’ll get better coverage with seed and higher level of success with hand planting,” says Coffman.

The crew is lucky: They can easily access this part of the reservoir by truck. “It’s intense, physical work,” says Greg Carey, cofounder of Siskiyou BioSurvey. Iron Gate reservoir is sinuous, skinny, and nine miles long; later this week they’ll be planting in areas that can only be accessed by foot, which means packing 40 pounds of acorns cross-country, boots taking on more mud with each step.

Several of the planters wear gloves, masks, caps and hoodies to brace against the steady breeze coming off the reservoir. Come summer the landscape will turn hot, dry, and windy — tough conditions for plants to take root. To take advantage of the residual moisture in the mud, Chenoweth’s crews will chase the new shoreline as the lake recedes, repeating the process at the two other reservoirs: Copco Lake, a few miles upstream of Iron Gate, and Topsy, behind J.C. Boyle dam in Oregon. Before long the Klamath River’s new shape will reveal itself, and the quagmires of mud will bloom.

Carey, who typically takes winters off, will be out with the planting crew as much as possible to witness the landscape transforming around them.

“We’re smelling the lakebed; all of this biology that has just died and become nutrients,” says Carey. “The plants are just going to explode.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Could California’s Next Dam Removal Take Place on This Endangered River?

Saving Africa’s Most Endangered Big Cat

Conservationists in Namibia have found the fate of people and cheetahs are closely intertwined — and so are solutions to help both.

Today we know a good bit about cheetahs: They’re the fastest land animal, going from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds. They’re expert hunters, although they often lose their prey to bigger predators. And they also face big threats, occupying just 9% of their historic range. But when Dr. Laurie Marker first began working with the animals in the early 1970s, many people didn’t even know if they were a dog or a cat.

“They’ve got dog-like claws,” she explains. “I think that confused all the farmers.”

Marker has dedicated her career to closing that knowledge gap. She began working with cheetahs in 1974 at the Wildlife Safari, a wildlife park in Oregon, which included trips to South West Africa (now Namibia) to research the rewilding of cheetahs born in captivity. During her time there she realized that farmers were killing hundreds of cheetahs a year to protect their herds, and some of the world’s last remaining cheetah populations could be lost.

So in 1990 she moved to Namibia and launched the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an organization that does research, education and conservation to help secure a future for wild cheetahs and support surrounding communities.

Woman stands in the background with goats and dogs in yard — Laurie Marker. Photo: Jennifer Leigh Warner

Marker spoke to The Revelator about how dogs can help cheetahs, what risks climate change poses, and why addressing poverty would aid conservation.

Where did cheetahs historically range?

Around 1900 there were about 100,000 cheetahs, and they were found throughout Asia and Africa. They had a very large distribution. But by the 1950s they were gone in most of the areas of Asia — the last of the Asian cheetahs are in Iran, and there’s probably less than 20 there. By the 1950s they were gone in India. Today there’s only about 7,000 cheetahs left, and they’re found in about 23 countries in 31 populations, of which 20 of those populations are under 100 individuals.

We have put cheetahs back into India in the last year, and I just got word two of the cheetahs that we actually sent over had a litter of cubs. So today, I think there’s three or four new cubs in India.

Conflicts with people are a big threat to cheetahs. What solutions have you found?

The majority — more than 80% — of the cheetahs found today are outside of protected areas. Here in Namibia, about 90% are found outside of protected areas. When I moved here, it was to find out more about how they were living on the farmlands with livestock farmers and then what kinds of programs could be developed.

What we’ve done in the last 30 years is develop a variety of programs so that cheetahs and people could live in harmony together. Many of those are about good livestock management, good rangeland management and good wildlife management. I think farmers around the world think predators are all going to eat all their livestock. Where we as farmers can actually play a key role in protecting our livestock. It’s not that much work, but you have to think about it. Predators aren’t just out there wanting to eat your livestock. What they want is an easy meal.

Man sits with three puppies and two goats — Puppies being raised as livestock guarding dogs. Photos: Isabella Groc

So we use livestock guarding dogs, which we breed and place with farmers, that protect their livestock. Around here people mostly have goats, sheep and cattle. And the other area that I work in is up in Somaliland where there’s mostly goats, sheep and camels. Through an integrated program like good livestock management and having dogs, you can actually reduce your livestock loss 80 to 100% and not have to kill predators. We not only like cheetahs, we like all the other predators because predators play a really important role in the health of the ecosystems.

We have leopards, which are harder to live with, but if you get the right practices down, it is all the same. We also have hyenas, brown and spotted, as well as jackals and caracals. Those are the main predators around.

Cheetahs actually are one of the best hunters on the savannas. When they eat, they eat very rapidly and then move away. So there’s usually things left over that allows for more biodiversity. For instance, I always say to the farming community that if you have cheetahs on your land, the cheetah will make a kill and the jackals will be eating off of what the cheetah killed, and the jackal isn’t going to be in your goat yard. Not only is it feeding the jackal, but it’s feeding the birds of prey and all the other insects and small carnivorous mammals. That’s why you end up with greater biodiversity, and that’s the important part of a top predator within a healthy ecosystem.

Are more protected areas needed?

I think in Africa there might be 12 game reserves large enough for cheetahs. Cheetahs have one of the largest home ranges of any animal on Earth. So between the cheetahs and the African wild dogs, which we also work with here, you have huge ranges. And so that means you have to develop programs within those ranges so that the people and the wildlife can live together.

In Namibia about 20% of the land is protected by the government. And then another 20% are conservancies. Namibia is a leader in conservancy management where the communities actually manage their natural resources and they’re able to benefit from that management as well. We’ve been very active in trying to help develop these kinds of initiatives throughout other areas in Africa as well.

Our human-wildlife conflict laws are different from most countries. In many countries people get compensation if they lose their livestock [to wildlife]. And Namibia won’t do that because we believe that you’re developing farmers that are just losing their livestock to get paid. Namibia has tried to be very proactive by having conservancies, by having things like livestock guarding dogs, and good livestock and wildlife management training programs, so that the farmers actually benefit through having access to their own wildlife through ecotourism.

Is there a lot of overlap in the techniques you use and those used by others in the United States and Europe who are working on reducing conflict between livestock and other predators like wolves?

Yes. The livestock guarding dog program started in Oregon and that was back in the middle ’70s and early ’80s, where I learned about it. Now our programs [in Namibia] have been going on since the early 1990s and we have spread the word. We published all of our data. People monitor what we do very closely. We work with a Turkish breed called the Anatolian Shepherd and Kangal dogs and they’ve been used for about 5,000 years. I went to Turkey and spent a lot of time learning about how the dogs work from the Turkish herders and they usually have three dogs — a female and two males. The female wakes up and she barks, and the males are huge and go after whatever might be around, but also their bark is loud.

You have to have enough dogs to protect against wolves because wolves are also a pack animal. And so for us, cheetahs aren’t a pack animal, leopards aren’t a pack animal. So we can actually work with individual dogs with herds up to 200 to 300 animals and have great success.

But we also encourage the use of herders as well. I think a lot of people in America don’t utilize [herders] a lot. They throw the animals out in the field, in the open range, and then blame anything that might happen. And I’m opposed to that. I am a livestock farmer myself, we have a dairy goat farm, and my agriculture background is linked together with the wildlife background. For me, I like my livestock and I like the wildlife and I like the predators. I feel it’s my responsibility to take care of my livestock through good management.

What kind of a threat does climate change pose?

Cheetahs are found in the most arid and semi-arid landscapes in all of the world with the poorest people on Earth. The animals are being affected through the loss of habitat and what’s going to happen with climate change. We’ve got much hotter days, longer days that are hot, less days that have rain. All of these are affecting and will affect the movements of the animals, the diseases that potentially animals can get and can carry — the prey base will be very much affected, and the grazing lands. That’s going to shift the migration of these animals and put them possibly in even more conflict with the human population.

Outstretched cheetah running — Cheetah running. Photo: Jennifer Leigh Warner

I think livelihood development is a really critical part of the solution. [Too much grazing has led to] desertification, you end up with either sand deserts taking over, or with invasive bushes taking over, or thickened bushes. We’ve developed a whole habitat restoration project because here in Namibia, an area about the size of California is so thickly thorn-bushed that it has reduced the economic value for agriculture as well as the grazing lands for the wildlife and livestock.

We see this in many of the areas where cheetahs are found because of the effect of this overgrazing by the livestock. With this form of desertification — where you’ve got thickened thorn bushes, no grasses, and then the underground water is being taken up by these invasive bushes — it causes even a greater effect for climate change.

What kind of action would you like to see?

I don’t think anybody in the western world really cares about the poor people that I work with in the middle of Africa, but I really care about them and they don’t want to be poor starving farmers. It’s getting worse and worse. We are helping develop alternative livelihoods and funding to assist greater wildlife and livestock management techniques to help the people get out of poverty.

Then we can have more habitats where animals like the cheetah can live, and when you end up with a top predator, like a cheetah, you end up with a much greater amount of biodiversity.

Often these arid landscapes are called “dead lands,” but they’re only dead because they’re overgrazed and the biodiversity isn’t there. We really need to re-establish biodiversity and it can be done, but we first need to reduce the impact on the land by people. And that revolves around poverty reduction plans, education and the development of conservancies.

I think that the cheetah can be an icon — it can help people accept predators on a worldwide basis, but we just need to understand that we can live together.

Previously in The Revelator:

Is the Jaguarundi Extinct in the United States?

Species Spotlight: The Critically Endangered Sumatran Tiger — Small But Mighty

This elusive predator’s stripes act as camouflage, but that’s not enough to protect them from poachers and habitat loss.

Species name:

Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae or sondaica)

Description:

The Sumatran tiger is the world’s smallest tiger subspecies* but still the largest predator in Indonesia. An adult female weighs about 198 pounds (90 kg), while an adult male can be more than 264 pounds (120 kg), with a shoulder height of about 23 inches (60 cm). Sumatran tigers have great day and night vision, very strong canine teeth, and impressive claws for holding and gripping moving prey. Their vision is six times better than humans’ at night, but hearing is their most acute sense, mainly used for hunting. They can detect high-pitched sounds produced by prey. Each individual Sumatran tiger has nearly 100 unique stripe patterns, like human fingerprints, which provide camouflage. Based on these stripes, scientists can identify individual tigers in the wild.

* (Editor’s note: Tiger subspecies remain a matter of ongoing scientific discussion.)

Where it’s found:

Endemic to the island of Sumatra, this predator still lives in 24 of 38 landscapes larger than 96 square miles (250 square km), the smallest area that can support a breeding unit.

IUCN Red List status:

Endangered at the species level of Panthera tigris. Assessment for all subspecies, including Sumatran tigers, has been discharged by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature awaiting further reassessments. Detail about Sumatran tiger status, however, is provided in the supplementary material of the assessment.

Photo courtesy San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

Major threats:

Conflict between tigers and humans and illegal poaching and trafficking remain the most pressing threat to these big cats. Meanwhile rapid forest loss has left their habitat fragmented. Agriculture, the main driver of deforestation, contributed to an estimated loss of 27% of tropical forests across the island between 2000 and 2016. With demand for products such as palm oil, coffee and timber only increasing, this trend will continue.

Notable conservation programs or legal protections:

The Sumatran tiger is legally protected by the government of Indonesia through the Law No. 5 of 1990 regarding the Conservation of Natural Resources and Ecosystems. Key conservation priorities include:

- Strengthening the capacity of Sumatran tiger conservation through research – exploration, knowledge management, and training and education.
- Increasing the effectiveness of tiger landscape management in both major landscapes and marginal habitats.
- Strengthening the protection of tigers from habitat destruction, poaching, and conflict through effective patrols and law enforcement.
- Strengthening networks and partnerships for conservation that increase mutual benefits, supports, and added value to the community and stakeholders.
- Improving infrastructure and strengthening human-tiger conflict mitigation to save problem tigers and threatened populations.
- Increasing permeability and connectivity between habitat clusters in fragmented habitats.

My favorite experience:

I have been studying the Sumatran tiger using camera traps since 1998. Discovering tigers and other wildlife species, especially those with low detection probabilities, has always been my favorite experience. Together with the San Diego Zoo, where I’m a research fellow, I also learned many interesting new things related to technology in wildlife conservation, including the use of GPS collars, thermal drones, and new analytical techniques to strengthen the management of the Sumatran tigers and other key wildlife. As a senior manager, I’ve also had an opportunity to build and enhance the capacity of young people to become a new generation in Sumatran tiger and wildlife conservation.

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

We need studies on potential connectivity among Sumatran tiger landscapes, with an emphasis on the roles of marginal habitats; nature-based solutions to strengthen active involvement of forest-edge communities in Sumatran tiger and key wildlife conservation; and technologies to enhance the capacity of forest rangers to prevent and detect illegal hunting on the tiger and principal prey.

Key research:

- Goodrich, J., H. T. Wibisono, D. Miquelle, A. Lynam, E. Sanderson, S. Chapman, T. N. E. Gray, A. Harihar, P. Chanchani. 2022. Panthera tigris: IUCN Redlist status update. Catnews, 76: 12 – 13.
- Goodrich, J., H. T. Wibisono, D. Miquelle, A. Lynam, E. Sanderson, S. Chapman, T. N. E. Gray, A. Harihar, P. Chanchani. 2022. Panthera tigris. In The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-1.RLTS.T15955A214862019.en
- Wibisono, H. T. 2021. An Island-Wide Status of Sumatran tiger (Panthera Tigris Sumatrae) and Principal Prey in Sumatra, Indonesia. A Ph.D Dissertation, Department of Entomology and Wildlife Conservation, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Delaware, DE, US. https://udspace.udel.edu/items/c86c7184-8214-463b-ad51-f5da61b98132

Previously in The Revelator:

Tigers and Wolves: The Reigning Cats and Dogs in Conservation?

Is Our Food Waste Creating a Murder of Crows?

Ongoing research finds that trashcans can feed and boost crow populations, which comes with a potentially deadly cost for some other bird species.

Last summer a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia headed into the field to study the food web linking a local bird community. But their destination wasn’t a temperate rainforest or rocky coastline — it was urban Vancouver on trash day.

Their goal: untangling hidden ways in which food in the city’s trash cans may shape its ecosystem.

The project is the brainchild of Dan Forrest, a Ph.D. student at the university’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, who says urban trees held special significance for him while he was growing up in Philadelphia.

“I depended on these urban parks and green spaces to get a bit of respite from the urban hustle and bustle,” he says.

But not everyone enjoyed the same benefits he did. “I saw that these spaces weren’t distributed evenly everywhere around the city.” Some people, often those in richer, whiter neighborhoods, had greater access than others to urban nature. Even then, he worried the trend would expand and worsen. “I knew that urbanization was fast becoming one of the major forces for change in our world.”

When he arrived in Vancouver as a grad student, he and other students and faculty members noticed large numbers of crows and gulls coming onto campus to raid trash cans. How, they wondered, was the easy availability of food waste affecting the urban ecosystem?

It’s not a small question, as 30-40% of food in the United States — and as much as 60% in Canada — ends up uneaten and in the trash. This can be a bonanza for urban wildlife — including crows, who tend to thrive in cities.

A crow sits on the rim of an outdoor trash can — Photo by Burkhard Kaufhold on Unsplash

But if food waste attracts unusual numbers of these gregarious, intelligent birds, could it create ripple effects through the rest of the local bird community?

In addition to eating trash, crows often prey on other birds, raiding their nests to eat eggs and young. According to Forrest, Vancouver’s robin population has been declining for decades, while black-capped chickadees have been holding steady or even increasing; he wonders if this could be, at least in part, because robins’ open cup nests are more vulnerable to crows than chickadee nests hidden in tree cavities.

These questions eventually became the focus of his dissertation research, which began last summer. Forrest and a group of undergraduate research assistants woke up before sunrise to walk through neighborhoods across the city, note trash receptacles with visible food waste, and observe the behavior of birds in the area. “What were they doing? Were they eating, calling, interacting with another species?” says Forrest. “And if they were eating something, what was it?”

He’s still analyzing the data, but it’s already clear that human trash “is making up a substantial portion of crows’ diet [in Vancouver],” says Forrest, and “they’re congregating in areas where there’s lots of food waste.”

The next step will be to connect the presence of crows with overall urban bird diversity across Vancouver neighborhoods, drawing on a range of data sources. In addition to nest predation, “there could be a number of different reasons why there are fewer [bird] species around where there are crows — because they’re scared of the crows, or they’re being outcompeted by the crows,” says Forrest.

Forrest is already in touch with the city government, and if it does turn out that crows attracted by trash are having negative impacts on bird communities, he hopes to work with officials to make changes that will benefit both birds and people, such as introducing more crow-resistant trash bins or improving trash pickup services in lower-income areas — changes that could be made in other cities, too.

Forrest’s project adds to a rich body of research on the dynamics of urban bird communities. Past studies have uncovered complex relationships between bird feeders (another artificial source of food for wildlife), nest predators, and songbirds’ nesting success. And as Forrest has noticed in both Philadelphia and Vancouver, socioeconomic and racial inequality among human communities affects birds, too — for example, neighborhoods in Los Angeles where Black people were once prevented from buying homes by “redlining” still have greater bird diversity than historically Black neighborhoods, which tend to have denser housing and fewer trees.

Although it’s still in the early stages, other experts are intrigued by his project’s potential. Desirée Narango of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, an ornithologist and urban ecologist who is not involved in Forrest’s research, says he is embarking on “an ambitious study, which is definitely admirable. I think it’s exciting that he’s already having conversations with the city, because that’s how urban ecology can really make a difference, by actually having these conversations, determining what sort of actions can help people and wildlife, and then making it happen.”

Forrest notes that his research isn’t intended to vilify crows — or any other species. Crows may be a threat to smaller birds, but as Forrest acknowledges, a lot of people like them, too. On his surveys, he met people who carried peanuts in their pockets to feed crows while walking in their neighborhoods.

“I don’t necessarily want to make a judgment call on behalf of the community,” Forrest says. Instead, he wants to help residents make better-informed decisions by revealing the hidden dynamics of the urban ecosystem they’re part of. That may start by paying better attention to what we eat — and what we, as a society, throw away.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Secret Value of Trash

Will a ‘Wilderness’ Designation Help This Vital Ecosystem?

Conservationists agree that Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands are an ecologically important area, but how to protect them isn’t as simple.

Outdoor adventurers visiting Oregon often flock to the rocky coastline, climb snow-capped Mount Hood, or peer into the gleaming blue waters of Crater Lake. But few make it to the Owyhee Canyonlands, in the remote southeast corner of the state. Here millions of acres of desert wilderness stretch into southwestern Idaho and northern Nevada — a sea of sagebrush interrupted by jagged red-rock canyons, clear streams, rollicking whitewater, riverside hot springs and darky, starry night skies.

The Owyhee offers recreation opportunities for bikers, hikers, paddlers, fishers and other travelers. But it’s the area’s conservation potential that has attracted attention recently. It contains a huge expanse of sagebrush steppe, a habit in decline as the desert West has been plowed, paved and grazed. Intact sagebrush steppe is needed by far-ranging animals like pronghorn, elk and bighorn sheep, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has identified the Owyhee as a priority conservation area for imperiled greater sage grouse. It’s home to some 250 species, including 28 endemic plants and 14 bats — wild, diverse, and largely unprotected.

But that could change.

Wilderness or Monument

Protecting the Owyhee has long been a goal of conservationists, and legislation now in Congress could help — depending on who you ask. The Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act would designate 1.1 million acres as wilderness in the Owyhee that’s currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s supported by Friends of the Owyhee, Oregon Natural Desert Association, the Wilderness Society, Conservation Lands Foundation and other regional and national organizations.

The bill also has the backing of Oregon’s two senators. It was introduced in the summer of 2023 by Sen. Ron Wyden and is cosponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley. It passed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in December with bipartisan support, which is further than previous versions of the bill introduced in years past have made it. But that could be as far as it goes.

Canyon with green river valley — Three Forks Recreation site in the Owyhee, Oregon. Photo: Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0 DEED)

“We recognize that we’re in an election year and that the House of Representatives hasn’t been prioritizing conservation legislation,” says Ryan Houston, executive director of Oregon Natural Desert Association. “Actually getting this bill all the way through both houses of Congress and getting it on the president’s desk before the end of this Congress at the end of December are really long odds.”

That’s why supporters are also pursuing another strategy: calling on the Biden administration to designate the area a national monument.

“We know that the Biden administration is interested in monuments and given the groundwork that’s been laid here, we believe this is a good, viable alternative to the legislation if Congress doesn’t act,” he says.

Land designated as “wilderness” comes with protections under the Wilderness Act, which includes closing the area to future mining claims. A monument would come with whatever protections are in the president’s proclamation, which can also include limitations on road building and industrial development.

Preventing any industrialization of the Owyhee would be particularly important.

The sagebrush steppe landscape across the intermountain West is a heavily fragmented type of habitat, which makes large remaining swathes critical for wildlife. “When we have intact areas where wildlife can move across tens of thousands of acres without having to interface with industrial facilities, we can maintain strong wildlife populations, we can maintain good healthy habitat,” says Houston. “But once it gets fragmented, that can have significant impacts on wildlife.”

An uninterrupted landscape will also better help plants and animals cope with climate change as they need to shift their ranges to higher elevations as temperatures warm.

“Species need to be able to move across elevation gradients to be able to accommodate and adapt to a changing environment,” he says. “Having connected habitats across elevational gradients, soil types, geology, moisture and precipitation regimes — all of those kinds of forms of connection are fundamentally what help protect biodiversity on a landscape like this.”

The Grazing Problem

While that’s true, not all environmentalists see the current legislation or national monument effort as the best ways to protect the area’s wildlife and wilderness characteristics. One of those is Katie Fite, director of public lands for Wildlands Defense.

[The legislation] “would be a tragedy for biodiversity and for anyone seeking a real wilderness experience on public lands,” she says. “It’s a ticket for destroying the very wilderness-worthy and monument-worthy values that are out there in the Owyhee landscape.”

At issue is the fact that the vast majority — upwards of 90% — of Oregon’s high desert lands managed by the BLM are used for cattle grazing, and this includes the 1.1 million acres proposed for wilderness designation, says Houston. Grazing can threaten the ecological health of sagebrush steppe landscapes. Cows trample native vegetation, pollute water sources and cause streambank erosion. Under either the wilderness bill or a potential national monument, that grazing is likely to continue. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act existing active grazing permits are allowed to continue.

Adult and young cows stand in sagebrush. — Cattle grazing in an allotment east of the Owyhee River Canyon. Photo: Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0 DEED)

In the case of a national monument, the president has the choice. “But in this case, based on the other monuments the president has established, based on the politics here, based on who’s around the table, we would fully expect that the president would establish a monument that would allow for the continuance of grazing subject to existing law and regulation,” he says. “It can change in the future because the BLM has the role and the responsibility to manage grazing. So in the future, there could be more, there could be less, it could be different. But a wilderness designation itself isn’t a trigger that changes it.”

While Houston says that “impacts of grazing on that landscape have been significant.” He also sees a path for better management. “In both cases there are ways that management could improve conditions on the landscape,” he says. “The first goal is to protect the habitat, the next to manage for conservation.”

The BLM is charged with managing for multiple uses, which includes goals that are often opposed — like protecting wildlife and managing grazing. Designating land as a monument or wilderness can help narrow the focus, says Houston.

But Fite sees grazing in a wilderness area like the Owyhee as fundamentally problematic.

“I view this as an attack on the Wilderness Act, on wilderness as a whole and on public lands by enshrining grazing,” she says. “It would degrade the very meaning of monument and wilderness.”

And it would greatly imperil the ecosystem the conservation effort seeks to protect, she says.

Grazing can fuel the spread of nonnative invasive plants such as cheatgrass and Medusahead, which are highly flammable, she says. It’s a problem made worse as ranchers haul water into more remote areas for livestock, and further spread invasive plants, which proliferate near water sources in the arid landscape.

“Areas of extensive trampling disturbance around water sources are epicenters for weed infestation,” she says. “They’re hauling the water along these roads and then putting the trough out in the middle of nowhere. Once you get these weeds going out there, there’s really no going back.”

Additional Risks

Besides grazing, other threats loom, such as industrial development and the roads that come with it. That includes mining for minerals such as silver, gold and uranium; oil and gas production; industrial wind and solar development; and the transmission systems that accompany all kinds of energy infrastructure.

Wilderness protections would ward off those advances, but Fite worries that they miss the most at-risk area: the McDermitt caldera, which isn’t included in proposed land for protections in the Owyhee. The Thacker Pass lithium mine has already been permitted on BLM land at the southern edge of the volcanic crater just across the border in Nevada and would be on the Owyhee’s doorstep.

“Oregon senators are totally looking away from the biggest threat out there in this very water-starved landscape, which is lithium mining and uranium mining in the McDermitt Caldera,” she says.

As Houston sees it, wilderness protections aren’t perfect but still a necessary step.

“We care about protecting [the Owyhee landscape], and we care about managing it better. Protecting it is something like wilderness. It shuts down those [development] threats. Period. Done. Permanently,” he says. “Managing it better is about things like grazing and other types of decisions that the BLM makes continuously over time. Fundamentally managing it better is a longer-term conversation.”

But if more protections do come, that would also mean more people. Despite the fact that the Owyhee isn’t a well-known travel destination, it also isn’t undiscovered. Growing Boise sits just an hour to the east, and recreationists of all kinds hike, drive, and fish the Owyhee. More could join them.

“Change is happening regardless of what happens with the designation, so what we need is better management, and we need the BLM to have the resources and the direction from leadership — whether that’s Congress or the president — to manage the recreation well,” says Houston.

There’s one thing that all conservationists are likely to agree on: “It’s a special, majestic landscape, and that’s why fundamentally we’re interested in protecting it,” he says.

If, and how, that gets done remains to be seen.

Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Oregon’s Twin Lake

What One Researcher Learned Studying Grizzlies for 40 Years

Wildlife ecologist Bruce McLellan lived in the remote Flathead Valley in Canada and followed some bears for upwards of 30 years.

Bruce McLellan recalls seeing his first grizzly bear when he was only 4 years old. It must have made an impression. He became a wildlife ecologist and devoted his career to studying the hulking bruins — much of it in the same remote place.

He moved to the wilds of the Flathead Valley in Canada in 1978 with his wife, Celine, and spent more than 40 years there, capturing, radio-collaring and then following the lives of 170 different grizzlies. He and Celine, who often accompanied him during his work, built a cabin along the Flathead River, where they raised two children.

During that time they contended with wildfires, floods, wildlife and even creepy neighbors. But living there also allowed McLellan to live amongst the animals he was studying. He followed the whole lives of several female bears who lived into their late 20s and early 30s.

“It’s interesting, but it also gets emotional,” he told The Revelator.

McLellan chronicles his personal and professional adventures in a recent book, Grizzly Bear Science and the Art of a Wilderness Life: Forty Years of Research in the Flathead Valley. The book combines anecdotes of his field work and personal life — collaring grizzlies is no easy task, and neither is raising children in the wilderness. The book also delves into his scientific findings about bear behavior and ecology.

The Revelator spoke with McLellan about how research methods evolved over his career, what climate change will mean for grizzlies, and how people can be better neighbors to bears.

You’ve spent decades studying grizzlies. Why write this book now?

There are a few reasons. One is that I’ve written several dozen scientific journal papers, and I don’t think anyone, besides other scientists, really reads them. And when I’m out in the forest, which I am a lot, I bump into various hunters and campers and other people, and they’re very unaware of what we [scientists] are doing. Yet they’re very curious. Given that ultimately these taxpayers have paid for my work, I thought it was my duty to let them know what I’ve done in the last 45 years.

I also think that there’s a disconnect happening between scientists and the general public in our greater society. And I hope [the book] lets people know what scientists do and to realize that scientists are just normal people. We’re not trying to make stuff up. We’re not lying. No one’s telling us what to say. We’re just trying to learn and provide information so that decision makers — whoever they are — can make better decisions.

There’s also a lot of personal stories in there. I’m sure if it was just all grizzly bear science, it wouldn’t be quite as easy to read. So I broke it up with stories about our life. I think it was fairly unique what we ended up doing, building our cabin and raising our kids in the wilderness.

How have methods of studying grizzlies changed over the course of your long career?

When I started on grizzly bears in 1978, the radio collars that [researchers Frank and John] Craighead invented in the Sixties were just becoming fairly reliable. Somewhat uniquely is that we lived [where we were tracking bears]. So I’d track these bears every day with radio telemetry. I didn’t know it at the time, but most studies don’t do that. They just put on collars and then locate the bears from an aircraft every week or two. But we followed these individuals daily and watched them all the time.

Of course that also included animal capture, and the drugs we used for that have evolved a lot over the 45 years, and so too have the capture methods.

Then as far as radio tracking goes, around the late 1990s and 2000s is when GPS technology became available. Then seven or eight years later uplinks through satellites became available. All of a sudden you have very accurate locations, but you never had to actually go out and track the bears.

Right now all the data just comes to your computer. You don’t have to go outside. These days you can hire a helicopter company to put radio collars on and then take them off. You get wonderful data, but sometimes I wonder if people really know what’s going on because there’s many things happening in the wild.

Another big change in technology that we were involved in was DNA. The group I was working with designed the hair-trapping method of getting hair from an animal. From that we can identify individuals and sex. That allowed us to finally count bears properly in forested areas and look at gene flow. We also used chemical isotopes to look at trophic levels of bears’ diets.

Lots of things have changed, and I think we can learn a lot more now, but I still worry that all these technological advances more or less mean more time in front of a computer and less time in the forest with the animals. And that’s too bad, in a way. You learn a lot by just observing.

What did you learn about their behavior?

From a behavioral point of view, grizzly bears aren’t territorial. Neither sex is. They have big home ranges that overlap. The males compete for breeding opportunities with females, and the females are promiscuous. They’ll mate with several males, often to confuse paternity so that the males don’t want to kill the babies because they think they’re the dad.

The males fight and compete over the females. Most males we catch in the spring are all beat up because they’ve been scrapping.

Most females don’t disperse much. They stay near their mother’s home range, which is very beneficial because that allows areas to have a fairly high density of bears because the females aren’t big wanderers, which makes them not as vulnerable.

These are still big areas, but not compared to males’ ranges. There’s nowhere on the continent big enough for males to live without being killed. But females have smaller ranges and smaller dispersal distances. Many females die of natural causes.

How well are grizzly bears doing?

In the United States two or three centuries ago they were found over enormous areas — from New Mexico through California. And in Canada they were across the prairies and Saskatchewan into central Manitoba. The European settlers had a war on carnivores and more or less wiped out grizzly bears, wolves and cougars.

In British Columbia we didn’t lose them nearly to the level that you did in the lower 48, largely because a lot of our province is pretty mountainous and relatively inhospitable for humans.

Since the Endangered Species Act listing of grizzlies in 1975, I think the mentality has changed in the United States and Canada. Since then populations have been recovering in both countries.

In the last 50 years, Yellowstone has gone from roughly about 200 bears to 1,000. And the northern Continental Divide has gone from 400 or 500 up to over 1,000. In southern British Columbia it’s the same. The Flathead population tripled in the years I was down there.

With my first publication in the 1980s on the Flathead bears, I had them increasing quite rapidly, and I was concerned that my results were questionable because it was generally thought that bears don’t go up very fast and they’re not doing well. The belief was that they were going extinct.

In general they’re recovering after nearly being wiped out. But we still have a few very troublingly small populations, including in the southern Coast Range of British Columbia and in the North Cascades in Washington.

But as their numbers are coming up, now we’re dealing with more conflict issues [with people]. People aren’t used to it, and some people are quite nervous. They have to habituate to bears.

The biggest challenge now is coexistence. How do we live with grizzlies in our farmlands and our yards and our rural 5-acre subdivisions?

How can we be better neighbors?

The number-one thing is to get rid of your attractants. Bears are driven by food, and humans have great food, whether it’s apple trees or garbage or the list goes on. If you don’t want bears around and you want your fruit or your chickens or whatever to yourself, you have to protect it. You’ve got to have electric fences. If not, you’re giving it to the bears and you’re also having them come around your place.

Two people sit in front of display on bear-proof fencing — The Flathead National Forest hosted an educational Bear Fair on August 11, 2012. Participants learned tips and tools for living and recreating in bear country. Photo: US Forest Service Northern Region, CC BY 2.0 DEED

I have a small vineyard and fruit trees, and I have electric fences. The bears can’t get into what I want. However, I also have a bunch of apple trees, and I have a big sockeye salmon stream right through the middle of my property.

They can have that. But they’re safe here, and they’re not safe everywhere.

The other thing is that you’re going to have to learn to have them around. As my daughter points out, putting on bear spray should be just like putting on your coat if you go for a jog or something. Where she lives in another part of British Columbia, it’s just what you do.

Her daughter, who’s 12 — when she wants to go biking, she takes bear spray, and she knows how to use it. Those are the things we’re going to have to start learning to deal with. There’s lots we can do. It’s going to take effort, education, money and skilled people.

How could climate change affect grizzlies?

It’s a bit of a wildcard. I’m not a climate biologist, but when I look at the models, I have a feeling that there’s going to be some areas, like the fruit systems, that may end up actually getting better because there’ll be more wildfires.

Most fruits do way better in the sun. Huckleberries and buffalo berries are two very major fruits that do really well after fire. Perhaps with more fires, we’ll have big berry fields. That’s certainly been the case. The big berry fields in the Flathead were all caused by big fires in the 1930s, when there were record-high temperatures.

But other areas will suffer. Salmon is an obvious one. They’re not doing well all through coastal Alaska, British Columbia, Russia and Japan for many reasons, but a warming climate is a big one — whether it’s warming in the ocean or the melting of the glaciers or the warming of the streams.

Then there’s the whitebark pine — that’s another major bear food in Yellowstone and the dry side of the Coast Range and the interior mountains of British Columbia. It’s doing quite poorly.

Another issue is climate refugees. What happens to the people in Texas or Oklahoma when it gets too hot to live there? Where are they going to go? They might start moving into Montana and into British Columbia. Humanity will be shifting northward, I assume. And that’s where the bears are. So that’s also a great concern for me.

How we live with an increasing number of bears I think will be the future challenge.

Previously in The Revelator:

Grizzly Bears and Roads: The Grisly Truth

Helping Bison Find Their Way Home

Supporting the reintroduction of buffalo on Tribal lands in the United States and Canada requires international, interagency cooperation.

CHIEF MOUNTAIN BORDER CROSSING— When two bison belonging to the Blackfeet Nation of Montana attempted to enter Canada in September, rangers from Parks Canada, the country’s national park agency, met them before they could cross the border and gently steered them home.

It’s not that American bison, or buffalo, haven’t been welcome in Canada. When bison were on the brink of extinction in 1907, the Canadian government moved nearly 700 of them by train from Montana’s Flathead Valley to Alberta to ensure the keystone species’ survival. The Canadian program was so successful that the animals had to be moved again, to what is now Elk Island National Park. There, for more than 80 years, genetically pure stock has served as the base for an ambitious program reintroducing bison across Canada, into the United States, and around the world.

It’s from this herd that the Blackfeet Nation — part of the four-nation, boundary-spanning Blackfoot Confederacy — reintroduced 87 bison onto their land in Montana in 2016 with the help of wardens and biologists from Parks Canada. In summer 2023 the Blackfeet released 49 of these bison within a large section of the Blackfeet Tribal lands adjacent to the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park and the Canada-U.S. Border.

Bison rest in the grass in the foreground while mountains loom in the background — The bison summer paddock at Waterton Lakes National Park, filled with bison originally from the Elk Island herd. (Photo: Molly McCluskey)

And it’s from this land that bison keep finding their way into Waterton Lakes or Glacier National Park or up to the border — indifferent to political lines and simply roaming through their territory, as their ancestors did for centuries.

That territory, of course, has since been carved up into parcels now owned by different countries, public-land management agencies, and private entities, as well as Tribes.

Bison roaming freely presents challenges and potential threats to the massive animals, not the least of which is international bureaucracy. Every stray wandering near the border requires the cooperation of 20 government agencies, including the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council and Alberta government, as well as the blessing of private landowners to turn them homeward.

“There’s a cultural connection to returning the buffalo back to the Blackfeet from Elk Island,” says Troy Heinert, executive director of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, based in Montana. “The Tribes that have sister Tribes or a presence on both sides of the border… it’s a little easier for them to work with international agencies in their buffalo program. But the paperwork is not very easy when you’re transporting buffalo across international borders.”

A press conference marking a commitment between US National Park Service and Parks Canada to support Indigenous-led conservation and increased collaboration with Indigenous peoples and advancing nature-based climate solutions and climate change adaptation. L to R: Chief Roy Fox of Kainai Nation; Chief Ouray Crowfoot of Siksika Nation; Council member Samuel Crowfoot of Siksika Nation; Kate Hammond, intermountain regional director, National Park Service. Photo by Molly McCluskey

Bison reintroduction programs have gained traction on Tribal lands in the United States and Canada in recent years amid growing understanding of their role in ecosystem management and the impact their eradication has had on First Nations and Indigenous people. The overarching initiative — often requiring vast interagency cooperation — shows no signs of slowing despite its challenges.

The Canadian government views the bison program as part of its fundamental responsibility to address past harms against its First Nations.

“With our truth and reconciliation objectives within the government of Canada, rematriating bison to First Nations and Indigenous peoples is one of our first priorities,” says Brad Romaniuk, Parks Canada’s resource conservation manager, who oversees wildlife transfers and is part of the team that helps turn wandering bison back from the border. Rematriation, he explains, is an overarching initiative to restore the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their ancestral lands that takes many forms, including the return of bison. “If a [Tribal] nation approaches us and they have the facilities and we can help them get set up, they’re the first ones to get buffalo from us.”

In September the U.S. Department of the Interior also reaffirmed its commitment to herd reintroduction, allotting $5 million to the restoration of bison and grassland ecosystems in Tribal communities.

“The American bison is inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology and American history,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland wrote in a statement. “While the overall recovery of bison over the last 130 years is a conservation success story, significant work remains to not only ensure that bison will remain a viable species but also to restore grassland ecosystems, strengthen rural economies dependent on grassland health and provide for the return of bison to Tribally owned and ancestral lands.”

There are more than 80 Tribes in the buffalo council across 32 million acres of lands, managing 30,000 animals. Heinert says he receives calls from newly engaged Tribes nearly every day requesting information on joining the program. While some, like the Blackfeet, will receive herds from Elk Island, ultimately the source of each herd will depend on the reason for the request: whether bison are to be used to heal the land, reestablish a cultural and spiritual connection, restore a food source, or something else.

The bison summer paddock at Waterton Lakes National Park, filled with bison originally from the Elk Island herd. (Photo: Molly McCluskey)

“Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Badlands, those other national parks and grasslands that we take surplus buffalo from, it really comes to the intended purpose for that Tribe,” Heinert says. “Some Tribes are looking for specific genetics. Some Tribes are looking for genetic diversity, so maybe they have received Badlands buffalo for years and now they want to bring some Teddy Roosevelt in.”

Reintroducing a herd isn’t simply a matter of releasing it into a new location. The buffalo council provides technical services, training in management techniques and herd health, support with herd development grants and other financial resources, trainings for bison workers or herd managers, and more. In addition to providing the bison, Parks Canada helps with transport, collaring, and other services.

“Some of the challenges are obviously making sure Tribes are prepared to manage buffalo,” Heinert says. “We have Tribes that have managed buffalo for decades and Tribes that are brand new, so making sure they have the infrastructure and the right numbers on the landscape that they have dedicated to their buffalo program… that all takes resources, and Tribes very seldom have extra resources to dedicate to their buffalo program.”

It’s all “so much more than just backing up a trailer and opening a gate,” Heinert says. “In some cases there’s years of preparation before the first buffalo is ever unloaded.”

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Ensuring the bison live where they’re meant to once they’ve been reintroduced is another difficult task. Some, like the ones Romaniuk and his team encountered in the fall, can be turned back before crossing international lines. Others, such as a cow and calf who made it across the border on Sept. 29, have to be rounded up and sent back. Leaving them to roam could jeopardize their survival.

The threat doesn’t come from Canadian government agencies. It doesn’t come from the U.S. government, either, which named the bison the “national mammal” in 2016, or the National Park Service, which claims it’s an “honor” to support the Blackfeet Nation in “their historic achievement.”

Rather, the potential threat lies on privately held ranches and other lands outside the parks.

“Our respect for our neighbors and stakeholders outside the park, where there’s no real social acceptance for the bison, is a concern for us,” Romaniuk says. “They’re welcome into Waterton Lakes, but where they’re not welcome currently is on the private lands to the east of us,” where they could eat food intended for livestock or knock down fences. “Don’t get me wrong, there are landowners adjacent to tribal lands that are supportive, but the ranching industry, some of them just can’t afford to have bison on their lands because of fences and feed.”

When asked about turning herds away, Naaman Horn — a public affairs specialist with the Intermountain Regional Office in Denver — sent a statement that read in part, “The park looks forward to working on a co-stewardship agreement with the Blackfeet to coordinate bison conservation and management in the Chief Mountain area. In the event this herd enters Glacier National Park, ensuring the safety of our visitors as well as the bison is our top priority. As a free-ranging herd, these bison will be treated as any other wildlife in the park and be allowed to roam freely on the landscape.”

Both governments stress that their role is simply to support the Tribes. All officials interviewed were careful not to take any credit for the initiatives, or even to propose a five- or 10-year plan, which they say is entirely Tribal-led. It’s a sentiment Heinert shares on behalf of the buffalo council, which he says is following the Tribes’ leads, even as he is often a driving force, quite literally, behind some of these reintroductions.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to drive a lot of those trucks delivering buffalo,” Heinert says. “When we show up to a Tribe, especially when it’s a Tribe that’s getting buffalo for the first time in maybe ever, knowing that when you see those Tribal members, knowing that the elders have never known buffalo on their lands, and the kids that are there, knowing that there will always be buffalo on their lands from that point forward, that to me is a reconnection and a reestablishment of that relationship that Indigenous people have had with buffalo.

“A lot of times it’s about healing and reconnecting to a life way that was a good way for many Tribes for a long time,” says Heinert. “We’ve seen the devastation with the decimation of the buffalo. A lot of Tribes view this as a way back to that lifestyle.”

Could Baird’s Tapirs Be a New Conservation Ambassador?

This little-known neotropical megafauna offers hope for boosting conservation and fighting climate change.

It’s 6 p.m. in the lowland tropical rainforest; darkness and the drone of insects descend upon two camouflage-clad individuals. They hunker on an elevated wooden platform to conceal their scent from a potential passerby. For the next 12 hours, their senses will remain fixed on a pile of mangoes, bananas and a dash of molasses below — a powerful animal attractant.

The two women — wildlife veterinarian Priscila Peralta-Aguilar and biologist Sarah Wicks — take turns, one attempting to sleep and the other standing guard. Even the scuttling sound of a raccoon excites the weary observers sitting quietly amongst the famously biodiverse forests of Southern Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula.

“Around 1:30, I heard a noise — something very soft,” Peralta-Aguilar tells me later as she recounts the night. “I thought — is it the raccoon again? I turned my red light in the direction of the sound.”

Her anticipation is understandable. She’s been holding this nightly vigil for four months. And as a media fellow working for the same nonprofit, Osa Conservation, I sometimes joined her arduous efforts to track and await a notoriously elusive creature. But on this night, the gentle giant now illuminated by her headlamp induces an adrenaline rush.

She stares the giant in the face: the largest mammal in the Neotropics. In a single motion — for which she has practiced well — Peralta-Aguilar grabs the tranquilizer, darting a Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii) on the forest floor. Vets and biologists arriving at the prompt of a late-night call work in methodical silence to fit the female with a GPS collar, take biomorphic measurements, and collect biological samples that will help them understand the endangered animal’s health and genetics. Mere minutes after administering a reverser drug, the tapir awakes and departs nonchalantly; the team finally breathes a sigh of relief.

While passing months of insect-infused nights on a trying schedule may seem peculiar, the animal for whom these biologists patiently wait is more peculiar yet. Weighing in at an average of 660 pounds, the Baird’s tapir’s physical enormity has yet to confer its recognizability.

Researchers putting radio on tapir. — This GPS collar, lasting around 2-3 years, produces a location data point every two hours using satellite-enabled GPS location and VHF radio-frequency monitoring systems. Photo: © Galdric Mossoll

“As humans we tend to value more what we miss than what we have,” says Esteban Brenes-Mora, senior Mesoamerica associate at the conservation nonprofit Re:Wild and referred to colloquially as the “tapir guy.” He has dedicated his career to studying Baird’s tapirs, a species for which scant published research exists. We know shockingly little about the animal’s natural history and ecology; one is more likely to know of its two closest relatives, the rhino and horse, than this neotropical megafauna.

But here’s something we do know: We’d miss tapirs if they disappeared. And once before, they nearly did.

A Fragile Existence

Baird’s tapirs are currently listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, with population estimates of around 4,500 remaining individuals — fewer than their critically endangered and popular cousin, the black rhino. Despite that troublingly low number, things would have been worse without efforts by conservationists, over the past 30 years, to expand and enforce protected areas.

Costa Rica is the only place where Baird’s tapir populations have recovered — a success largely owed to a socioeconomic model adopted in the 1990s to disincentivize destructive industries while incentivizing forest protection and restoration. This restructuring fueled forest recovery and fostered livelihoods conducive to human-wildlife coexistence. The country successfully maintains a network of protected areas where conservation groups, local communities and governments work together to prevent and mitigate threats to the species.

But problems remain across the animal’s range, which stretches through Mexico and Central America. One of the biggest threats is habitat loss, which has reduced the tapir’s distribution by as much as 50% in three decades. At least 70,000 square miles of forested habitat were lost between 2001 and 2010.

The largest mammal to survive the Pleistocene will require large, well-connected and diverse areas to continue its existence.

But areas for living and finding food have an alarming lack of connectivity and suitability. Half of the Baird tapir’s remaining habitat lies within protected areas, and even in these conserved regions, poaching, deforestation and wildlife trafficking further reduce populations.

Tapirs will need to make use of human-dominated landscapes, too, but the scientific community still lacks information on the species’ movement ecology within unprotected areas, which makes their study so important.

Friends of the Forest

“If we start imagining a planet without tapirs,” Brenes-Mora says, “we’d see a cascade effect down through the whole trophic net.”

Tapirs are a seldom-recognized backbone of neotropical ecosystems. Often described as “gardeners of the forest,” they eat seeds that smaller animals can’t, making them an essential dispersal agent for larger tree species once consumed by now-extinct megafauna. It’s likely tapirs have played a key role in keeping large-fruited species alive.

And while the Baird’s tapir is smaller than its vanished predecessors, it doesn’t skimp on meals. A 2015 study found one animal in Corcovado National Park consumed an average of 26 pounds per day. Its fecal matter, meanwhile, is essential for seed and plant-microbe dispersal.

Two tapirs' heads peak out of the bushes. — An endangered Baird’s tapir and her calf feed from an orange grove in Bijagua Springs Paradise, Costa Rica. Photo: © Dr. Andrew Whitworth for Osa Conservation

Tapirs also provide another critical service: Their abundant dung-making increases a forest’s carbon capacity. The tree species that tapirs disperse also tend to be those that sequester more atmospheric carbon. Tropical forests store 55% of the forest carbon stock globally, so we need tapirs’ ecosystem-stabilizing services to maintain one of our planet’s most critical carbon sinks.

Their diet is diverse, and so are the landscapes they inhabit. Where other species of conservation concern, such as jaguars, remain constrained to the most stringently protected habitats, Baird’s tapirs roam from the deepest reaches of protected national parks to regions as unexotic as a cucumber field.

But those same cucumber fields illustrate a problem: Humans and tapirs don’t always get along. The successful recovery of tapir populations in Costa Rica, thanks to stringently enforced protected areas, has caused increased interactions between tapirs and farmers, where tapirs raid crops and cause significant losses.

Jorge Rojas-Jiménez, a wildlife veterinarian, works with the Baird’s tapir in northern Costa Rica’s Bijagua. It’s an area where successful habitat protection and community-led conservation have ushered the return of these notoriously elusive animals to areas where they now exist more conspicuously, like people’s backyards.

“They are an adaptable species — they can shape any ecosystem and feed from any plant that isn’t necessarily inside a primary forest,” he says. Recent studies show Baird’s tapirs to be more resilient and capable of utilizing available habitat in fragmented corridors than previously suggested; the species commonly uses secondary forest tracts to move between primary forest patches.

Tapirs’ ability to utilize human-disturbed landscapes should be heeded for three main reasons. Firstly, the Baird’s tapir demonstrates that we shouldn’t discount deforested or human-modified habitat patches — critical to fostering connectivity in a fragmented Mesoamerica — for their potential to become protected areas. Secondly, tapirs’ magic dung may be just the natural restoration strategy needed in a world of conservation limited by resources and time. Finally, and importantly, tapirs aren’t just sowing trees but the seeds of social change, too. Their readiness to move into human-disturbed landscapes means these alluring animals have profound potential to be a “flagship species” for Central American biological corridors.

“Tapirs have become an icon for ecotourism and income,” Brenes-Mora says. “People have seen that one hectare with cows is less profitable than a hectare with a nice forest and a couple of trails.”

On the Move

Large mammals often generate public support for biodiversity protection — tigers, elephants and rhinos have been lauded for supercharging conservation and sustainable tourism. Tapir recovery in areas like the Tenorio-Miravalles Biological Corridor in Costa Rica represents a living example of community-fueled species recovery seldom witnessed in the age of extinction. But we can’t take this heartwarming tale for granted — endangered megafauna and communities living in harmony results from decades-long, dedicated efforts to create and rigorously enforce habitat areas.

Given adequate protection, we know tapirs will, albeit slowly, creep outside the bounds of protected areas into habitat corridors and human-dominated landscapes, where similarly imperiled yet more disturbance-sensitive species like jaguars remain out of the public’s eye. Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica’s largest national park in the country’s south Pacific region, demonstrates precisely the effectiveness of creating and enforcing protected areas to recover endangered species populations.

Two men and one woman squat by a tree outfitted with camera trap. — Biologist Sofía Pastor-Parajeles, Don Jorge, a local farmer, and veterinarian Jorge Rojas-Jiménez are deploying a camera trap where an electric fence will be installed around crops to monitor tapir activity. Photo: © Michiel van Noppen

Eleanor Flatt, an ecologist at Osa Conservation, has lived adjacent to this biologically intense, protected ecosystem for nearly a decade. She’s witnessed Baird’s tapirs recover within the park’s bounds and move willingly into secondary forested areas and landscape matrices. As an author on a 2021 study investigating tens of thousands of camera trap photos from the region, Flatt can testify to both the rebound of the species and the excitement with which local landowners describe hosting endangered species on their properties.

“People don’t know much about tapirs, even those who live in the area, because they wouldn’t have seen them for the past 30 years,” she says. “As soon as you learn about their importance, they can be a definite key flagship species for conservation.”

That’s why researchers have spent countless hours trying to tag and track the animals in the hope of learning more about them — and protecting them. Baird’s tapirs harbor massive conservation potential, both ecologically and socially, yet we still lack a complete picture of their movement and range requirements outside protected areas and within biological corridors. Transmissions from a GPS collar will produce precisely this valuable information.

“For conservation, we need to know how species move in unprotected areas,” says Flatt. “That’s where our efforts are needed most, to guide how you manage, improve and establish functional biological corridors regarding habitat connectivity and climate change.”

More GPS-toting tapirs mean more data from which conservationists can accurately pinpoint and protect priority landscapes, designate corridors critical to the species’ survival, and predict where and when local extinctions may occur. Live-tracking technologies also enable scientists to understand where and when wildlife-human conflicts arise, allowing negative interactions between wildlife and humans to be settled with participative and sustainable solutions co-created between conservationists, communities and farmers.

“This is the largest collaring and movement ecology project done with the tapir — it is the most extensive study of the species so far,” says Brenes-Mora. “Costa Rica is in a stage where we must start looking at how people-dominated landscapes can feed into wildlife conservation.”

Wild animals will require not only refuge within protected areas but also the space, resources, and ability to migrate offered by human-dominated landscapes. Tapirs exemplify the possibility of sharing in our planet’s riches, how human-wildlife coexistence can, and must, be central to social and economic systems. Tapirs show us the way of the future.

Camera trap footage from the secondary forests surrounding Osa Conservation’s wilderness preserve — land completely devoid of both trees and tapirs just 40 years ago — recently revealed a female Baird’s tapir with a small, dappled calf in tow. By enforcing protected areas, we’ve already saved the species from extinction once — efforts that paid dividends ecologically and socially.

Now, in the face of changing climate patterns, land use, and reduced wildlife populations, it’s imperative that we expand conservation beyond protected areas. Tapirs show that a conservation model premised on coexistence can come at little or no cost to human livelihoods. If the tireless platform-sitting biologists are any testament, tapirs are an indispensable species, their size a metaphor for their sheer potential to spearhead novel conservation models. Brenes-Mora summed it up poignantly — “Tapirs need us to save them,” but “we need them more.”

If we give tapirs what they need — first protected areas, and next the ability to inhabit and move through human-disturbed landscapes — they’ll be sure to reciprocate. A simple fecal gift, rich with potential, maybe the only favor required in return.

Previously in The Revelator:

All the World’s a Camera Trap