THE WEEK IN WILDLIFE 06/01/2024
Big Man Kills Trapped Yellowstone Wolf, Another Human Case of Bird Flu, & Why The Climate Change Fight Needs Wildlife
by Richard Conniff
LIKE TROPHY-HUNTING A MOUSE IN A GLUE TRAP
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte made headlines this week for killing a radio-collared wolf in a trap just outside Yellowstone Park, in the process apparently violating several state laws.
Slate interviewed Nate Hegyi, a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau, on how he broke the story. Caveat: The lead paragraph says Gianforte “was cited for violating state hunting regulations for failing to take a required wolf-trapping education course.” But not cited the way you and I get cited. What he got was a warning, for what turns out to have been a second offense.
Gianforte had previously killed a radio-collared Yellowstone wolf in a trap, and a radio-collared Yellowstone mountain lion someone had treed for him, both in 2021. His failure to take the required course was widely noted at the time. It’s not known what type of traps Gianforte used. But leg-hold traps are still legal in Montana.
It’s not the first brush with the law for Gianforte, a Republican. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for attacking a reporter who asked him a question about health care. (He wasn’t governor then, so he had to pay a fine and take an anger management class.) Anyway, you can imagine how friendly he must be to anyone questioning his practice of the manly art of killing radio-collared animals in traps.
It did not discourage Hegyi. Here’s part of the interview:
Do you know how long those traps were out?
The governor told a local reporter that they’ve been out since January, which would be at least two weeks prior to trapping that wolf. This is where it gets a little wonky. Gianforte was setting traps on a private ranch owned by a big conservative media mogul. And that guy’s ranch manager (who’s also the vice president of the Montana Trappers Association)—his name was also on these traps. And so there’s a good chance that the ranch manager was actually checking the traps for Gianforte. And maybe Gianforte was lucky enough that he was just down there on a federal holiday, and there was the wolf, after two or more weeks of waiting for the animal to get trapped. Was it just serendipitous? Or was the wolf trapped, and the ranch manager found it and called Gianforte? I don’t want to say either way, but that’s my biggest question. If the ranch manager called Gianforte, and Gianforte drove or flew over to kill it, that would have broken the state hunting regulations. You’re supposed to kill it or release it immediately upon seeing it. It’s the more humane thing to do.
In his original report, Hegyi wrote:
Word of Gianforte's wolf-kill violation comes as the Republican-controlled Montana Legislature appears poised to send to his desk bills aimed at aggressively reducing the state's wolf population through hunting and trapping. One would reimburse wolf trappers for the costs they incur, which critics call a "bounty" ….
Meanwhile, the New Mexico Legislature last week approved a bill banning the use of wildlife traps, snares and poison on public lands across the state, likely joining the growing number of Western states that have outlawed the practice increasingly viewed as cruel.
A BID TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT FROM TRUMP
During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations, often in open disdain for scientific findings. He removed protection from half the nation’s wetlands and otherwise endangered wildlife. He also gutted air pollution limits in ways that scientists say have caused additional sickness and death for thousands of Americans each year.
So it is potentially a big deal that the biggest union for staff at the Environmental Protection Agency this week ratified a new contract to protect the scientific integrity of their work. The four-year agreement gives staff the right to “participate in ‘the free flow of scientific information’ by talking about their work at conferences, meetings, and with the press …” It also protects them from retribution if they report scientific misconduct to the agency.
Will a union contract actually stop an egomaniacal human bulldozer with a history of ignoring the law? The only sure way to protect wildlife, the environment, or our families is to keep convicted felon Donald Trump from getting anywhere near the White House ever again.
HUMAN CASES ARE STILL A TRICKLE BUT …
This year’s third U.S. case of bird flu in humans has turned up, this time in Michigan. It’s a dairy worker again, and along with the usual eye symptoms, patient three also has respiratory symptoms and a cough.
“What the presence of respiratory symptoms tells us is that the exposure risk is higher,” said Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director. “Simply put, someone who’s coughing may be more likely to transmit the virus than someone who has an eye infection.” So far, the people living with the victim have not developed symptoms.
The bird flu has been identified in dairy herds in nine states so far. But the industry continues to resist broader testing of cattle or requiring workers to wear personal protective equipment. It’s a recipe for turning a containable problem into something far more serious. Expect further new cases soon.
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT PLANTING A TRILLION TREES
“Forget the idea that you need to plant trees to store carbon!” says Cássio Cardoso Pereira, an ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute of Science and Technology. That’s the first of six points he and his co-authors make in a new study in the journal BioScience about how restoring plant and animal diversity is essential to prevent catastrophic climate change.
What’s wrong with just planting trees? Too often, planners imagine they get the biggest climate benefit (with the least thought) by replacing grasslands and other native vegetation with tree plantations, because trees, you know, store carbon. These plantations typically consist of nonnative pine or eucalyptus trees, which grow quickly but do nothing for local wildlife. Moreover, grasslands mainly store carbon in the soil, and disturbing the soil to plant those trees just releases it into the atmosphere. The carbon sink becomes a carbon source, and climate change comes inching closer.
As part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, various nations have committed to restore a billion hectares (2.47 billion acres) of land by 2030. But the usual one-size-fits-all approach means these projects get planned “without even knowing the vegetation neighboring the location where the restoration takes place.” This failure to connect—combined with those nonnative trees—leads to the opposite of the intended effect, ecosystem destruction.
Taking measures to integrate local flora and fauna, on the other hand, creates climate benefits by altering the fire regime and microclimate and increasing storage of carbon. In a healthy native habitat, multiple species go about their accustomed work of pollinating flowers, eating fruits, and thus dispersing seeds and propagating plants. The result is an ecological community that’s more complex, varied, and resilient in the face of a rapidly changing climate.
Concentrating restoration projects in existing areas of agriculture, ranching, and tree plantations would protect natural areas and sequester an additional 13.7 billion metric tons of carbon per year, without threatening our food supply.
Most companies that now commit to climate-related goals are kidding themselves and us if they don’t also commit to biodiversity. The two things work together, much as healthy plant and animal communities enhance carbon storage in a forest.
The international conferences that now separately focus on climate change and biodiversity issues need to meet together and recognize that they are talking about different sides of the same problem.
That’s it for this week. Hope you can get outside and enjoy the wildlife.