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Thoughts From Home
No full textSome creepy crawly and misunderstood wildlife, like spiders, bats, and raccoons offer a lot of benefits to our environment and we'd like to shed some positive light on those important ecoservices. In Part 1 of the Creepy Crawly and Misunderstood Wildlife podcast, the team talks about spiders, bats, and raccoons.
Spiders are hardy builders, using their cable-like silk to create intricate webs to catch up to 14 times their own weight in insect prey. Bats are a unique species, flying mammals that navigate their environment via echolocation and most North American bats are entirely insectivorous, with some individual bats consuming up to 4,500 flying insects per night. Raccoons are important predators of wasps nests, but they also eat wild fruits, crayfish, and mice.♫Welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and our home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Throughout this series we'll be talking with experts, authors, and a variety of other guests, to bring you the most up to date information, events and happenings here at the National Conservation Training Center. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.♫
CW: My name is Catherine Woodward and I work at the National Conservation Training Center as a Fish and Wildlife biologist and today I am joined by our NCTC Podcast team, Jim Siegel, Mike McAllister, and Roxanne May to talk about creepy crawly misunderstood wildlife on this chilly autumn day. So, October and November, they're a beautiful time when the days get shorter, the leaves turn to warm hues, the fall rolls in to stay through the morning, and the harvest moon hangs bright in the night sky and the critters come out. Most of the time people can go day to day paying no attention to the wildlife around them and maybe they have a serious fear or phobia of certain species. But we want to draw attention to some important ecological services of multiple animals that you're perhaps more familiar with from a close encounter driving down a country road, having found them lurking in your garage messing with garbage cans or trying to hibernate the winter away in your attic. So, there's many animals out there that get a bad rep. Maybe they're less charismatic and more mysterious. Maybe they're mostly misunderstood. Spiders, bats, raccoons, opossums, skunks and so many more critters that are often characterized as creepy crawly and maligned are underappreciated, underrated and we're here to shed some positive light on their many benefits to us and to our personal property, like how they help manage pests in our yards, our gardens and homes and more broadly in our entire ecosystem. So, the first one on our list is spiders and I know I have a fear of spiders so we're going to talk about spiders first and does anybody have any spider stories?
RM: I’ve woke up in the middle of the night before and there's been a spider in my bed, I’ve had them run in through the house and my golden retriever chases them and eats them, you know, but overall I have a huge fear of spiders. I mean is that realistic to be scared of them that way? Are they really creepy crawly nasty things or are they pretty cool?
JS: Yes. So the name for the fear of spiders is definitely
what I have and I’m arachnophobic.
RM: Me, too.
CW: Do I have to admit I'm on the I'm scared of spiders, too. So, what about you, Mike or Jim?
MM: This is Mike. I do my best to tolerate spiders. I used to be terrified of them and would definitely change my pattern in life but I realize I can't get away from them and I try to accept them. I do my best.
JS: I don't have any great spider stories except that I once lived in Arizona and there seemed to be a black widow in every shed that I ever entered. They were black widow spiders were so common both in Arizona and California, another state that I've lived, that it was amazing how many poisonous spiders there were in that environment that I never saw them in other parts of the country.
CW: Do you just like check your boots and check everything before stepping like just to keep your eye out for the Black Widow or whatever?
JS: It was mostly like dealing with the, you know, the mops in the corner of the shed or the tent poles. That was just a great place to see black widows spiders in California and Arizona.
RM: Can they hurt you? Do they inject venom or anything like that? What do they do?
JS: Let's talk a little bit about it. I think that many you know, there are a couple of species of spiders in the United States that are are poisonous, the brown recluse and the black widow. There are a few other kinds of widow spiders. Those are two of the spiders that are poisonous. Most spiders are not poisonous and we have something like thousands of different species of spiders in the United States. Yet very, very few of them, to two species I mentioned, are actually poisonous and it's very difficult to be bitten by a spider. It's interesting to note that in the medical records many times, more than three quarters of the time, when people say I've been bitten by a spider medical science shows that they have not been bitten by a spider. They've been bitten by some other thing, some other insect or some other animal and it's not, they are not being bitten by a spider but spiders do have venom in them. That venom is used because they're a predator on insects and so they have fangs in which they inject enzymes into their insect prey kind of dissolving them from inside out and a few kind of spiders grind up their prey, their insect prey, and then they put in the enzymes into that mass of insect flesh to liquefy it. And so they have a very interesting way of digesting their food but they eat an enormous amount of insects, something like 14 times their weight in insects during their lives which would be like a normal sized person eating fourteen pounds of food a day. So, they're incredible consumers of insects and that's the important role that they play in our environment, in our gardens, in our yards and occasionally right in our homes. They are feeding on the insects that are loose in our homes.
CW: I think it's funny how you hit on many alleged cases of people getting bitten and they think that it's a spider so that just goes to show that people don't like spiders and they immediately jump the gun and think it's a spider bite but there's probably many other insects.
JS: Right. Occasionally it is a spider bite but that's not the norm. You know, three quarters of the time when you think you've been bitten by a spider, you've been bitten by something else.
CW: What are the most common spiders that we typically see like in our house or crawling around?
JS: In our house, I don't know what the common spiders are but we have a lot of different kinds of garden spiders which make those huge webs that you see as you walk through the woods or through your garden. There's a lot of different kinds of jumping spiders which you often see on window panes and on on the sides of walls and there are tiny, very furry spiders. There's a lot of different kinds of wolf spiders which are some of the spiders that you see on lawns that make like a grassy tube like shape. There's so many different kinds of spiders but I think the most typical ones that we see are different kinds of garden spiders which are orb weaving spiders that make enormous webs and you often see those in your garden. They’re among the most common, they're green and black. Some of them are kind of yellow in color. If you spend a lot of time in gardens you will find a lot of different kinds of spiders.
CW: And Jim, can you tell us about like how a spider makes its web or about like the spider silk?
JS: Well, the silk is an incredible, they leave their silk from their abdomen and if you see a spider laying silk, they use their legs to lay it in various shapes and in various confirmations. It's an incredible substance. It's among the most strongest of the materials that a living thing can ever produce and it's one of the most powerful substances and because of its value of the strength of the fiber, we are starting to think about ways of putting the genes to make spider silk in other animals such as goats and so the silk would come up in their milk or if we put the gene for spiders in various plants, the gene for the spider silk would make the leaves stronger and the fibers could be harvested from the leaves of the plants. But this is obviously a genetic engineering process of embedding spider silk genes into other organisms and not harvesting it necessarily from the spiders themselves.
CW: Now, Mike, as you're maintaining NCTC’s properties, do you come alongside like spider webs, and as you're cleaning the eaves and stuff, you come across a lot of spiders have to deal with them?
MM: Spiders are very prevalent on campus. We can clean the eaves off if we have a project under the buildings and by the next day it doesn't even look like we've done anything. They are hardy builders. Running the trails or working on doing trail work, I don't know how they cast their silk across the trail but there will be a spider smaller my fingernail and it'll have a four foot web across a trail and you run through it and then you get to party with it because it's crawling all over you trying to get off of it, trying to get off of you and by the time you get back to the shop you're covered in them. And it's incredible because you can feel the spider web actually like pull in your face and like the tensile strength and then it breaks. It is quite a unique fiber for sure. I was wondering, Jim, do spiders recycle their silk or do they eat it or where does it go? Do they make a new web all the time?
JS: You know, I think that they have to make new webs each time, they don't recycle it. It is a fiber that's coming from their body. Right? And so that they're not able to gather it up again like you gathering wool in a ball and use it over again. But they are able to adjust it sometimes and repair it and you can see them doing that. That they're able to build on their existing webs and sometimes improve them and repair them. But they have to make that silk anew to create more silk as opposed to gathering up old silk and you know, re-laying it out.
MM: OK.
RM: You know that's interesting that you brought that up, Mike, about walking through the trails because I'm a big hiker so you never want to be the first in the line because you get all […] I'm kind of curious about this, Jim. How do they jump from one spot to the other because some of it is like really far.
JS: You know, they can't fly. They don't have wings. They have eight legs. They don't have wings but and typically they're able to get there by being blown over there in the wind. So, I remember when they're hanging down they get projected in various directions and by doing that they bridge the gaps and as soon as they bridge the gap once, it's like having a cable over the bridge. They're able to start building the thing but they don't spray or do some giant leap but they're mostly being blown by the wind.
RM: Interesting.
CW: So, let's move on to our second animal. That was a great conversation and spiders are pretty cool, actually. So, this animal is a classic spooky one that hangs upside down. And it is the bat. There's a widespread misconception that all bats feed on blood and maybe one reason these animals are undervalued. Do bats feed on blood and do we have to worry about them eating our blood?
JS: I would say that in North America, that's something you don't have to worry about. But if you lived in Peru or if you lived in Brazil, there are a few species of vampire bats. The lucky thing is that there are many species of bats in the world that are not blood feeding. The vampire bats the only and they're only found in the new world so there are no vampire bats in the old world in Europe and Asia and Africa. There's none there.
CW: What do you most of the bats here in North America eat?
JS: Almost, except for a couple of species down in the southwest, all of our bats in North America are insect eating bats. That's the only thing that they're eating and they eat everything from beetles and moths, to flies are the common foods of bats and bugs and typically flying insects and they're very, very valuable to the ecology. They are a major predator of insects in the evening birds and and other things eat insects during the day. But at nighttime the bats are the major predator of flying insects.
CW: Yeah, it's really cool in the summertime where you can see the bats swooping at night and it's really neat. I've heard that they can even eat stinkbugs. Is that pretty common part of their diet?
JS: So, if stinkbugs are flying about that it would be but stinkbugs aren't terrific fliers, so they can fly fairly well. More likely they're eating other kinds of insects like flying beetles, moths, flies. Those are the common things that are bats are eating. In some places the bats are so abundant that they show up on the radar and so it gives you some idea of how much insects those bats are eating each night. It's tons and tons and tons of insects that they are feeding on each night.
CW: Now, you talked about the vampire bats, so why do the bats hang upside down in their classic way?
JS: You know, if you look at a bats feet, the feet are very small and weak. The part of the bat that is the most evolved, and the most powerful, are its wings which are actually evolved from hands. So, these are the spread fingers of the bat and the webbing between them is what you know as a bats wing, is a hand with the webbing between the fingers and so that's the most powerful organ, you know, physical organ and extremity of the bat are its wings. Its feet are actually kind of weak and small and weak and so those things are only used, they can't support the weight of the animal like your legs and so the back can't sit up like a human being or like a horse. It's not able to stand a high on its legs and so that’s why it’s hanging upside down.
CW: So, how do that move around in the dark?
JS: Bats have an incredible feature, which is they make high pitched noises which many times are unable to hear them and they echolocate the sound bouncing off of the environment and the objects in the environment means that they see through echolocation. So, they actually have fairly good eyesight but that's not the main way that they're flying through the environment. It's by bouncing sound off of objects and hearing the shape and the size and the location of these objects through echolocation. It's like sonar for a boat.
RM: It's really kind of cool, you know, when you think about bats. I see them a lot at night and I grew up with the pool so we saw bats all the time. We would be swimming and they would dive down at us. You know, of course we were freaking out, you know. Do they always live close to water or where do they live?
JS: You know what? They don't always live close to water but if they need to drink they will do what you saw at the pool. Bat's live in any place where there's a lot of flying insects so they don't have to necessarily live close to water. But often times water environments like here where we live on the Potomac, there's a lot of hatching flying insects coming off of the water and so that's the bats are not only taking advantage of to be able to drink but they're catching all the mayflies and the horseflies and other kinds of flies that may be hatching out in the river in the river bottoms where there's a lot of insects are being hatched out and that's why you're seeing them down by the river.
CW: Now Jim. So the bats seem like they have a very unique voice in the animal kingdom so they can fly but they're also mammals so like what category are they in?
JS: They're in their own order of mammals called the chiroptera and that is the most closely related to shrews and moles as they're most closely related mammal group. They're in their own order of flying mammals.
CW: Another important function that we haven't hit on yet is how bats are pollinators. Can you talk a little bit about that, Jim?
JS: Yes, there are a couple of species in the southwest which are long nosed and long tongue bats which pollinate various kinds of cactus and a few other kinds of plants. And these long nose bats and long tongue bats, their main food is pollen and nectar that they're getting from these cactuses like saguaro and a few others and they're able to gather with their long snout and their long tongues, they're almost like a like a hummingbird. They also eat some insects but mostly they're eating the pollen and nectar from flowers and then sometimes they're eating the fruit that are of those same kinds of cactus plants but they're mostly eating pollen and nectar.
CW: So, bats are night flying insects. They pollinate flowers. They're scattering the seeds. We don't have to worry about them sucking our blood like vampire bats so they're not in our area. Thanks Jim and everybody for talking about bats. Now we can have a greater appreciation for their role in our environment. So next on our list is raccoons, the cute little raccoons. I'm a fan of raccoons. I love raccoons.
RM: Until they're in my yard.
CW: Yeah, that's true. My dad actually had a pet raccoon for the longest time until it was growing to be or it was having bad behaviors. But he had a pet raccoon which is really cool, I love telling people that.
RM: They are cute.
JS: You know, raccoons are a classic omnivorous mammal, you know, medium size. They eat an enormous amount of a lot of different things. They eat quite a lot of crayfish. They eat quite a lot of vegetable matter, particularly wild fruits. They do eat some grain, such as corn but they eat some wild grains. They eat a lot of mice and other small animals. So, they're an important predator on things like that. And interesting enough, one of the values that they have in gardens are a major predator on WASP nests. So, yellowjacket nest in the ground, they will break into the nest and eat the larva out of the yellowjackets nest. Therefore, controlling the number of wasps in our environment. That's an important role that raccoons play and that's not a very well known trait they have. You know, we think of them eating the cat food, you know, that we leave out on the porch and they certainly do eat those things. But the major things that they eat are things like mice and crayfish and a lot of different kinds of fruit. Such as the fruit of wild raspberries and blackberries and other kinds of fruiting shrubs and trees. Raccoons eat that a lot. Unfortunately, they also eat a lot of garden plants but their value is an important predator and they also eat carrion so they do clean up carcasses in our environment so they are valuable in that way as well.
MM: Hey, Jim. Raccoon's seem oddly smart. Am I just observing that observing that or are they like proven to be wise critters?
JS: Raccoons have are very coordinated. You can see them when you see them manipulate their food. Sometimes they wash their food and water and they're often living near water and they are very able to open containers and things like that showing a lot of dexterity and I think that that's why you think of them as intelligent and I think they're as intelligent as things like a dog or a cat. They're as intelligent as a lot of other kinds of predatory animals.
CW: I have a question. So, Jim, do raccoons kind of like do things solo or do they like stick that group? I don't even know what their behavior is with other raccoons.
JS: You know, when people feed raccoons, it's even amazing how many raccoons might show up on your porch. But typically they lead largely solitary lives and they move through the environment usually by themselves. But they do come together obviously to mate and the babies stay with their mother for many months after they leave a nest site, like a hole in a tree or a hole in a log. And so they're following their mother around for a number of months and then by winter time they're on their own. So, that you know, they grow up pretty quickly but they're generally solitary animals in their normal state of wandering in the environment. They're by themselves.
CW: Now what's your advice to somebody who has a problem with raccoons around their yard or getting into their garage or something like that?
JS: You know, obviously the most important thing is to not leave out a lot of pet food for raccoons and to get garbage cans with strongly attached lids, that's important. You do sometimes need to close off little holes in your house and in your shed that you think a raccoon could get into. And you know, you do have to keep your animals, like chickens and things like that, they have to be protected at night and live in the coops that are strong enough to keep a raccoon out. I think that that is an important feature. Raccoons in certain environments are very, very abundant, particularly if there's no predators like wolves and bobcats and things like that. You can actually get a quite a lot of raccoons living in a relatively small area. And so it's important to realize that, you know, we have
Thoughts From Home
No full text NCTC is always looking for ways we can minimize our impact on the environment, and we ensure that we operate our campus in a sustainable fashion. We'll be sharing several podcasts on NCTC's sustainability practices and how you can incorporate these methods of sustainability into your life.
In the first episode, listen to a fun conversation about bird-friendly coffee with Mike McAllister and Tracy McCleaf. They discuss how it is naturally grown in dense rain forests, which protect many neotropical migrating birds. And you’ll hear how you can switch to bird-friendly coffee for your morning cup of joe to help preserve critical habitats for birds and wildlife, fight climate change, and protect biodiversity.Welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia and our home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
MM: Welcome to Thoughts from Home. I'm Mike McAllister and today I'll be speaking with Tracy McLeaf about bird friendly coffee. Coffee is an important part of many people's morning routine but do you know how important it is for the birds?
TM: Yeah, Mike, I was just hoping maybe we could talk about today is a little bit of the connection between birds and coffee the big connection that all biologists your all time is habitat, habitat, habitat. That's what it comes down to for birds and coffee. Coffee and growing practices for coffee specifically benefit neotropical birds who are living in these areas for most of their lives. I mean seven to eight months out of the year they're only up here with us and their breeding cycle a few months out of every year. So most of their time is spent in those areas and these can be birds anything from herons and raptors to swallow's and songbirds. I thought, you know, there's a few species here at NCTC that if you come here in the season when they're here during the breeding season, sign out a pair of binoculars. You can walk around the campus here. We've got a lot of good habitat and you'll see a lot of these new tropical species that you'd be benefiting by drinking our bird friendly coffee. They include things like wood thrush, and great catbirds, scarlet tanager, which are great when you get to see those they're going to be really high up; black and white warblers, Eastern would be you hear them a lot more than you'll see them around here but they're really popular species around here and a common yellow bird.
MM: Where is coffee grown?
TM: When you look at a globe kind of a bellecourt around the middle of south central South America is the most common like where we get our coffee but also grown in the Middle East and Asia and Africa to kind of all over the world in that that warm built there.
MM: I really enjoy coffee and coffee is a large part of my day and routine. How big a deal is coffee or how much coffee does America import?
TM: Well, Mike, you and I may be the biggest coffee drinkers at NCTC but apparently the United States their third largest import and I read that worldwide it's a six billion dollar industry. It's like the thinks it said the second highest rated commodity that's traded around the world. So I think, you know, we make some changes in how it's grown our purchasing habits and watching how the coffee we buy has grown. It can make a big difference like habitat quality for species in the world and carbon sequestration climate change we could make an impact eventually with these things because coffee production in general has a lot of harmful practices. I mean it's your typical when you go a large scale farm operation, there's clearcutting, there's monoculture, there's pesticides. You're trying to get large scale pounds per acre production you all that kind of stuff. It's just like any other agricultural commodity. We're going to talk about the same kinds of things with traditional coffee production. It's low habitat diversity. I mean a good Segway from there that is a growing practices for coffee. I kind of think of it as there's three different ways or areas that coffees grown and we have the traditional farm coffee that we just talked about. You know, it's clear cut nothing but coffee bushes for acres and acres and acres for sun and other place like that you might find just to find animals I you're going to be some species around you might find about Agrast study that said about 60 species of birds, different neotropical birds might be in a traditional coffee area and then you look at shade grown coffee and then there's bird friendly certified coffee. So those there's a variation between those two shade grown coffee traditionally approach grown coffee you might find about sixty nine species tropical birds or seventy something like that. But then when you start looking at bird friendly certified farms they're finding up to like two hundred forty three different species of neotropical birds in those habitats. And the reason there's a difference between shade grown and bird friendly grows shade grown which we used to serve here for a long time and it's served to brand coffee with shade grown right now we're not serving any shade grown coffee but we are transitioning to a bird friendly shade grown which is why we're doing the podcast. Shade Grown Coffee like I don't know if you have Mike have you seen Rainforest Alliance certified coffees?
MM: Yeah. Yeah I have noticed that a little frog symbol or something. Yeah.
TM: So the Rainforest Alliance has grown coffee but when I read more about that it said that that only requires a fifteen percent shade cover and the farm doesn't actually have to have that percent of shade cover if they promised to work to attain that percent of covered. So it's more of a trust agreement helping the farms improve themselves to that to the limit. So it's still better than nothing and it's a good it's a good deal. But when you talk about bird friendly shade grown coffee, they're talking about a 40 percent canopy cover. It's significant. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why you see the species diversity in species and another reason is more diversity in the bird friendly shade grown areas is bird friendly certification requires a quality foliage cover. So there's and they want different strata. So it's not just bushes, it's not just tall trees and bushes. It's everything in between to increase the diversity of everything. They even have a requirement for epiphytes and to know what an epiphyte is?
MM: I do not
TM: I had to guess I was close but I looked it up in epiphytes something like a plant that grows on another planet without being parasitic or something like Spanish moss in the south and the live oaks all that grayish moss that hangs off of them that's an epic fight and things like Air Force those are epiphytes. So this bird transmogrification has a requirement for those. So all vegetative diversification and strato diversification all that leads to more species diversification. So it's a it's just an overall better habitat that the bird friendly certified farms are promoting.
MM: But that's really interesting.I had noticed the different labels on coffee and had always thought that it maybe meant more about the quality of the coffee or the flavor of the bean. It's really neat to find out that there's so much interest and energy put into helping out the animals and critters and birds. A large commodity like that and they're actually worried about not worry but thinking about the processes.
TM: Yeah, because a commodity like that it could make a difference in the long run. Wwhen we get the bird friendly coffee here like you have to do a serious taste test to see how the quality is. Wow this is definitely great coffee or not.
MM: I would love to be a part of that. OK, I'll bring in the Grinder and the processers.
[birds chirping]
MM: What are some of NCTC’s efforts and what are we doing to support birds and coffee cravings on campus?
TM: NCTC buys about five hundred and fifty pounds of coffee a year for some reason I thought it'd be way more than that.
MM: Me, too!
TM: Maybe that was a month and I got the wrong stat.
MM: That was our receipt's combined.
TM: 550 lbs coffee a year and we thought with that kind of book that we should try to we we have some sustainable practices. But over the past couple of years, you know, with the COVID years off we had time to think about and regear some operations we do around here and we'll talk about more of this later as podcast. But one of the things that was mentioned was why don't we look at bird friendly coffee? So we did we had our guest services contractor Aramark look into different bird friendly options and they had to do a lot of research for a few reasons. There are a lot of boutique coffee shops who had the bird friendly coffee but so it took them a while to find a vendor who could deliver the mass quantities and they're still working on that make sure they can get all the certifications they need to be able to purchase the coffee and all that and we're going to have a good bit of upfront cost because if you ever been to NCTC we have these coffee brewers all over the buildings, then the instructional buildings and in the server in the auditorium and all those have to be replaced. So that's like a that's a pretty big upfront expense and that's because they belong to the current coffee vendor we're working with and they they'll take them back so we'd have to place on that. So that's that's a pretty big effort for us to do this. But obviously we think it's worthwhile the director and the service are willing to make that investment to make this change because this is it's a good thing we can we the grounds we used to give all the coffee grounds to our nursery to use in their plant propagation stuff that they're doing and I think now we're donating some of it to the compost pile as needed. I think that's where the grounds are out. So we're we're really trying to use more sustainable practices but this is a big flashy shiny thing that we can do it in NCTC and I think it'll be well received.
MM: Yeah, sure. I know I'm excited to try and taste the difference and you know, given the scale of farming and knowing and learning about how much it affects birds, it'll be good to know that my coffee isn't negatively impacting wildlife.
TM: Right? Yeah.
MM: You said we were replacing the equipment because was owned by the vendor but is there any special way to prepare bird friendly coffee or is it just the normal coffee beans and coffee grounds just like an other coffee just like just like usual.
TM: We looked into options between buying whole bean or buy ground and there was really no difference. We're probably any with ground that saves us from having to buy grinder's but it's prepared exactly the same and it's just as many options. I mean there's when we were looking at some of these the decaf and then there's all the different flavor descriptions in between like if you want a citrus highlighter, chocolaty highlighter, you know, all those things that I don't really notice until someone says you taste the chocolate? Yeah, yeah I did.
MM: A cherry afterglow.
TM: Yeah.
MM: If others wanted to be more conscious of the way they consume and buy coffee, what are some processes they can do to make the switch?
TM: You know what I found was I would send people to the Smithsonian's website for bird friendly coffee and I think it's a National Zoo Smithsonian Institute like maybe we can provide that at some point. But if you go to their site, look up bird friendly coffee, it has a list of people who sell it and not manufacturers suppliers. So there are a lot of like a little boutique shops who are going to have a lot of places out there and get it on on small household basis amounts. So it is available a lot of it of course with online industry you can get it almost from anywhere at any time. So yeah I think it's worth trying if you want to it's a little more expensive than buying a can of Folgers but it's something that you can do maybe makes a nice Christmas gift by someone a nice tin of bird friendly coffee may encourage some changes that way and that's that's a way we could do it to support the support the vendors, the farmers who are trying to do the right thing.
MM: That's really interesting. Thank you for all those tips, Tracy and our information today. I know I'll be looking forward to discovering some new copy vendors and copy types and brands. My mornings will be a little brighter knowing the birds will be happy.
TM: Yeah, hopefully we'll have a rolled out for you in time for the holidays.
MM: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
TM: Sure.
MM: Bird friendly coffee is the perfect cup of coffee. It tastes better and helps protect the planet. Make a switch to bird friendly coffee today and share this with coffee lovers out there. Thank you for joining us on our podcast.
TM: Thank you, Mike.
Thank you for listening to the National Conservation Training Center podcast series. If you have feedback, thoughts, or stories you'd like to share, contact us at [email protected]
Thoughts From Home
No full textIn February of 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Program hosted a “Multi-Sector Summit to Address Light Pollution and Bird Collisions” at the National Conservation Training Center. This Summit was the first of its kind: a symposium that brought together scientists, medical researchers, engineers, city planners, architects, lighting specialists, conservation groups, federal agencies, various industries, and social scientists to discuss the effects of lights at night on bird migration, dark skies, collisions, as well as human health and safety.
The keynote speaker at the Summit was Jane Alexander, award winning actress, author, and conservation champion. Both a captivating storyteller and a birder, we couldn't wait to ask Jane about her love of birds and how she cultivates her passion for protecting birds alongside others. In this episode of the Thoughts From Home podcast, Brian Smith, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Administrator/Assistant Regional Director, talks with her about her passion for birds.
You can find more information about the Multi-Sector Summit at https://ow.ly/fvSk50RXUUS. For more information about bird collisions, go to https://ow.ly/vYNO50QIK45 and nighttime lighting at https://ow.ly/WWa450QIK57Welcome to thoughts From Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and are home to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
Brian Smith
Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition from thoughts from home. My name is Brian Smith. I work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The assistant regional director of Migratory Bird Program in our Midwest region stationed up in East Lansing, Michigan today. I'm really honored today to have our guest for this conversation. She's an actress, author, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts and a global wildlife ambassador. Miss Jane Alexander, we're happy to have you here today, Jane, very thankful that you taking the time to speak with us. What else would you like for our listeners to know today?
Jane Alexander
Oh, my gosh, it depends what we're talking about exactly. You know, if we're talking about birds. Yes. Look up there. There. If we're talking about the stars. Yes. Look up. They're there. Except they're not. The stars are not there for people to see. Over 90% of people in urban environments around the world do not get to see the stars anymore. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that and about light pollution and bird collisions, which kill many birds.
Brian Smith
I truly appreciate the time you're going to spend with us today and talk about this. So Jane and I had the opportunity to meet for the first time back in February, where Fish and Wildlife Service pulled together a summit on migratory bird collisions and light pollution, and the effects that light pollution have on attracting birds to to areas and and colliding into structures, exhausting themselves around lights and artificial lights, which is something that people don't really understand because many of them are night migrants. And so I had the opportunity to meet Jane. She was kind enough to come and be the keynote speaker for that summit, and just gave a great introduction to kick off a meeting. It was just one of those groundbreaking moments where we really brought a broad community together of people that not only are interested in migratory birds, but are in the industry sectors that need to learn about the effects of some of the actions that they take on migratory birds and nocturnal migration. So it was one of those summits that has really been a pivotal moment, I think, for us within the conservation community to engage people in a new way. So. So before we dive into that topic, Jane, you mentioned about looking out for the birds. You know, it's spring migration season. Have you been out much?
Jane Alexander
I go out every single morning, Brian, and I was just out and, where I am right now, it's rare to see a warbling vireo or a Tennessee warbler, so that was nice. Yeah. And my favorite wood thrush are back as of this week. So I just love it when the birds return on their migratory path almost the same time to the same place every year. I mean, climate change has changed that to some degree because it's getting warmer everywhere. so they're coming a little earlier and but they still come back even if not in the numbers that they used to. They're still coming back, which is very exciting and good news.
Brian Smith
So it's great that you try to take time every morning and get out of it. You mentioned Tennessee Warbler. I walked out my door yesterday morning to come to the office, and I heard that sound, and I was like, hold on, what is that? I had to go through the Rolodex of my brain of what it was. And, and, it was Tennessee Warbler singing. Right? We got a honey locust front yard, and it was just singing away and a new species for the yard. And then woke up this morning to a rose breasted grosbeak just sitting right in the front tray. And, yeah, it took the trip of a lifetime for my son. This weekend we drove to Magee Marsh and also Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. My son Cody is 14 and is just getting into birds, really excited about it and just had a wonderful trip. Had one of those spots where just had a swarm of warblers of ten different species in a flock, and just sat there and watched them for an hour. It was amazing.
Jane Alexander
So you know that maybe Marsh in Ohio is just one of the greatest places we have in North America. I think particularly, you know, as you saw with your son, how wonderful for him to see all those warblers at once. We rarely get to see them that way. So that's really exciting.
Brian Smith
Exactly. So, so tell me, Jane, and you and I have talked about this, but I'd love for others to hear. How did you come to love birds and become such a champion for conservation? What drove you towards that? I loved your answer when we talked about this. When I was picking you up from the airport. We just started talking about it, and I just loved a story that you told me.
Jane Alexander
well, I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and Brookline, just right on the border of Boston and the muddy River. And my dad was away. And in the war during World War two. But when he came back, we moved to this house in the suburbs. And the birds were always there. They were always present backyard birds. We all have them in North America. Starlings, robins. Maybe not everybody has mockingbirds, but many people do. And those were the three that caught my attention because they were making the loudest noises all the time and waking me up. And my mother named them for me. The backyard birds. And the thing I adored about them was, well, they can fly. Why can't we fly? Of course, my brother grew up to be a pilot and he did fly. But it's not the same as flapping your wings, you know? And and, I said, birds have it all. Mom, are birds. Angels. I really thought I was a good little Christian girl. I thought they must be the angels that God gave us. And I still think to this day they are angels because they touch down and they bring joy to everybody. So my dad made balsa wood wings for me to try to get lift off, and I would jump off dunes, rocks, you name it, skinning my knees and so on. And I never, of course, got lift off.
Brian Smith
How did you become such a champion for conservation, given your career and the trajectory that you were on, how did you integrate that into your life?
Jane Alexander
I had fallen in love with birth as a child and sort of given it up for a number of years while my hormones were raging as a teenager and boys took over. But I got back to it when my husband and I moved to the country north of Manhattan in Putnam County, New York. And, I noticed that in the first year, the next spring, the same birds were coming back.
Jane Alexander
I said, oh my gosh, they live here. They've lived here for millennia, perhaps. And, I was dumb. I guess I just hadn't realized that. But I said, we've got to protect them. We've got to protect their homes as I'm protecting my home, and I'm the invader because I'm the new person that came in on the block. So that was the commitment that and the fact that we had a wood thrush singing in the woods behind us, and we had several wood flashes. We're very lucky up there. There's still there in Putnam County and I, I thought it was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in the world. You can hear wood thrush on tapes. You can hear them, bad wood thrush song, because they don't all sing terrifically. There's one outside this morning and it was really screeching at a no, that's not it. But the this would be called the Grand Old Man. And he was with us for about five years, and he had the most gorgeous sound. And when you hear it live in the evening, early evening or in the morning, there's something really ethereal about it. He's double voiced. So anyway, I fell in love with the wood thrush, and that led me to seeking to know more about birds. I joined an Audubon chapter where I live with. I still belong to that same chapter and still do Christmas bird counts and bird surveys for them with them and it changed my life. I also got very, very active as an actress, both in theater and film, all through the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s. When I went to the National Endowment for the Arts. But to chair it for four years and during those times away from home, I very much wanted a hobby and birding. Was it. So then I really committed. I got Peterson's Bird Guide to begin with. Then I have all the other ones now, from Sibley to Ken Coffman to Audubon and so on. The Stokes guide to. And I was totally smitten and I and to this day I, I can't go a day without birding. Now it's gotten that bad.
Brian Smith
It's not a it's not a bad habit to have. So thank you for all that you've done for conservation and couldn't have a better champion for birds and for just conservation in general. But I want to talk specifically. As I mentioned earlier, you and I met going into the bird Collision Summit and Artificial Lighting Summit, bringing partners together, bringing industry together. It's a wide diversity of audiences together to talk about this issue of bird collisions with glass bird collisions with structures that are drawn there from artificial lighting. It's a massive issue. A billion birds a year with a B die from collisions with with glass alone. And we're talking about people's homes where they work, where they live, where they go have their coffee. You know, this is one of those issues that's pervasive across the country. How did you become interested in involved in this one? And, I just really interested in it from the bird perspective and from the dark sky. What was that draw to this issue?
Jane Alexander
Well, when you fall in love with anything and one certainly knows it, when one becomes a parent, you want to protect those things that you love. You will protect your children to death. And it's the same way with birds. I fell in love with them and I said, oh my gosh, I have to protect them because we've always been concerned about when there's habitat change, when there's pesticides, herbicides that come in and take away their food, kill them. And I had started off with that and climate change came in and we had to work with adapting and mitigation, helping them through migrations, things like this. So let me just quickly rundown numbers that, you know, but maybe a listening audience does not know. In North America, we estimate there's about 10 billion birds when they come in in the springtime. And we hope for 20 billion birds in the fall, which means that we've had a good breeding season with birds. We hope for that many. But birds have an awful lot that is killing them. Now we have, of course, their natural predators and then we have habitat loss, as I spoke of. Then we have cats, domestic cats and feral cats are killing as many as 2.5 billion birds a year, between 1 billion and 2.5 billion. And then we still have pesticide use on fields and so on. And agriculture has been not a friend to many birds, and we're losing our insectivores, the ones who eat insects in great, great numbers. So if you add up the numbers and you have 2.5 killed by cats, you have 1 billion killed by collisions and light pollution, and then you have another half million killed by cars, pesticides and so on, it just doesn't add up. It's not sustainable. There's only 10 billion birds, and we're cutting down into the breeding stock every single year when we're losing them. So I started to focus on what we really can do and what I felt was something that all of us can fix, that all of us are involved in, and that is lighting, lighting at night, the love of birds, 50 million people say that they are bird lovers and feed the birds. That's an extraordinary amount of people. And I think nobody hates the birds, except maybe those that are tearing into their crops and things like that. And so this seemed like something that we can fix bird collisions, light pollution, mostly at night. And the numbers really rise during migration. That's in the fall. And right now we're in the peak migration in the northeast of the United States pretty soon, right up into Canada. It's long winded, but that's how I became involved. And that's why I'm dedicated right now to solving this money issue. So we stop the killing of a billion birds a year.
Brian Smith
Excellent. Thank you for running through those numbers. And another number that I don't think I've mentioned yet is over the last 50 years, we've learned that we've lost 3 billion birds from the breeding population. And so over that 50 year span, we've lost 3 billion birds from a very wide diversity of species that are common backyard birds to those that many people don't see or know even exist. So, so it's across all these different systems in North America.
Jane Alexander
So, yeah, I mean, it's a shocking number in 50 years. I look at what it was 13 billion. Now we're down to ten. Now. We could very, very likely in another 50 years bow down to 4 billion birds that are only. And we're so I think this is highly doable. And I love the summit that U.S. Fish and Wildlife gave us in February. It was an extraordinary event in which you brought together people in the lighting business, architects, people who had experienced, glass on buildings that was really egregious, like the McCormick Building in Chicago, which was an eye opener for many people. In October of 2023, just last fall, over a thousand birds were killed in one night in one building, the McCormick building. The good news this is how quickly can turn around. And U.S. Fish and Wildlife was really helpful in this because of the summit, and many people were shocked by a thousand birds being killed in one night. They have now committed to putting film on their windows, a kind of patterned film during the migratory periods in particular, which the birds will see and they won't crash into them. So that's a great, great sign that we can turn this around.
Brian Smith
The other piece of that is they've also committed to they are implementing a much stricter policy to restrict the amount of light that leaves their building, which was the other factor. And I wanted to touch on that because we've talked about artificial light and light pollution. And what does that have to do with birds and bird migration? Because a lot of our listeners may not know that during especially during migration, birds are attracted to this light and they're attracted at different scales. So a big city like Chicago puts out a lot of light into the night sky. And so birds use stars to migrate at night and constellations to move at night. And so they're attracted to this light for some reason, we don't know what the true attraction is. But then as they get closer into the city, the lights become disoriented. And then as they get closer to buildings, it's disorienting and they're trying to get in. They can see habitat on the inside of these buildings, sometimes through plants and things like that, and they just collide with windows, or they exhaust themselves trying to figure out what that and artificial light is. So very simple actions like you mentioned the film for lighting, if you don't need a light, turn it off. Think about the lights you're using, taking these very simple actions about just really critically thinking about how we use lights and lights across the landscape. So thank you for that.
Jane Alexander
Yeah. And just to add to that, Brian, we don't really need a lot of lights facing up, which blocks the the stars. Many, many birds migrate by the stars. And we need some lights of course, to let airplanes know about whatever's up there, high buildings and so on. But we don't need as many and we don't need perhaps, perhaps the amount of lumens that are being cast now. And so there are ways to fix it. And this will take a lot of people in those industries, as well as the public themselves in their own backyards, because none of us can calculate how many birds are hitting home windows. And I know that very well because unfortunately, it's happened to me twice when I aired. I didn't put the simple little streamers or beads down the side of the window at migration time to let the birds know that the windows were not, that you could fly right through them. As you say, we don't know why birds do this. We don't know. Well, we know if they think that that's a reflection or they see through the building and they see this forest on the other side, but we don't know why they are attracted to light specifically, it seems. But scientists are working on it, and I have every good belief that they'll come to some good conclusions.
Brian Smith
And thank you. That's all great information. So the one piece that we've talked about is simple actions. And to get people to take simple actions, you have to engage them in some way. And engaging communities is very important. I remember you sharing a story, your work with piping plovers and engaging communities. And, you know, it started out fairly adversarial and now they're an engaged community. So if you could tell that story and kind of relate it to what we're looking at and how it would be very important from a collision standpoint, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Jane Alexander
Oh, sure. So I spend a lot of my time at my home in Nova Scotia, where my families go back couple of hundred years and it beautiful sandy beach and piping plovers like sandy beach with a little bit of seaweed, rock, little bit of stones and beach grass. And they like to be able to forage at the low tide for mollusks and things like that.
Jane Alexander
So they are an endangered species in North America. They have been declining for some time. There's some of them in the Great Lakes. There's some of them all along the eastern seaboard, and they go up into parts of Canada as well as they do in my place in Nova Scotia. The village I live in is very small, and the beach is relatively small, about half a mile at most. And these little birds, I've been monitoring them for over 25 years now, and they have been declining and they have not been nesting. Their predators get their eggs. They can be anything from seagulls to crows to foxes and things like that, and human distraction. So we had not had any chicks for a long time. And last summer, 2023, a pair flew in. I think it was the same pair to come the year before, and their nests failed twice the year before. They came in and they sat down in a certain really weird area on the beach where a lot of traffic of human traffic was, and they produced for eggs and so we roped it off. And as we'd been doing for 20 years and all the parts of the province on any beaches that had piping plovers, we asked the public to leash their dogs to make sure that they walked at the low tide line so that they were not distracting the birds in the nest, and so on. Well, after they hatched, and after about ten days, mom left. The female piping plover always leave after a while. I say she goes down to the Bahamas to get a margarita because she's exhausted. And so she leaves the father to bring up the chicks and get them fledged and off the beach. What happened was pretty extraordinary. We had an extraordinary father, and we must remember that birds, like human beings, are individuals. So when you see somebody who's a superhero and he really was this dead piping plover because he would not be this distraction himself if his little chicks wandered around the beach, he would just send one peep, be, you know, 1 or 2 strong one, and they'd come running back. That was great. So we had a great father. We also had a great public. Finally, after 20 years, they had been getting the message. They had been getting the message that these were vulnerable birds. And we shared them with wherever they were going down the coast in the winter, probably the Bahamas. That takes a lot of them. And they also were leasing all of their dogs and they took a very personal interest in these birds. And we would talk to them about how wonderful this dad plover was and how we would corral them. And get them under his body at night, and they'd roost together in their little. And so, to make a long story short, I've gone much too long. But the little ones fledged finally. And one day they all for flapping their wings like I used to do in my balsa wood wings, flapping them up, and then all over the ocean they went, all four of them, and we thought they were gone because dad had already left. No. That night, for some reason, they came ba
Thoughts From Home
No full textIn celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, Jim Siegel, Ecology Curriculum Manager, and Randy Robinson, Education and Outreach Coordinator, discuss the successful recovery of the bald eagle and review the history of the NCTC eagle nest on its 20th anniversary. The NCTC eagles are a conservation success story right here on campus! Recorded on National American Eagle Day, hear the interesting details of how the bald eagle population has grown all over the United States and the challenges the species still faces today!Welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepardson, West Virginia and our home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
JS: Hi everyone. My name is Jim Siegel. I'm the ecology curriculum manager at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services National Conservation Training Center and today we're going to be talking about bald eagles and I'm joined with an old friend Randy Robertson who's an education and outreach coordinator at NCTC. And today Randy and I are going to be talking about the bald eagle and the endangered Species Act and some of the wonderful successes of the act. Randy, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to be doing today.
RR: Well, Jim, it's national Eagle Day here. It's June 20th, 2023 and it's also the fiftieth anniversary of the Endangered Species Act that's really helped out the bald eagle over these years. Along with that it's the 20th anniversary of our nest here at the National Conservation Training Center. So let's get into it. Let's talk a little bit about the history of the bald eagle in North America, Jim.
JS: The bald eagle has a really remarkable history in our country. In the 1700’s, it was estimated between 300 to 500000 bald eagles in North America. But by the 1950s, partially because of illegal shooting, but also because of DDT, a well known pesticide, the population had shrunk to only 500 nesting pairs in the lower 48 and dominantly the DDT was a problem because it affected the egg metabolism of reproducing eagles. That is, they could only lay eggs that were so fragile that when the Eagles sat on their eggs they often cracked in the nest and of course that meant that there was no hatchlings often for decades at a time.
RR: A lot that early research on DDT took place at the Patuxent Research Center between Baltimore and D.C. and a very interesting story. Now during World War II, of course DDT was used a lot and people argue that helped us win World War II, which you could say but it unknown at the time was the bad effect it was having on not just bald eagles but peregrine falcons and Brown pelicans and an Osprey like you say making their eggshells thin. Do you know the story of how they determined that it was DDT doing it?
JS: Well, there were a number of researchers who were looking into why a number of different kinds of wildlife were being affected by DDT and other pesticides. And Rachel Carson who published Silence Spring in the early 60s really showed this as a major problem. But there were researchers who were actually looking at the egg shells and testing these eggs for the presence of DDT in the tissues and so they very, very quickly determined that that was the cause of the problem. And as an interesting history, so right off the bat the bald eagle is considered endangered in 1967 Endangered Species Act. But then the DDT was banned seven years later in 1972 and so as a result almost immediately eagles and other birds of prey, and other birds as well, as the DDT declined its use declined the birds ability to lay healthy eggs recovered.
RR: And along with that we had the Endangered Species Act, as you mentioned, that came along I think the bald eagle was declared endangered in 1978 through 2007 when they were delisted. So a period of about 29 years altogether.
JS: It was actually listed in the Early Endangered Species Act as an endangered species in ‘67 and then the population started to grow over the next 20 years or so. And so by 1992 there was about 115,000 bald eagles in the lower 48. So by 1995 the birds were slightly delisted to threatened and no longer endangered. But by 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list altogether, considered fully recovered as a species.
RR: And here in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and across the country really, populations have been rising. It's been a true conservation success story but along with DDT being banned and the endangered species Act back in the early 70s, 1972, we also had the Clean Water Act. Rivers like the Potomac and other major rivers were badly polluted and once they got cleaned up fish started coming back in. And as we saw those rivers get cleaned up and the fish populations come up at the same time bald eagle populations were rising because they had great food sources.
JS: Bald eagles, about 65 percent of their diet all year round is fish. During certain periods of time they're almost eating fish 100 percent of the time. But over the course of their, over the entire year, about 65 percent of their diet is fish and you know, it's a terrific food source and yes, as we've cleaned our rivers, we have healthy populations of fish and other aquatic animals and it means good things for all these fish and other aquatic animal feeding birds.
RR: So Jim, what's going on with eagles in the United States today?
JS: Right. Well, the eagle population is amazingly amazing recovery. We believe that there's about 300000 eagles in the lower 48 states and another 30000 eagles in the state of Alaska alone. Right. In terms of the lower 48 states we have about 70000 breeding pairs of eagles. 3000 pairs of eagles in the Chesapeake area. The state of West Virginia has about 150 pairs of bald eagles. So the Chesapeake Bay population, we are sort of part of that. The state that has the most bald eagles right now is Minnesota. It has almost 10000 breeding eagles alone and the second state I believe is Florida with about 1500 breeding eagles.
RR: It's really inspiring to see a bald eagle on the wild and hard to mistake them the adults anyway. They've got the white head, the white tail feathers. Big bird of course. The juveniles are a little harder to determine if they're an eagle or maybe another bird because they don't get the white head and tail until they're about four to five years of age. But when I was a kid I never saw a bald eagle in the wild. And today when I go into a classroom and ask the students how many of you have seen an eagle and about half the kids put up their hands so that's fantastic that we see them back in the wild.
JS: I've lived in West Virginia in Shepherdstown for, on and off, for about 30 years and when I first moved here in 1992, there were very, very few eagles to be seen in this area. It was more common to see Osprey and other birds of prey and eagles were a rare sighting. Now you can see eagles fairly easily in the Shepherdstown area, Harpers Ferry area and it's really a delight to be able to see them every day.
RR: Jim, tell us a little bit about the work that went on by state agencies, federal agencies, NGOs when the eagle populations were in such decline in the lower 48. I know they brought in eagles from Alaska and Canada to repopulate. What do you know about that?
JS: Well, they put out eagles. In the beginning, they took eggs from successful nests in places where the DDT problem was was lowest and they transplanted some of those eggs and put them under eagles who were trying to hatch eggs that were going to be damaged because they had DDT in their tissues. Some people also hacked a few eagles and peregrine falcons and a few other birds and so they were able to get them started.
RR: Tell us what hacking means.
JS: Hacking means putting out birds in a hacking box, you know, like a nesting box and feeding them until they're able to forage on their own. Right now we're doing a lot of hacking of California condors in the West and so they're they're kept in a box in a cliff location or a tree location and when they are ready they're fed in the box. When they're released and they're fed and they stay around the box. It's interesting to note that eagles are able to learn to fly and learn to feed all on their own. They don't need to have parents to be able to learn these very instinctual behaviors not unlike a human baby can learn to walk, you know, without you forcing it to walk.
RR: Well, it's the 20th anniversary of our nest here at the National Conservation Training Center. Back in 2003 when they started building it, we got to see them do that in the fall. It was very interesting to see them build the nest stick by stick and by the spring of 2004 they laid their first eggs. And it's been a productive nest over the years. We were looking at some numbers earlier. Over the twenty year span there have been a total of 44 eggs laid and a total of 26 young birds or juvenile eagles that have fledged or flown from that nest. A little over 60 percent success rate which is pretty good for bald eagles in the wild. And some years we've had three eggs laid and three young ones fledge, other years it's been zero eggs have been laid. We had five years where we had no fledging birds but other years made up for it. So those other 15 years we've had two and three and sometimes one. This year we had one bird, two eggs laid but one young eagle fledged just last week it took off and we see it now and then today.
JS: I would say that this nest is very productive considering that on five years out of the twenty no birds fledged at all. That means that every year on average 1.7 birds, nearly two birds, have been fledged in this nest every year which is I think a remarkable amount and it shows you not only the health of the Potomac River in terms of fish and other animals for the birds to prey on, but it just means that our location we haven't disturbed them. They've been protected from disturbance and they've been very hardy and strong here. And it's interesting to note that they've been using this nest for about twenty years. It is not the original birds that are now in that nest. And Randy can tell us a little bit about some of the changes that have happened over that twenty year period.
RR: Well, we have seen alot of competition among birds and kind of good news bad news with the population rising. That's the good news. A little bit bad news, in a sense, is that there's more competition for prime nesting territory and this is a beautiful sycamore tree, 100 feet tall. We're in about over 500 acres of land along the Potomac River. So it's an ideal site but so other eagles would like to come over and now and then, actually almost every year for at least the past five years, we've seen young birds come in. Not this year but the year before, a young female we believe came in tried to take over the nest, she did for about three weeks. Then she was chased away by the resident female. So when the young birds get to be about four to five years of age, they're looking for a territory and a mate and a nest of their own and that's when we get the competition and sometimes it gets it gets pretty brutal. But the original pair that built the nest, we lost the male in 2011 and the female in 2018. So the two birds that we have in here now, the two adults, have been good parents and raising productive birds, taking good care of the nest and so on. But it's very interesting, you know, to watch them. A lot of people around the country enjoy watching the eagle cam. We put the first camera up in the fall of 2005. The spring of 2006 was the first year that we could witness them live on video online and that was the year that they had three young ones and all three of them fledged. The following year was a kind of a bad winter, 2007, at that time we didn't have any, we had three eggs laid but none fledged. Then in 2008 another good year, we had three eggs laid and three fledged. So over the years it's been very interesting to watch. But if you like to look at the nest if you haven't seen it, it's outdoorchannel.com/eaglecam. It's streamed by the outdoor channel so the address is outdoorchannel.com/eaglecam or if you search for NCTC eagle cam or Shepherdstown, West Virginia eagle cam you'll find it. And we leave it on year round now because in the summertime, even though the young ones have fledged, every now and then we see them back at the nest. The young one kind of associates the nest with food and the adults may bring a fish back there now and then. And sometimes we see a blue heron come in now that the Eagles are not in the nest all the time. Of course when they're in the nest they're very protective of the nest. They don't want any other big birds around but when they're not they're mostly down at the river through the summer months. We might see a great blue heron come in. We might see a turkey vulture. So it's kind of fun to see what's going on there.
JS: A couple of weeks ago we had a goose check out the nest. It was looking for a nesting site a hundred feet off the ground which is unusual place for geese to nest.
RR: But that was funny. I'd never seen that.
JS: That was amazing. It was amazing. It's been a real eye opener. I think Randy and I have learned a lot from just looking at that nest. Almost every year we learn something new about their behavior and how they perform, all the different activities. It is amazing that when we have a lot of snow those parents are going to sit on those eggs even when the snow totally covers them. So it's hard to believe that anything actually survive but they are keeping those eggs warm even in 40 inches of snow. And you'd say why do they even in the snow in the first place is because the eggs take 35 days to hatch and the young are going to be in the nest another eleven or twelve weeks. You can see that these birds are going to be trapped up in that nest for a long time and so those young have to get out of the nest before the heat of the summer would really bake them in the nest and they're not going to be able to drink any free water. So all the moisture that they're going to be able to get will have to come from the fish and other wildlife that they eat. And you can see where this is a challenge for a lot of birds. They have to get out of the nest as quickly as they can. Partly in this case for drinking water reasons but also for other reasons in terms of predation and other vulnerabilities from sitting in a nest.
RR: I'm always amazed at how fast they grow. Generally we say here in this latitude right around mid-February Valentine's Day the eggs are laid. 35 38 days later they hatch in mid-March and when they come out of the shell they're not even as big as your fist and in 12 weeks they're a full adult eagle size ready to fly from the nest. And almost every other day you can see a change in the young birds as they grow. It's just incredible how fast they do grow. And a lot of people enjoy watching that online and folks keep daily tabs on them and post videos and take photographs and post those. So we have a great online community that loves watching the Eagles and there are almost on there 24/7 pretty much during the nesting season. So that's a lot of fun.
JS: It's been interesting watching what the young are fed. Typically they're fed some of the most common things or different kinds of suckers that are running in the spring up the Potomac River to spawn. And so those are a very important food source. But they also eat ducklings, small geese. We've seen them eating snakes, turtles, another kind of fish that we've seen are eels, catfish, a number of bass and sunfish. But I think typically what can be said about 60 something percent of their diet appears to be fish. Often the young fish seems to be among the most important thing for them to eat. Small rabbits, squirrels sometimes we see a portion of the deer. Which I don't think the eagle is killing an animal like that but it's eating it from a carcass.
RR: The adults are scavengers so they'll take advantage of anything they can find. They're not particular but like Jim said, when the young ones are growing fish is definitely their preferred food because it's high protein, lots of moisture and we see a lot of fish out of the Potomac brought into the nest here and it's been a good source for these eagles. Well, Jim, we've got eagles, you know, on the rebound, populations are coming up but we've still got some continuing threats to eagles. Let's talk about those. We've got lead poisoning from lead shot, avian flu, wind turbines, electrical lines. Even bald eagles can get hit by cars and trucks when they're scavenging along the roadway and some habitat loss as well.
JS: Right. You know, one of the things that easily preventable is the whole problem of led shot. The Eagles often scavenge at carcasses of game animals such as deer that have been shot by hunting and the gut piles that are often left behind have some lead shot in them and when the eagles eat those carcasses they ingest the shot. And only a few pellets can actually poison the eagles so that they may die. And I've seen some statistics that suggest that half the bald eagles, with even a tiny amount of shot, are a little bit poisoned by the presence of lead. So one of the things that we can do as citizens of the United States is if we change the kinds of shot that we use in rifles and hand guns to other kinds of shot that are not lead based, that will be a good thing for eagles and other birds that might ingest shot. The lead is not helping these eagles recover.
RR: Discarded fishing line is another big problem. This year in Tennessee we saw a couple of young eagles get tangled up in fishing, monofilament fishing line is very strong and pretty much impossible to break or cut without a knife. And so something as simple as if you're out and about on a hike or you going out for a day fishing with the family, if you find discarded line, pick up and dispose of it properly, keep it away from the wildlife. That benefits lots of wildlife, not just bald eagles. Rodenticides poisoning from rat poison. That's another problem we find in wildlife.
JS: Right. You know, it's very common in the United States for people to poison rats and mice around their homes, around their farms. But it's interesting to note that those poisoned animals are often scavenged by birds and other animals and so when we do that, the rodenticide enters the food chain. A lot of the pesticides that we use are very persistent and so that's one of the threats, like DDT in the 1950s, today rodenticides are often fairly common in the environment and if we use less of them that will be a very good thing for wildlife.
RR: Of course, wind turbines are dangerous to bald eagles. The tips of those turbines spin at 150 miles per hour so any bird, not just bald eagles, but bats and the wind industry and the electrical industry are doing research to try to prevent those and site those properly. Electrical lines, another issue. Especially in areas where there's a high populations of eagles. Like Florida for example, they will insulate areas of lines where you know, that might be dangerous to birds. So so those the companies are working on doing that as well. So those are just a few, of course in habitat loss, we mentioned, as more developments go up around the country, loss of habitat is another concern.
JS: You know, these eagles often nest in some of the largest trees in your area. So our nest here at NCTC is in a tree that's about a hundred years old and about a hundred feet tall, a huge sycamore tree and those big, big trees that are about 100 years old are obviously they're just not as common as they used to be and so if we can make sure that our developments that are near rivers and lakes and near the bay, that we protect those big trees, the riparian area trees, that's very important for their habitat.
RR: So to wrap things up, Jim, I think we can celebrate National Eagle Day in a positive way here. The Eagles are coming back. It's the fiftieth anniversary of the Endangered Species Act which definitely been helpful for the bald eagles and we can celebrate the 20th anniversary of our nest. Here again you can see the nest online at outdoorchannel.com/eaglecam, that's the National Conservation Training Center Bald Eagles Nest. So we're just about out of time. Jim, thanks for joining me to talk about bald eagles today.
JS: Well, it's a pleasure being with you, Randy.
Thank you for listening to the National Conservation Training Center podcast series. If you have feedback thoughts or stories you'd like to share, contact us at [email protected]
Thoughts From Home
No full textFor 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has protected America's imperiled plants and animals. Mark Madison, Historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, shares about the history of the Endangered Species Act during its 50th Anniversary year. All Americans can take pride in the fact that, under the ESA, the California condor, grizzly bear, Okaloosa darter, whooping crane, and black-footed ferret have all been brought back from the brink of extinction. It has helped to create a better understanding of how human activities can impact the environment and how we can work together to protect it. We can also celebrate that many other species no longer need ESA protection and have been removed from the list of endangered and threatened species, including the bald eagle—the very symbol of our nation's strength.Welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia and are home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
For 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has protected America's imperiled plants and animals from the carnivorous green pitcher plant of southeastern wetlands to the western snowy plover of northwestern beaches to the iconic polar bear of the Arctic. My name is Catherine Blalack and I'm a Fish and Wildlife biologist at the National Conservation Training Center.
Today I'm here with Mark Madison, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Historian to learn more about the history of the Endangered Species Act on its fiftieth anniversary year. Mark, can you briefly share about the history of the Fish and Wildlife Service and why it's important to protect and conserve plants and wildlife? Sure, that's my job. Thank you, Catherine, for that easy first question. So the Fish and Wildlife Service traces its roots all the way back to 1871 shortly after the Civil War as the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries and we were set up initially to help restore the nation's fisheries. And then in the 1880s a parallel agency was set up on the biological survey that was supposed to protect everything that wasn't a fish, birds, mammals and so on. The two agencies were combined in 1940 and became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And the reason it's important to conserve fish, wildlife plants and their habitats is they were in dire straints around the turn of the century, 80s and 90s. That was a period when the passenger pigeon was going extinct. Bison were on their way out in the wild and there was a real decimation plants, animals and their habitats and it was a reaction to this huge destruction of large swaths of our nation's flora and fauna that our agency was set up as a last ditch attempt to try to protect them for future generations.
I was reading about the federal protection of endangered species and it dates back to the Lacey Act in nineteen hundred. Was this quickly after that act was established the Environmental Law of the Endangered Species Act? Well there was a couple of things that came before the iconic endangered species Act of 1973. So you're absolutely right. The first federal wildlife protection was the Lacey Act and that was really far sighted in legislation for 1900, it banned interstate commerce and illegally caught wildlife and really wiped out a lot of poaching and market hunting and game hogs. It also wiped out the plume trade where birds were slaughtered for women's fashion, which is really popular at the end of the 19th century. And then after that the migratory bird treaty was signed in 1916 and that that helped protect birds that crossed state lines the beginning of looking at species that crossed state or even international lines to try to protect them. So the migratory bird treaty was signed with Canada to try to protect birds and migrate across the North American continent. And then there was a law in 1940 that was the first law to protect an individual species and that was the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act that tried to protect our nation's symbol. And then in the 1960s there were two Endangered Species Act, an earlier Endangered Species Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Conservation Act and they really started to set aside some habitat for wildlife and to start listing endangered and threatened species.
But what's the difference between the endangered Species Preservation Act and the other one that you mentioned versus what we have today that was established in '73? Sure. So, in 1966, the Endangered Species Preservation Act had the secretary of interior list all domestic species of fish and wildlife that were endangered and it actually gave some funds to acquire habitat for them and some of the first species to get habitat were Eagles not surprisingly. And in 1969 there was something called the Endangered Species Conservation Act and that extended protection to animals threatened with worldwide extinction once again growing the circle of boundaries to protect and protecting animals that might be in Africa and Asia and be threatened or endangered.
What was pivotal in establishing those laws? There was widespread concern in the 1960s that was the beginning of an era where people were very concerned about pollution and other toxins like insecticides like DDT which were wiping out raptors, bald eagles, whooping cranes, California condors. So even after the beginning of a wildlife refuge system and the Lacey Act species were declining again in the 1950s and 60s. This was part of a broader environmental movement where the American public petitioned Congress to begin protecting these species and at the same time a lot of conservation biologists were noting worldwide decimation of species. So that is the impetus to try and protect species across all border state borders and international borders. It's kind of like an all over effort. Yeah, I like to think of it as an expanding circle of protection. So you know, we started with protecting fish and then, you know, game mammals and charismatic birds like the bird you described at your feeder this morning and gradually you know, it expanded to include plants, species that exist beyond our borders, species that might not be as charismatic like insects and invertebrate and some plants. So it's kind of expanding the circle of things we want to protect.
Was the first species that went extinct the passenger pigeon? Is that correct? There were probably other species very narrowly endemic species like dodo birds and so on that were found just on one island of the giant rock and so on. But the big one in the US you're absolutely right Catherine was the passenger pigeon passenger pigeon was striking because it was probably the most populous bird ever to exist on the planet. That is so hard to believe. It is! Billions of them as late as the 1970s when the bird was on its way out. We have records of flocks of passenger pigeons in places like Michigan where there could have been millions of them and one small habitat so it was a gregarious, really popular species that darkened the sky. They would break the limbs of trees. There would be so many of them landing on these trees and they were made extinct primarily by human hunting within a hundred years. So people looked at the passenger pigeon and said oh my God, what's going to be next? And then they looked at bison, bald eagles and said, you know, we really need to protect these species and that was really the origin of the early American conservation movement. Theodore Roosevelt and some of these thinkers decided we need to protect habitat. They set up the National Wildlife Refuge System in 1903. We need to protect laws like the Lacey Act and that Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and we need to try to restore these species.
Yeah, What was the first species that was listed under the Endangered Species Act? You mentioned under the Preservation Act there was several species listed maybe not the invertebrate but mammals and fish and birds. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So in 1966 the Endangered Species Preservation Act basically said make a list of what's endangered out there and the list was compiled by 1967 and that was our first endangered species list. And you're right, there were all vertebrae that was what was most on people's radar and it's kind of an interesting list. It had 14 mammals, 36 birds, three reptiles, three amphibians and 22 fishes on them and they were all listed at once. But some of the ones that are probably more common to people and we'd expect to be on there were like the whooping crane and the California condor, these charismatic birds. There were even a couple of species on there that went extinct like Bachman's warbler and dusky seaside sparrow unfortunately were on that first list and they're gone now. And then some bigger species like the Timberwolf, the Red Wolf Grizzly Bear Florida panther, black footed ferrets, manatees, all of these species are put on there and the American alligator was probably the most well known reptile.
So are you hitting on some success stories there? As you mentioned the different species listed? Yeah, and I think the law itself was a big success. People may not know this but the 1973 endangered Species Act was almost universally welcomed, which is different sometimes than environmental legislation today it actually passed the House of Representatives 390 to 12, which is pretty impressive. But even more impressively when it went to the Senate it passed unanimously.
Considering the history just like the fur trade, the plume trade and just hearing you talk about it, it's such a shift, you know, to hear that that was such a swinging vote. That's really interesting. Yeah. It is hugely popular and I think, you know, initially people were focused on those large charismatic species. This is going to bring back the eagle and the whooping crane and so on. But even in that first list, you know, you had amphibians, you had fishes a whole bunch of species people were much less familiar with.
Now you asked about some success stories. As you introduced me, I'm a historian for the fish and Wildlife Service. So there's a couple that have historical resonance that are really success stories. The bald eagles pretty well known that came off the list relatively recently but some that are less well known is for example the brown pelican and I like the brown pelican because it was the first species that was protected by a national wildlife refuge system was a little island in Florida at Pelican Island protected the brown pelican down in Florida. This poor species had all sorts of threats to it. People would hunt them, they'd shoot them. Audubon went to Pelican Island and shot them so he could paint them and then they got poisoned by DDT and other contaminants. But they really came back robustly and they were delisted in 2009.
Another exciting one that has a historical resonance is the Louisiana Black Bear. So that's a subspecies of black bear found in Louisiana and Mississippi. Not sure how I got the name Louisiana, Mississippi lost out on that one but that was that there was endangered beginning at the early 1980s and it was actually a bear that Teddy Roosevelt wanted to hunt. It was a pretty hard bear to find. And when he went down to hunt he actually didn't find any of them and then the guides felt bad. Oh man. The president came down here to hunt Louisiana Black Bear. He didn't get any and it was unsuccessful. Well they found that it was, it turned out to be successful in an unexpected way. They found a cub and they tied a cub to a tree and they said, well, why don't you just shoot this? At least you can say you got a Louisiana Blackburne Teddy Roosevelt said no, no, I'm not going to shoot Cub release it, let it go. And the cartoonist drew a picture of Roosevelt letting this little cub go and a year later a toymaker wrote the president. And said Hey, I'd like to make a toy and call it the teddy bear based on this cartoon the story. Yeah. So the the origins of the teddy bear, the Louisiana Black Bear that was a species that was on the first list and it's been listed as recovered in 2016. So that's really a fun success story too. So now that bear happily has recovered, it didn't go extinct even though many people feared it would and it's a success story for the Endangered Species Act.
Can I give you one more? This one is really fun. So I mentioned that some of the species on the endangered species list are taken off sadly because they go extinct. I mean we hate to see that the dusky seaside sparrow, Bachman's warbler, the ivory billed woodpecker was on the first list. We're not sure there's any of those left but there's one little mammal that was on that first list I mentioned name the black footed ferret. Now this thing is really interesting. Its numbers crashed because of people poisoning prairie dogs and these black footed ferrets like to eat prairie dogs and for prairie dogs been poisoned then they get poisoned and then they also had a plot. Mark, let me stop you, why were people poisoning? Because prairie dog holes could cause horses livestock to break the legs ruined agricultural stuff. Yeah, exactly. So they were poisoned by our agency and by individuals throughout most of the twentieth century so their numbers got very low and then they were declared extinct in 1979 and when a species is declared extinct it comes off the list. You know we can't protect it anymore if it's entirely gone. But one prairie dog was rediscovered in 1981, two years after had been declared extinct and it was discovered unfortunately by a dog who killed it a farmer's dog. Well, this prairie dog the farmers took it to a taxidermist. A taxidermist said this looks like a black footed ferret, looks like a species that we used to have, but is now extinct. And when Fish and Wildlife Service found out about it, we realized they weren't extinct since the dog had found it. And finally we looked really hard and we found a little colony of them in Wyoming but they weren't in good shape. They were down to eighteen animals were all that was left a plague ran through them and wiped out most of that colony and they were taken out of the wild put in captive breeding facility and now there's over 300 black footed ferrets in the wild again they've come back there in a number of locations and amazingly in 2021 we cloned the first black-footed ferret first endangered species ever to be cloned. It's a new way perhaps going forward for us to help restore species. So it's kind of an exciting story. Not only was this poor little mammal declared extinct when it wasn't extinct in fact from the edge of extinction. But now we're using the most modern science possible to clone them and to try to increase their genetic diversity. That is so remarkable. I wonder yeah. That's a fun sort of they might have and then they're like oh I think it's good. Oh no it’s not.
Well here's another just fun fact about the black footed ferrets. We're here at the National Conservation Training Center which is the home of the Fish and Wildlife Service and we have on display in our museum the very first we discovered black footed ferret. So the one that the farmer's dog killed was eventually taxidermed and it's on display in our museum in an exhibit on endangered species and everybody called it Lucille that was the informal name. But it turned out when we got it we quickly discovered Lucille was a male. It’s official name was, I think it was something to the equivalent of yeah it was it was you know, adult. I know I know what it was a stud book No one. So they were given the ferrets names for genetic diversity and to stop too much inbreeding and so on wasn't much of a stud since it was dead but they all got names in those days. What a cool artifact to be in the archives. It's one of my favorites and it's very cute. Yes, they are so fun to watch them popping up.
So once a species is listed under the ESA what does that mean for the species and what kind of work are we doing to support conservation? That's a really good question. So a lot of species have been listed. We've listed more than 2300 species as endangered or threatened and about six hundred of those live in the United States even this year in 2013 we've already added thirteen new species to the list including everything from lesser prairie chicken to a clam and a type of crayfish. So once species go on the endangered or threatened species list, a number of laws go into effect to protect them basically. First of all, reasonably enough going back to the Lacey Act, you can't take an endangered species. You can't hunt it. We don't want you transporting it. We don't want people selling endangered species. So that's prohibited pretty much across the board. And then we come up with what we call species survival plans, efforts to bring back species sometimes kind of amazingly, bring them back to habitat where they'd been fully removed like gray wolves have been fully removed from Yellowstone and they've been restored to Yellowstone and they're doing very well. So there's a whole series of measures, extraordinary measures, everything from breeding them in zoos to bringing them back to habitat where they once might have existed but they might have been extinct in that habitat for 50 years. All of these extraordinary measures go into effect to try to protect endangered species.
You mentioned passenger pigeons. I think if the endangered species Act had a motto it would be no more passenger pigeons. It really is. I like that. Yeah, it attempts to outlaw extinction is really what it does at its basic level and in the purpose of it is that so future generations can see as diverse the wildlife and habitats as we enjoy and that that always struck me as a very noble goal. And I'd say one other thing about the endangered species Act and that you know, we talked about the Lacey Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and sometimes people look at the Endangered Species Act as kind of an evolution of these earlier acts, you know, just slowly adding more species or more protections. But it really isn't. The Endangered Species Act was really revolutionary. It attempted idealistically to outlaw extinction for the first time, had our agency trying to restore species to habitats they'd been completely removed from, and it even includes amazing measures to bring species back. For example, there's at least three species of wildlife I know that for a while were completely removed from the wild. Red wolves, black-footed ferrets, and California condors at some point in their species history there were none in nature that were completely removed from the wild and they were brought back in all three cases pretty successfully after being bred zoos. Yep. And captive breeding facilities and that was kind of new for us to take a species out of the wild and then try to bring it back and then reintroduce it. So it really is a break from all the other earlier protections to kind of an extraordinarily idealistic and ambitious protection and it's largely worked. The extinction of species has declined tremendously since the ESA was passed in 1973. And you know, our goal is to stop anything else from going extinct.
I think our agency is commendable for the work that we do and it's so such a like wide array of things that we do. The challenges are endless. The species you just listed sixteen hundred species listed in the US. Our work never ends, but you know the things that you're talking about are successes and the recovery of the Red Wolf and the condor and the black footed ferret that's really awesome and exciting. Yeah I would just add one thing so I've been working for the agency for twenty four years and I like to tell new employees our agency has a very noble mission. I think it's the most noble but I won't be that subjective. But I mean you know, these laws are very complicated. They have a lot of different elements to them and so on but basically the laws that we enforce and the work we do on refuge's or with endangered species or in fish hatcheries, it all boils down to we want our kids and their grandkids to have the same richness of wildlife that we've enjoyed. And I don't know how you can be against that mission and most of the public is behind to work on that. All but the next generation. Yep, exactly. We want them to enjoy the biodiversity that we enjoy that you mentioned seeing outside your window this morning.
How is NCTC involved and what role are we playing? That's a good question. So most of our endangered species work is done outside of NCTC through ecological services offices where they list species. They come up with species survival plans. They monitor species. They do this in the field where the species live. But NCTC plays a critical role and that we train biologists on how to carry out the Endangered Species Act, how to understand the regulatory language that's the Endangered Species Act, how to best promulgate these types of species. And then we also have a historic role in reminding folks how these species came to the brink of extinction and the successes we've had over the last 152 years in trying to conserve these species. It's great we have like a ton of classes on conservation policy and ecological adaptation, habitat restoration and management courses that are helping biologists do their jobs in the field. Yeah, that's a tool we've only had for the last twenty five years or so. I think it's made a big difference in our effectiveness. So our main training center is here at NCTC and we give these biologists the tools they need to deal with endangered specie
Thoughts From Home
No full textWhen walking the trails at the NCTC, you are surrounded by beautiful trees. Have you thought about what kind of tree they are or how they fit in biodiversity? Or why the younger trees were planted in that spot? The NCTC Land Management team takes great thought into where new trees will be planted and why. Mike McAllister talks with Casey Johnson, an Ecologist at NCTC, about tree planting and gives advice on planting your own native trees!Welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and our home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
MM: Welcome to Thoughts from Home. I'm Mike McCallister. I'll be your host for today and I'm here with Casey Johnson who is a land management technician at NCTC. We are going to talk about NCTC's land management practices, specifically tree planting. From suburban backyards to tropical rainforests, trees all around the world are providing the necessities of life. Trees clean our air and water, provide habitat for wildlife, connect communities and support our health and well-being. Casey, thank you for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
CJ: Absolutely. And it's a pleasure to be back. So my career with the Fish and Wildlife Service has started at NCTC over a decade ago. I've been part time here at NCTC since 2009 and full time since 2011 and since that time I've had quite a bit of experience planting trees around the property since in the land management program itself and as it's written in our land management plan there is a significant opportunity to do that.
MM: There is a lot of property in it at NCTC and I see you on every inch of it when I'm out and about. Can you describe NCTC’s property and landscape?
CJ: Absolutely. So backing up a little bit before and acquired the property it was worked as agricultural fields. It was a mixed use agricultural property and a lot of that did come with open fields for farming. But then we also had this edge habitat which had mature trees in it which was great but now as we've identified what it is that we are working with, there are certain areas that would benefit from improving the wildlife corridors and connecting what would be otherwise considered fragmented habitat. So a lot of what we're doing is connecting those forest areas together by planting trees. We also have riparian areas since we're almost I would say a mile of water frontage along the Potomac River. We do have a significant opportunity to improve the habitat along those riparian zones.
MM: So riparian is that like repairing your repairing it or what is riparian?
CJ: It's a clever way to think about it but no riparian actually means water, OK, because we're close to the waterway and it can overrun its banks in high rain or precipitation events. What we want to make sure is those areas are protected as much as possible from erosion and soil loss which is as you know a big problem. But one of the ways we do that is through planting trees and those areas or improving the habitat to minimize those devastating effects.
MM: OK, I did not know what riparian was. What's a popular tree on campus or species wise what's common?
CJ: So we do have common trees, there's common trees and then there's beneficial trees. So one commentary that we have that might not be of a higher wildlife value would be say the box elder which is a type of maple tree. OK, but we do have other higher value trees that we try and promote around campus that are both naturally occurring and that we want to try and plant more of in those areas that we've identified where we want the trees we have to make sure that we're planting the trees in that are cited for that location. What I can do is give you a list of some of the tree species that we focus on.
MM: Sure. I think trees are cool.
CJ: OK, so as a short list we have various oaks, cherry’s, walnuts, hickories, American plum, persimmon, Sycamore, White Pine, Eastern Red Cedar, Eastern Cottonwood, Willows, Elms, Hackberry and of course like I said we have various maples and those are just to name a few. The point that I'm getting at is we want diversity as much as possible. If you have a monoculture of just one tree you're not really doing the ecosystem any real benefit because as you know there's plenty critters out there that require different micro habitats to complete the lifecycle or just be happy. So having a diversity of plants in the environment goes a long way to fulfilling that.
MM: Awesome. Let's talk more about the relationship between trees and biodiversity. What trees specifically are most beneficial to wildlife here at NCTC and are dead tree is important.
CJ: So in terms of most important, I would say that could certainly be up to debate. However, there are plenty of people that would argue that Oaks serve a very high ecological benefit compared to most other trees that would be found in those similar areas. So for example an oak tree can promote as many as 400 or more species of caterpillars.
MM: There's 400 different species?
CJ: Absolutely. So just think about how mind boggling I don't know about you but I can't name 400 species of caterpillars.
MM: There's green ones. There's brown.
CJ: Exactly. But as you can imagine, different oaks can host a whole web of insects. Now the fact that they're locally native helps. In contrast, if you think about something like a ginko tree, the ginkgo biloba, they host zero caterpillars. There's no ecological benefit to ginkgo trees. Now I got to say they look absolutely amazing in the fall with their foliage but they don't really serve ecological benefit when it comes to hosting insects in that regard.
MM: So when you're choosing trees you're selecting them for their benefits to the wildlife, not necessarily what a human would like or think is pretty.
CJ: True. But the great thing about having that diverse selection of trees is you also get a diverse selection of opportunities to get the look you're going for. Maples is a great example. There's plenty of maples out there that just have amazing fall foliage color and if that's what you want, there's a native species that absolutely fits that need. So yes, I would think of it in terms of habitat opportunity first but in terms of the human dimension of if you're trying to create a certain goal there should be a native species out there that's perfect.
MM: And who would we talk to find what species works well in our area?
CJ: Well, I would say local resources are going to be your best resources. Of course the Internet is always good but there's a local garden clubs and local extension offices, local nurseries and more specifically there's local nurseries that specialize native plants. If you don't have a nursery in your immediate area that carries locally native plants, I would have a conversation with them say hey, I'm interested in purchasing native plants from you. Do you have the ability to get those if you're going to give that demand for that company you would essentially be steering their buying towards what the customer wants.
MM: Showing the need and maybe the stock you and others can benefit from it.
CJ: Sure. And I would say those are your best resources to get exactly what you're looking for and the more locally sourced the better.
MM: Wonderful, wonderful. Let's talk about sensitizes tree planting efforts. Is there anything specific you'd like to share about our efforts?
CJ: Yeah, and like I said earlier, we have a property that is previous agricultural use right now it's 530 acres of mixed use property. We do have a lot of buildings on campus so outside the buildings envelope is where my domain begins. So we have a lot of area to be able to work with. Fortunately for planting trees and diversifying the communities in this immediate area we have I want to say over 10 separate planting areas that either have been planted or that are actively being cared for. Our most recent one was maybe about four acres but within that four acres we were able to plant almost a thousand trees. So you've just improved that habitat and that diversity by a thousand plants in just a very small area. Of course we're trying to create again a wildlife buffer and a habitat corridor for wildlife. But yeah, it's just a really good feeling to know that we have the the tools the ability to do something like that for the benefit of conservation.
MM: Very interesting to hear that sounds like a big effort to plant that many trees on that tree plot.
CJ: Certainly was. There was a lot of people involved and a lot of great volunteers.
MM: Of the trees that we are planting. Is there a certain species that you're targeting on the new plants? The new planting?
CJ: That's an excellent question. So when it comes to planting for specific habitat needs, whether it's for a particular critter or a particular habitat type, one of the most important things you want to consider is making sure that the plant or plants that you're choosing for that area will do well in that location.
MM: Sunlight, shade, stuff like that?
CJ: Yeah. And even the soil type of if it's rocky or if it's swampy, if it holds a lot of water you're going to choose a plant that likes quote wet feet.
MM: Yeah OK.
CJ: So there's there's certain trees out there that would benefit and do better in those areas versus something that would prefer a more upland, dry, not as much moisture probably more exposed to the elements and say high winds that sort thing.
MM: And when I hear planting trees I usually think of I guess a seed but you can also plant trees from saplings. What you recommend? What do you do? Do you use seeds, do you use saplings?
CJ: We do a little bit of both. Here at NCTC what we have done historically is we will purchase bare root seedlings from a local native plant nursery. Usually it's a tree nursery that specializes in growing young trees and we can buy them from six inches up to let's say what they'll call a whip which is typically four to six foot tall seedling.
MM: Oh wow.
CJ: Yeah so the bigger they are the more roots they're going to have of course the bigger the whole you're going to need to dig. Which is you know maybe something to keep in mind depending on what your site requirements are for you're trying to dig that hole for.
MM: Too big a tree or too big a sapling for your tooling you couldn't dig the hole big enough. You can buy too big a sapling.
CJ: Sure, sure. Absolutely. And by extension you might need to care for it more because it's water demands might be higher or you might need to stake it more robustly to prevent it from being tossed around in high winds, that sort of thing.
MM: I'm new to saplings. Is there anything else I can do to take care of these saplings?
CJ: Absolutely. Some of the smaller saplings that we have if they're not ready to go out into the field, we will actually pot up into an appropriately sized container and keep that container for a year or more in our in-house native plant nursery which I helped oversee and care for now the benefit of having a plant nursery is you can shelter the plants as needed until they're robust enough to go out into the field. And in addition to that we also have different zones within the nursery that will keep either different sized trees or in some cases we'll have herbaceous plants which are more for use and our pollinator gardens around campus or we'll have shrubs that we want to put in the landscape near buildings to fill that need whatever that need.
MM: Ornamental or diversity. OK.
CJ: Going back to your question, your statement about if we collect seeds also the answer is yes we do. So when we collect seeds we try and collect from as local as possible. Like I said, usually it's from campus on site somewhere and depending on the seed and what it needs to stratify and grow into a plant will hold onto that and do what we have to do. We have raised beds in our native plant nursery that we will overwinter them in the soil outside if necessary. Sometimes we'll keep them in a refrigerator till we're ready to work with them if we have other things going on or otherwise just to kind of slow their developmental progress and yeah, same thing we grow them to a size until such time they're ready to be planted out into the field and we don't have to tend to them nearly as much.
MM: So basically you collect the seeds locally and then you give them the best opportunity to grow and once they're big enough and strong enough then you go replant them out in the wild where they have a good opportunity to continue growing basically.
CJ: Exactly. And follow up to that statement if for any reason we need to replace a plant that did not survive, we do what are called survival checks where we walk and check the plants periodically, see how they're doing making sure that they're staked up appropriately. But if they didn't survive, we have the ability to replace that plant for one that's certainly more alive and is likely to do as good or better in that same location. So we don't have attrition through dying of all the hard work that we did to create a dense planting area. We can maintain that.
MM: You can keep it going if the in case there are some losses over time.
CJ: Exactly.
MM: How has NCTC’s trees and forest changed over the time that we've been here.
CJ: As you can imagine, trees grow, they get bigger, they do what trees do which is obviously the goal that we're going for. Now when we do have what they call canopy closure, when those trees get big enough and tall enough and a big enough canopy to start touching one another up in the canopy, then that helps shade out what would then be called the understory. And by doing that we are minimizing any encroachment or introduction of invasive plants or other low growing plants that we wouldn't necessarily want there. We're creating the forest system and over time as those plants get bigger, more mature they start producing seed or acorns and in that process promoting wildlife, you're feeding the critters that rely on that sort of habitat. But then you're also introducing an important part of the process which is succession. What you're doing is you're getting the kids and the grandkids of those trees established and what you're essentially doing is creating a life cycle that you now get to see. Well, I don't know how long we'll be alive to see it over and over but you get to see the process of taking what was essentially an open ground into a more natural force that ecosystem that hopefully if we did our job right feeds itself and you know, regenerates itself.
MM: Almost all regulating.
CJ: Exactly in perpetuity.
MM: Once it matures it can regulate and help control the invasive or undesirable plants growing.
CJ: And the other thing is from a habitat standpoint as trees get bigger you're essentially creating more surface area so you know, bigger trees have more branches which can carry more leaves and from a wildlife standpoint specifically if we're talking about say birding or birds surface area is huge when it comes to having enough habitat for birds at least let's say birds that use trees to come in and utilize that space now whereas before it was just like a two dimensional ground. Now you have this three dimensional space that is now usable by not just birds but any number of those 400 caterpillars.
MM: If someone were to want to plant a tree on their own, what advice would you give them?
CJ: I would say the same thing applies as it does in real estate location, location, location. OK, if you have a location that you're starting with and you know where you want to plant you want to make sure that you have the correct plant for that location or conversely if you have a plant that you know you want to stick in the ground somewhere, make sure that you're not going to have to dig it up in a year or two because you planted it in a spot that isn't the right spot for it. Now what I mean by that is not just is it going to get enough rainfall or is it going to get enough sunlight but also think about what's around it, what might be nearby. If you're in urban setting there are trees that do great around infrastructure, human made things like sidewalks and buildings and then there's trees that would absolutely destroy and devastate infrastructure. You know, it'll bust up sidewalks. There's trees with roots that go they follow piping really they follow moisture. Yeah, as you can imagine. But in a sense that's aggressive and destructful. So know your plant, know the location and make sure that what you're doing is a good fit and not just for the size of the plant now but also really consider what the mature size and space the plant will require or end up being towards the end of its lifespan. If you're planting an oak seedling as you know they get big and they can have a height of eighty or more feet and a span of sixty or more feet. So definitely keep that in mind when you're you know, sticking something in the ground.
MM: Consider your 50 year plan.
CJ: Yeah exactly. Exactly
MM: That is super interesting. I know I really enjoyed learning about trees and tree planting today. Casey, thank you so much for sharing about the important work you and others are doing at NCTC we hope you the listener realize how critically important trees are and consider adding native trees to your property. Thanks for listening to today's podcast.
Thank you for listening to the National Conservation Training Center podcast series. If you have feedback, thoughts or stories you'd like to share, contact us at [email protected]
Thoughts From Home
No full textJoin us on a captivating journey through the skies as we explore the fascinating world of migratory birds. Every year, millions of birds undertake incredible journeys, traveling thousands of miles across continents. However, these majestic creatures face numerous challenges along their migratory routes, including one of the most insidious threats: glass collisions. But there's hope on the horizon. Through innovative strategies like dimming the lights during migration seasons, we are working to mitigate the risk posed by glass collisions.
In our latest podcast episode, “Birds in Flight: Migration and Its Perils," NCTC Outreach Coordinator, Randy Robinson, talks with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, Joelle Gehring and Jo Anna Lutmerding, about bird migration, the perils they face, and how you can do your part to help.
You can find more information about bird collisions at https://ow.ly/vYNO50QIK45 and nighttime lighting at https://ow.ly/WWa450QIK57Welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic SHEPHERDSTOWN, West Virginia and our home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
RR: Welcome to the Thoughts from Home podcast series. We're coming to you from the Home of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Conservation Training Center near Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I'm Randy Robinson, outreach coordinator here at the NCTC. And today we're talking about migratory birds and how we humans can help our feathered friends. We're very happy to have two biologist from the Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Birds Division join us Joelle Gehring and Jo Anna Lutmerding doing welcome to you both and thanks for taking time to chat today.
JG: Thank you, Randy.
RR: Great to have you here. So Joelle, what do we mean when we use the term migratory birds?
JG: Yes, thank you. Well, there are formal definitions but my favorite definition is these birds that migrate long distances and it's to me it's a very inspiring and creates a lot of awe for me to think about these birds, some of which breed north of the Arctic Circle in places that I've never had the opportunity to even see, and they migrate down through Canada and through the United States going through Mexico sometimes over the Gulf of Mexico out over top of some of these oceans and spend their, what we consider to be winters, in warmer places. Some of our migratory birds aren't flying quite that far but they are moving in some northward and southward pattern throughout the year to follow the food sources, to follow the warmth and to continue this full annual cycle of their lives.
RR: It is amazing to even just think about it's kind of mind boggling. But Jo Anna, why do birds migrate? Seems kind of risky for such little birds, hummingbirds and so on. Why do they migrate and what can we learn by observing the birds that go these great distances?
JL: Thank you for that question. And to start with I'd just like to say that we see birds everywhere and all the time and every season but we don't always see the same ones and that's because of migration. So for example in our yards around our homes Year-Round we may see our resident species cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers, crows and so these are species that have learned to adapt to an area year round and they may only need to move very short distances. But then as the seasons change we start to see new characters coming and going. So for example, in the winter we are having birds show up that breed in northern parts of Canada and they have adapted to resources that are available even in the mid-Atlantic places like Maryland where I live that are available all winter and so they can take advantage of those whereas other species, they have adapted to resources that are really dependent on the longer days, the warmer weather and so they are the ones who migrate the longer distances so they can take advantage of insects, flowers with nectar, fruits, seeds that they're going to need to survive. So it's been a really amazing product of millions of years of evolution and species evolving to take advantage of the changing daily different availability of resources. And it's just really amazing to get to turn our attention to that. And if we pay attention across the seasons seeing these species change even from the windows of our home, we can observe these changes throughout the year and birds teach us many things. As someone who loves birds I look to birds for beauty. We can catch glimpses of them when they're migrating a flash of color in a tree or a bit of song or a call when we step out of our home. And so it's a way for us to connect with the world around us and how beautiful it is and speaking of connection, they also teach us that we're connected to them, that we are all connected. They link us across the world, across really vast landscapes but also that what we do matters to them. So it's a reminder that our actions affect them as much as their beauty and song can affect us. And so it's a very intertwined connection that is really important for us to to value.
RR: I love to see the birds out even in the wintertime. See that little flash of color here, that little song, it always makes your day when you hear that or see that. But migration is pretty amazing phenomenon. Well, how do birds migrate? And I've learned that they often migrate at night, is that correct?
JG: Yes, it's incredible. And when I think about how to get from NCTC into Washington, D.C. or wherever we're going, I need a GPS and I just hope I have cell service to get me through that full navigation of a commute. These birds are hatched and within months they are embarking within months of hatching they are embarking on an incredible journey. They don't have GPS, they don't have cell phones. They can even use a paper map or phone a friend. They are using stellar constellations. They're using magnetic fields of the earth, polarization of light along the horizon sometimes they are using landmarks such as the Mississippi River or the Potomac if they get really confused sometimes they're using sunrise or sunset. They're using all of these various tools that we are surrounded by all the time and may not notice but they're using those to navigate long distances and we're not just talking from Wisconsin to Mexico. We are saying they are migrating from potentially their nest site all the way down to a particular area in Central America, South America, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and then going all the way back up to that same specific spot. That's how refined it is. I get goosebumps and I think about it and it's an incredible feat and they're doing all of this as Jo Anna mentioned, we are surrounded by it all the time and some of us may see it but not truly see it and we may hear it but not necessarily listen for it and it's a beautiful way to connect with our planet and these are incredibly special birds and they're all around us all the time when we go take our kids to soccer practice or we take out the garbage or we walk the dog or when we sleep at night these birds are all around us and they are indeed migrating at night. You mentioned Randy and that is another magnificent and mysterious thing that how could we know they're there? How can we connect with them that way? We have several different ways that I'll let Jo Anna talk to you about but it's an incredible feat that is indeed happening at night. Why at night? You know, it could have something to do with trying to avoid predation. Weather patterns tend to be a little bit more still at night and it's just something that they've they've evolved to do over time and these are birds that have the same kind of vision that we do overall. Their night vision is not necessarily excellent for most of those species. It's not a whole lot better than ours. But they can somehow use these stellar constellations in these nighttime climates to have mass blankets of migratory birds over top of us in the spring in the fall.
RR: So Jo Anna, can we see those birds migrate or how can we do that? What's the best way to to observe them?
JL: Well, something that's also amazing about nocturnal migration is that you can observe it just by stepping outside and looking at the moon on a spring or fall night when migration is occurring. And it's interesting because this is something that also connects us through time so this is something that our human ancestors could have done and may have done as well to step out on clear night look at the moon and actually you can see the silhouettes of birds flying in front of the moon and it's a really magical experience as well as you might imagine. And if you listen, you can also hear them communicating with each other. So when they're flying in these flocks they are chirping quite a bit and some of those chirps are even distinctive. You can tell what species of bird it is by that chirp so you can also train your ear to identify some of these species when they're moving overhead at night. So very easy you don't have to have special equipment to get to witness this in that regard so anyone can do it. And another thing that is now available to everyone is this incredible online tool called Bird Cast. So this uses weather radar and our understanding of cues for migration to actually predict when birds are going to be moving at night and estimate of how many are going to be moving and then when the migration is actually occurring, this website will track the movements in real time and so you can set up alerts on this website and you can be told up to three days in advance that hey, on Tuesday night there might be five hundred million birds flying over the US that night and then you could go back Wednesday morning and actually see how many were observed through the weather radar and sometimes the an underestimate. So there was one night where they thought there might be seven hundred million birds and then the next morning they estimated there were actually over a billion birds that had migrated the night before. When you just think about that volume it's hard to imagine and it's all happening while we're sleeping for the most part most of us and just this phenomenon magical thing happening with these birds why a couple of ounces and are able to fly through the night without stopping? All while we're resting so it's a wonderful tool, Bird cast. I hope that our listeners can check it out.
RR: It is mind boggling to think about those birds in those numbers but I know those journeys are dangerous even just with natural means getting lost along the way. But we have a lot of human caused problems that we put in their way. Joelle, could you talk a little bit about glass is especially bad for birds.
JG: Yes. So the glass is a challenge for birds year round but especially during migration when we have birds entering into areas that they may not have been before and Jo Anna and I are runners. We know that when you we've never run all night. But if we did we know that when we got done we'd be hungry and tired and need a safe place to rest and refuel so that we could do it again the following night or in a couple nights later during migration. We have birds that are already exhausted and vulnerable and tired and they may be landing in our yards next to our dental offices next to wherever our schools and they are a little vulnerable that time to end. It's possibly in a new place. They're not familiar with it and they don't see glass the way we do. So we look at a building and we see a wall with a square hole in it or a rectangular hole we think must be glass. They don't view the world that way and they also seem to be confused by reflections in glass as well. So we've seen reflections on our windows and on big shiny buildings. Looks like there's vegetation or sky but we know it's glass. Birds don't understand that and so they often fly into glass and it causes a fatal collision. Although many birds appear to fly away and I myself have picked up birds that have hit my glass and tried to keep them safe before releasing them. I know now since I've done that that most of those birds unfortunately do not survive unless they're taken to a qualified rehabilitator who can help them give them the services that they need and then they can fly on their way hopefully. But most of most of those birds are not receiving any medical care and most of them are unfortunate fatalities even if they initially fly away. So the most important thing is to stop it from happening. Birds are more likely to collide with windows near bird feeders or concentrating birds maybe in our yards we love feeding birds. I do. But those windows are then at higher risk for causing a bird collision. As many as one billion birds a year are colliding with glass and that's a hard, heavy number to hear. But we have solutions and that's where Jo Anna and I like to focus on is solutions. We all like the windows in our homes and we love birds and we are happy to say that there are solutions that all of us can partake and they're easy, inexpensive and they're diverse in appearance. Some of those solutions actually save us money as well. I've in the past you know, I've said oh we'll put up a hawk silhouette or I'll put up a few glass decals or that kind of a plastic UV decal, I wish those worked but they don't and there just aren't enough birds still will fly between those and they don't see it as a hawk silhouette. They see it as a black blob and they will fly next to it below it, above it whatever they'll fly into the glass anyway. But what's most important is yes stuff on the glass to let the birds know needs to be on the outside of the glass and it needs to be in about a two inch by two inch pattern or something like that so birds will try to sneak through a bigger pattern than that but a two inch by two inch pattern seems to be fine for them and it really significantly reduces those bird collisions and this is becoming more and more important to people around more and more people are noticing bird collisions and jumping on this bandwagon which is not just a bandwagon. It is a valuable thing to do. It is an immediate results. So what are they doing? Most of these collisions are occurring at homes and low rise buildings, not necessarily even the taller buildings and they're using products that are maybe a dot pattern that goes on the external surface of the glass. Some people are using a film like bus Wrap that you might see that has a different look to it then the pattern. Some people are using a paracord curtain so paracord hanging down every three inches or so. Some people are just going with something simple and nice like a tempura paint which washes off with vinegar and as long as they paint a pattern on the outside surface of the glass that somehow replicates with no spaces bigger than two inches the birds will not fly through. Needs to be on the outside and it needs to be in about a two inch by two inch pattern. I know my mom one of her windows was causing a lot of collisions. I heard she loves to feed the birds. She's eighty two and during the pandemic she became increasingly more aware of the bird fatalities that she was causing the birds that she loves and I'll be honest she didn't quite tell me how many birds are colliding over there faster but you know how it is with moms so so she she's she would start telling you I'm getting serious about these collisions in this kind of bothering me and I'm hanging all these is window son things and the inside of my window is just not helping and those were on the inside of the glass the birds it was not helping reduce bird collisions. So I said let me fix it. So the first warm day that I was over there visiting her, I put up a pattern and worked beautifully and she said, you know, I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to see out my window. I thought this don't put anything on my glass, Joel that I'm not be able to see out my window and look at my birds and that people are going to think my house looks crazy. She was concerned about that but she's never been happier with the solution and she's thrilled and now she shares it with her family and friends. She's bringing brochures and handing it out and they're applying this to their glass and people feel good about and people are excited and they know they've had this issue for a long time and it's eaten away at them a bit. But there's a solution and t's not hard and it's not expensive and it is an immediate benefit to these birds that have been part of our culture for a long time. As Jo Anna was saying, my mom also tells me when the Orioles arrive in the spring when the sandhill cranes arrive and I think it's when the sandhill cranes arrive that she can get her sandals out and that's that it's a part of her life. Birds are part of her life as they are for many of us.
RR: That's awesome. I had a similar experience during the pandemic. You know, we're inside all day and you hear it when the bird gets kind of a sickening sound. You don't want to hear that thump. I got tired of that. There weren't a lot but there were once too many. Yeah. And so I tried something a little bit different. You mentioned parachute cord so I went online and figured out how to make a what they call a Zen curtain.
JG: Yes.
RR: Which is simply vertical white cord hanging down about every three inches and I did it myself. It was cheap. And it works.
JG: Yes it does.
RR: I have not, it was maybe three years ago, and I don't think there there's been a bird hit since then. One of the cool things is that if there's a little bit of a breeze they actually move. And it breaks up the reflection. So that's a simple do it yourself kind of remedy. I think we all want to help birds.
JG: I made two of those curtains as well, Randy. And I made them with my son while we were watching a movie and it was fun and hung it up and immediately eliminated bird collisions with those windows next to my bird feeders that I had been experiencing many collisions with and it was fun and there are different options with different esthetics, different costs. There are opportunities out there and you are not alone in seeing an increase in collisions when you were spending more time at home you are part of a bigger community that saw these issues happening more when you were at home and wanted to make a difference and in the past three or four years we have seen a significant increase in the number of people doing this. So you were part of a larger community, Randy, you and I and you too. You treated your windows as well, Jo Anna. In the last several years and we are part of a growing community that wants to make a difference.
RR: That's great. So Jo Anna, there's something else that we can do in many cases fairly simple as turning off a light switch. So tell us about how light affects birds.
JL: Yeah. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about light and that is a focus of mine is working to address light pollution which is increasing globally that we may not all realize just how bright our towns and cities have become the sky glow that is around us and how little now when we step outside, if we look up on what is typically a clear night, how many stars we can or can't see so we are losing visibility of our night skies compared to what we've had in the past. And this is another thing that connects us through time and it's only been in about the last hundred years that we have so much light at night and prior to that it was a very common experience. Someone this week even said it was probably the most common shared experience among humans through human history is to be able to step out of your home at night and look up and see a blanket of stars rise today you may look up and see maybe one hundred stars whereas in the past you may have seen thousands and so that's affecting us but it is also affecting birds. So and birds are migrating at night like we talked about earlier, they are using the stars to navigate than otherwise a dark sky. But now the Earth's surface is very well lit and that is something that's very new when you think about animals that have existed for millions of years. So they are now reacting to that light. It disorients them but it also draws them into the light so they are attracted to lit structures, towers, buildings, parking lots, roadways anything that has a light can disorient and attract a bird to it. And then what we observe is that once these birds are drawn to these areas is that they can't escape so they get trapped there and they may circle a tower or a building endlessly exhausting themselves. So all of that energy that they saved up to run or fly that marathon through the night is now being used around this building and so they're not making their targets where they had intended to land the next day now is going to wind up being very far away from where they are winding up because they are drawn into these lit areas and then this shortens their migration. They may stop over and then we start to see the impacts of the glass that Joelle just talked about. So these birds are now in these areas where there are a lot of buildings, a lot of glass, a lot of homes that increases th
Conservationists In Action
No full textHalfway between Hawaii and American Samoa lies the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. Palmyra consists of a circular string of about 26 islets nestled among several lagoons and encircled by 15,000 acres of shallow turquoise reefs and deep blue submerged reefs. It is the northernmost atoll in the Line Islands of the equatorial Pacific.
Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge was established in 2001, by the Secretary of the Interior. In 2009, the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was established. Palmyra Atoll is one of seven National Wildlife Refuges within the Marine National Monument. Only Palmyra is open for public visitation.
The Monument represents one of the last frontiers of scientific discovery in the world and is a safe haven for Central Pacific biodiversity. The Monument and the national wildlife refuges within it protect entire ecosystems – from coral reefs to deep seamounts, abyssal plains, and volcanic features.
In this episode of Conservationists in Action, Randy Robinson talks with Ryan Hagerty, Senior Video Producer and Regional Diving Safety Officer, about his experience working with the dive team on a pilot project to control the invasive crown-of-thorns starfish and prevent an outbreak on the remote Palmyra Atoll
Thoughts From Home
No full textSome creepy crawly and misunderstood wildlife offer a lot of benefits to our environment. In Part 2 of the Creepy Crawly and Misunderstood Wildlife podcast, the team talks about skunks, opossums, and snakes and their important ecoservices.
Skunks, opossums and snakes are some of the most efficient and effective natural pest controllers! Snakes keep prey populations in balance. The skunk's charm is in their adaptive and versatile diet, which includes insects, grubs, mice and more. Killing up to 5,000 ticks in a season, opossums are friends in eradicating ticks!!♫ You're welcome to Thoughts from Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia and our home to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Throughout this series we'll be talking with experts, authors and a variety of other guests to bring you the most up to date information, events and happenings here at the National Conservation Training Center. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy. ♫
Introduction: My name is Catherine Woodward and I work at the National Conservation Training Center as a Fish and wildlife biologist and today I am joined by our podcast team Jim Siegel, Mike McAllister and Roxanne May to talk about creepy crawly misunderstood wildlife on this chilly autumn day. So October and November they're a beautiful time when the days get shorter, the leaves turn to warm use the fall rolls in to stay through the morning and the harvest moon hangs bright in the night sky and the critters come out most of the time people can go day to day paying no attention to the wildlife around them and maybe they have a serious fear or phobia of certain species. But we want to draw attention to some important ecological services of multiple animals that you're perhaps more familiar with from a close encounter driving down a country road having found them lurking in your garage messing with garbage cans or trying to hibernate the winter away in your attic. So there's many animals out there that get a bad rep. Maybe they're less charismatic and more mysterious. Maybe they're mostly misunderstood spiders, bats, raccoons, possums, skunks and so many more critters that are often characterized as creepy crawly and maligned are underappreciated and underrated and we're here to shed some positive light on their are many benefits to us and to our personal property how they help manage pests in our yards, our gardens and homes and more broadly in our entire ecosystem. So the next animal on our list is the stinky skunk definitely one of the most smelliest animals out there with a powerful scent glands. These are some of the animals you should keep your distance from for good reason. Jim, do you know how far they can spray like or how powerful their spray is?
Jim: They don't generally spread very, very far. You know that they're saving that to protect themselves from being eaten and so they're not spraying it long distances. I'm not sure of actually how long can be sprayed but typically it's it's just relatively inches and a foot. They're not spraying it long distances like across a basketball court but they are using this to defend their lives and so it has been a very successful evolutionary feature that keeps most predators from attacking a skunk. So the typical Wolf or fox or feline like a like a bobcat will not bother a skunk but something like a great highland owl which doesn't worry about the smell of the odor will take skunks. So that's an interesting feature about them. Skunks are also, like a raccoon, are very important in our environment. I mean they eat a lot of mice. They eat a lot of insects. They also like a raccoon will eat the carcasses of small animals so they do clean up our environment. They do eat a little bit of plant matter, particularly various kinds of fruits and a little bit of grain. But mostly they're eating small animals.
Roxanne: I have a question for you and it's going back to their smell. So we have a skunk that lives at the back of our yard because we live next to a field. So whenever I'm taking Lucy out at night I can smell the skunk so we're not out there near it. But why does it emit that smell that the scent, just keep animals away?
Jim: You know, skunks are marking their territory like a dog bite and so that's the main value of the scent of a skunk is marking their territory to tell other skunks that this territory is occupied. It isn't just to protect them from predators. They are marking their environment, declaring it occupied not unlike a dog, a male dog, peeing on a fire hydrant. Yeah, it's very much like that. And so you might be smelling that you're smelling where the skunk has traveled and marking its environment. Unfortunately, you know, skunk sometimes are being hit by cars and so the odor often lingers for quite a long time and so that sometimes is happening and they get frightened by predators. They will spray and it lingers in the environment for quite a long time. And so it's kind of a combination of those things. But mostly it's they're marking their environment so that where you're smelling the odor.
Catherine: So Jim, is that different from them spraying?
Jim: It's different than they're spraying in that when they spray their totally releasing their scent glands and so that it will take many days maybe over a week to gather up enough internal juices to create more scent and so they're kind of letting it all hang out when they spray to protect their lives.
Catherine: Yeah, I was reading how they're actually mild tempered and they don't spray unless they have to and like there when they are about to spray they like stomp their feet and they arched their tail up and some of them can stand just to kind of like ward away to defend themselves. What do we do if we do get sprayed or if we run over a skunk and have that terrible smell? Do you know like a cure? Is it soaking in a tub of tomato juice?
Jim: You know what? I don't know how you get your entire car to tomato juice but there are certain kinds of soaps that are sent cutting. You know, there's a couple of different products that I have seen people use the tomato juice on a dog or a cat that has gotten involved with a skunk. It works a little bit. I don't think it works great but there are products that you can buy various kinds of fat cutting soaps that will neutralize the skunk smell and you know, after a couple of days it usually goes away. But if you're a dog or cat gets into a skunk, it needs to be cleaned pretty well. You know, with the products that are available, the tomato juice is not the perfect product to do that.
Roxanne: Yeah, I'm waiting for that to happen in our yard.
Jim: I had a friend whose dog is to get into a skunk like once a week and it was just crazy. I mean it never learned. It never learned.
Mike: I've almost tripped skunks before in my yard by Harpers Ferry and they're pretty tolerant. I move a lot quicker than they do and I I've never gotten sprayed but I've had three encounters last year and they're pretty tolerant I will say but I never want to find the limit.
Jim: I have caught skunks in live traps where you know the cage traps where they walk in and the door closes behind them and if you open the cage trap very slowly they don't spray you so you got to just keep calm and just, you know, talk to the skunk in a nice way and just move slowly. You can open up the have heart trap and release the skunk. It's not very hard actually.
Catherine: Yeah, I was reading it said if you're confronted by a skunk just have a slow quiet retreat away from the skunk. But I also found out Clark River National Wildlife Refuge in Kentucky several years ago they had a skunk that didn't have their scent glands anymore and they used beedi that was her name as a educational animal. But anyway so they recommended pine and cedar scent to cut that odor of the skunk so if anybody wants to know try and use pine and cedar and hopefully that will help cut the odor.
Jim: So pine sol you know a product like that might cut some of the odor.
Catherine: Mike do we want to move on to the next animal? Oppossums?
Mike: Sure possums easily hit the mark when it comes to misunderstood animals. Jim, can you share some more on possums?
Jim: Well possums are interesting is there are only North American marsupial which means that there are very ancient kind of mammal that give birth to a very very immature animal that then crawls into a pouch and attaches to a and lives suckling milk for a number of months before it grows into a more normal size baby as it were. And opossums often have 10, 12 babies at a time even up to 20 though a lot of times they don't all survive and they all sit in a pouch for a number of months before they grow large enough that they can walk around in the environment or typically they hang on to their mothers backs and they walk with their mother through the environment. It's amazing to see a mother opossum covered with her babies holding on. They have a prehensile tail which means that helps them to climb trees. They have an enormous amount of small teeth there are very primitive kind of teeth all very pointed but short and they're pretty harmless. They kind of look like a giant rat but actually a very harmless animal. They are so harmless to mice and they aren't so harmless to insects but they are pretty harmless to people.
Catherine: So Jim, you talked about the tail. The tail is very interesting part of the possum so it helps it climb up trees. Does it serve they can they can wrap their tail around the trunks of trees and the branches of trees to help stabilize themselves and a small opossum a small one could even hang from its tail at least for a moment where typically an adult opossum if it's heavy enough will not be able to hang from its tail but they can stabilize themselves using their tail.
Catherine: Yeah, we have indoor outdoor cats where I grew up that and my parents are outside in their yard and so we'll have cat food outside sometimes or like a tuna can or whatever and the possums will come and just sit right there on the porch staring into the kitchen windows. They are the freakiest things but I guess they're just after that cat food and it can just smell the cats around. So anyway, it's always freaky they are like large rats. You're right. That is a weird image.
Jim: I’ve seen them direct with cats and usually they don't hurt each other but they do hiss at each other so the cat hisses at the opossum and the opossum hisses back in its own way but they're pretty harmless and they generally don't fight with cats and dogs.
Roxanne: So it sounds like they're good animals to have around. Right?
Jim: They eat a lot of mice. They eat a lot of insect pests in the gardens. But one of the most interesting things that they do is when a possums are walking around in the environment they pick up a lot of ticks something like five thousand ticks a year will attach to the opossum. Opossums are very good at cleaning their fur and they lick all those ticks off and eat them so they are eliminating ticks from the environment by eating them off of their own bodies. So unlike a deer and a rabbit that sometimes can't remove the ticks, opossums are very good at grooming themselves and they're actually very clean animals in their way in that they're constantly licking themselves like a cat and cleaning their fur and cleaning their flesh and their ears and they're removing every tick and eating them. So that's something that they do that's very important.
Catherine: So, they're actively fighting against Lyme disease. That definitely gives me a deeper appreciation.
Jim: So yes, you should appreciate them more because each opossum that you see is eliminating up to about five thousand ticks year.
Catherine: Yeah, that's huge. Let's move on to our last critter and talk about the snakes and more specifically black rat snakes.
Jim: Well, there's about 50 species of snakes in the United States but a lot of times people worry about poisonous snakes and it is a significant there for different kinds of poisonous snakes of these 50 different species. So the rattlesnakes as a group, the Copperhead is a group, the Cottonmouth is a group and then the coral snakes which are actually pretty rare but a fourth group of snakes. But most of the snakes that we have in our environment are not venomous and so that's important to know. You know, people say what's a difference? How can you tell them? All the venomous snakes have the elliptical pupil? Those are like the slit eyes like a cat. Many of the poisonous snakes have a triangular and broad and coral snake does not but many of them do. Rattlesnakes have a rattle on their tail and all of the poisonous snakes have a heat pit between the nose and eye which if you look at a rattlesnakes face between its nostril and its eye you can see the pit very, very well. So those are pit vipers. So the cottonmouth, the rattlesnake, the Copperhead are pit vipers so they have a pit on base that you can see very clear and so that's non-venomous snakes don't have those pits. Generally non-venomous snakes do not have they don't have elliptical eyes, don't have triangular heads and so that's an important characteristic. Reason why I mention black rat snakes here is that's probably the most common big snake that people are seeing in around their homes and their gardens and obviously a lot of people see garter snakes and other small snakes. But I think the black rat snakes are often the most common snake that we see in our area here in the eastern panhandle. They're large sometimes up to five feet long and they grow to great sizes. They can live many years up to ten or fifteen years and they grow like I mentioned they grow to a big size and they're very, very imposing looking. Why are we finding these in near our homes in our gardens is that we have mice and rats near our homes and gardens and a lot of grace walls in our homes and gardens and that's what these black rat snakes are feeding on. So if we find them in our garage we probably have mice in our garage as well. We're finding them in our basements in our attics. We are probably having mice in those basement and attics as well. So they are filling a very important role of eating these rodents from around our homes and gardens and into the greater environment. So eating meadow moles, they're eating deer mice, they're eating small squirrels, the young of squirrels and they are eating some eggs of some of the of the birds they feed on that as well.
Roxanne: You know, I have a question because like I said earlier, I live in between fields so we see a lot of mice running through the yard and just all kinds of wild critters. But we have black snakes out here too and I've seen them close to my house and I freak out of course, you know a bunch of babies, you know, going to my sidewalk. So I've been worried about that that they were going to get in my house. If it does get in my house, I mean what do I do? How do I get him out because that's one of the creepy crawly fear things. I mean I'm scared of snakes, you know? So how would I move that to the field?
Jim: Right. It's you know, if you have snakes getting into your house though the way the snakes are getting in is the same way that the mice are getting into your house. So all the ways that you close off a house to mice will also close off the house to snakes. And so that's what you have to think about if you find a snake in your house carefully try to get it to crawl into a garbage pail or something like that kind of container and then take it outside. If you can get brave enough you can grab them with your hands with a gloved hand and grab them and put them very quickly into a garbage can or other closed container and take them outside and release them away from your home. You can get bitten by a black snake. Won't make much of it in my next question will it bite me and hold? Well, it will try it will often try to bite you and that's why I recommend wearing a good glove you know, a good leather glove or a garden glove that's thick. They will try to bite you and it isn't a serious bite. But why get bitten by a snake if you don't have to? I can get certain kinds of snake tongues if you have to deal with this issue a lot. There are at various kinds of garden places you can buy equipment that can pick up a snake and a snake tong or a snake stick that you can pick snakes up carefully. But I think you might want to avoid the whole thing altogether by clogging all the holes that might come into your house and into your garage or into your shed patching all those holes the mice don't get in. That's the main way that you're going to keep black rat snakes out of your house.
Catherine: Mike, do you have any snake stories from an on campus?
Mike: We get several calls the summer to remove snakes out of our hallways or entryways especially people will prop a door open because a building might be too warm and then the snakes of course are attracted to the warmth or the sunlight on the stone or something and they'll sneak in but it's pretty low not a whole lot of problem. I was when I first moved here a couple of years ago I was cleaning the oven. I had the oven on auto clean and so it was really hot and I had left my basement access door open just entering the new house out and I came upstairs and a snake and literally our black snake it literally climbed my stairwell from the basement and found my oven and was just hanging out in front of the really hot oven. That was a learning experience for sure about being in West Virginia and having an open door in the middle of the summer. It was better than having a brown bear walk in in Alaska, you know.
Jim: So one of the things that black rat snakes often used is they often lay their eggs in mulch piles in your garden so people have a garden mulch and a nice compost pile of garden waste and house waste. They often lay their eggs in the mulch piles and so you may in you know, at the end of a couple of months have 10-12 baby rats snakes coming out by the way, a baby rat snake isn't black. It kind of looks like a little rat snakes without the rattle. It's a very thin snake with with kind of a chainmail kind of pattern on its back of triangles and other colors. So it almost looks like a little rattlesnake but without the rattle and without the right type of head. So that's where it's different. It takes them a couple of years to get a full black color.
Catherine: Well that is our short list of creepy crawly misunderstood wildlife. Thanks Jim for your expertise and everybody for the conversation and stories told and walking us through the short list of animals and their critical role to the environment. We hope you guys can take away some of the information shared with you and tell others to with all the negative connotations and attitudes towards these animals it makes it more difficult to advocate for their protection and conservation. It's challenging to gain support on species that people can't relate to or have a connection with like a cuddly beautiful widely celebrated creature. I hope you enjoyed listening to our flip on the narrative. So next time when you see one of these animals instead of letting the negative feelings creep in or your fears start to scare you, let's focus on the good and grow our understanding on all that these creatures do for us.
♫ Thank you for listening to the National Conservation Training Center podcast series. If you have feedback, thoughts or stories you'd like to share, contact us at NCTC underscore podcast at FWS dot gov.
Thoughts From Home
No full textPart 2: The World of Electrofishing, Far-flung Adventures, and Studying the Hammer. After a legendary career as a fisheries biologist at the NCTC, Dr. Temple finally hung up his waders and traded his nets for retirement. However, he did not leave without making a lasting impact! Even in retirement, he continues to influence tomorrow's fisheries practitioners. With a career focused on teaching others, Dr. Temple is still dedicated to training the next generation of biologists in the art and science of electrofishing. Sharing his expertise around the world, he is widely regarded as an innovator in this field. From his early days of deciding his future to his later role as a fish and wildlife technical expert, we capture his story here.Welcome to thoughts From Home, your conservation podcast from the National Conservation Training Center. We're located along the Potomac River in historic Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and are home to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
Cecilia Melton
Welcome to the thought From Home podcast series. I'm Cecilia Melton from NCTC. In this episode we're talking with Doctor Alan Temple, a retired NCTC course leader, an expert in electrofishing. You might be wondering, what is electrofishing? Alan, could you tell us a little bit about what electrofishing is?
Alan Temple
Well, it is, it's a very simplistic notion. Electrofishing is an application of electricity into water to capture fish or control fish. And it's also used for other animal types sized fish, frogs, crayfish, aquatic insects and that sort of thing. So yeah, YouTube actually, I wanna mention YouTube is a really good source if you wanted to see different...
Cecilia Melton
Wanted to learn about it?
Alan Temple
Some of them not so good. So yeah, a lot. There's a whole range of stuff.
Cecilia Melton
So, for electrofishing. I know there's different ways to deliver it, backpack, boats, barges. How do you decide?
Alan Temple
Well you know backpack gear, boat gear and, barge electrofishing gear are three of the main types in the U.S. anyway. But there are a lot more different styles. There's remote shocking. There's other ways, electric seines, etc. so I just want to first say there is a bigger world out there to choose from. But just looking at those three major gear types, the first thing is depth of water like size of the stream, or if it's a lake. And so if you can't wait it, then barges are out and backpacks are out. So we use boats. If you can wade in there in the streams, or in the shoreline lake, then you could use a backpack. But backpacks are typically more for smaller streams. Now, if the stream is wider, often times people add a backpack every 3 to 5m. You know they'll be side by side, going down.
Cecilia Melton
Cover the whole.
Alan Temple
To cover the width of the stream. But usually that's not as effective as a barge where you have multiple, electrodes that go out and it's another skill set to use a barge, but they can be, much more effective than backpacks in larger streams. Also, if the connectivity is higher, say you're doing the little coastal drainages in Florida and that kind of thing, you need more power. And a barge has the same power levels or close to a boat so much more powerful than a backpack. So if you need more power for typically for high conductivity reason, for whatever, you know, larger systems or something like that, then you you go with the barge.
Cecilia Melton
Okay. So depends on the conditions of the water.
Alan Temple
And it depends upon the size of the water, the depth of water, the width water. And like you said, the water chemistry or the conductivity, you know, and yeah.
Cecilia Melton
So I think maybe some of the listeners might be wondering, are you killing fish?
Alan Temple
Certainly can.
Cecilia Melton
And that goes back to various.
Alan Temple
Certainly. Sorry. Yeah. Check the YouTube. It certainly can. In fact, electrofishing is used to kill zebra mussels and water intake structures. There's been, invasive carps that have been killed, you know, electric barriers, killing eggs have been tried for invasive species to kill eggs with electricity. And, you do, you can have mortality for sure, but typically, most of the time, a fisheries biologist will want to minimize trauma injuries, stress, mortality, you know, to the to their sampling. And that is where the electrical concepts like fishing concepts and training, and experience come in to play.
Cecilia Melton
You have to know what you're doing.
Alan Temple
Yeah. The experience is a huge teacher, but boy, you got to wrap there into the concept somewhere with training. Yep.
Cecilia Melton
So how does this technique help biologists?
Alan Temple
Well, oftentimes and not always, but often you have to have the fish in hand to get the data you need to make fisheries management decisions. So if you're doing fish movement studies or population estimation studies, you might need the to have the fish so you can tag them. Okay. You know, put a tag on so you can recognize them later. For population management you need to make measurements oftentimes and collect maybe a sample scale. So you're doing you know age and growth, size structure, relative abundance, condition survival rates. To get all that information you need to have the fish in hand. So that's for fisheries management. And there's also a section with fisheries biologist do that is dealing with assessing aquatic integrity of streams or lakes. And that requires getting a sample obtaining fish. So you know you know what species you have. And that usually requires capture and counting. The getting relative a bunch of species you catch you know for making biotic assessments.
Cecilia Melton
Okay. And before electrofishing was invented and developed, how did biologists study fish populations.
Alan Temple
Well that's a great question. And so usually in the northern hemisphere except for Australia, but and especially United states to and Canada, that electrofishing is such a common technique that we forget that really it's just a smaller piece of the pie of the total universe, pie universe of fishery sampling years. And most of that involves nets, angling, and weirs.
Cecilia Melton
Okay.
Alan Temple
And so nets are things like trawls and entanglement gears like gillnets and trammel nets, hoop nets, entrapment. Oh, entanglement gear, trap gear like lobster traps, you know, for instance, minnow traps. Also, like I said, angling. And that may be trout lines, anything with a hook, aligned with a hook or typical fishing type stuff is you, you know, rod and reel type use. And the weirs I mentioned before, those are kind of like a dam or a barrier to fish movement that directs them in to kind of a trap. And so that and that's still used. I mean, electrofishing is only, like I said, a piece of the pie. And it may be the most efficient gear to use in a particular situation, or it may not be in these other gears come in to play even now.
Cecilia Melton
So I know fish biologists are still using all those gears that you just mentioned. So, electrofishing would complement those years or be used in areas where those other gears will not be used.
Alan Temple
Yes. And so, for instance, electrofishing is more usually a shallow water technique even with boats. So say you had a lake and you wanted to assess a fish population that might be more pelagic or out in the middle of the lake and might also be near shore. So you might use electrofishing in near shore, but then you might use entanglement gears like a gillnet, out in the deeper water. So, so maybe you're looking at, in a big reservoir and you have, striped bass. You're not gonna electrofish striped bass the most part. They're going to be in the middle of the lake, and you're going to have to use entanglement gear, for that, for instance. Or crappie in the fall the real deep. And you can't get to them to electrofishing. You use trap, now for that.
Cecilia Melton
Makes sense.
Alan Temple
Yeah.
Cecilia Melton
And, so could you tell us a little bit? I know you've been involved with electrofishing for a very long time, and I would like to know a little bit about the development of the electrofishing techniques. And in the US and in other parts of the world as well.
Alan Temple
Well, I have to say that, you know, believe it or not, there's been published articles on the history of electrofishing, you know, a worldwide basis. And surprisingly, the dirt I guess to like that. But I got a lot of interesting. So yes, there was a great worldwide effort. And in fact, France, Germany and Russia contributed quite, quite a bit. They work kind of separately, but all the way back into the 1800s. So the first person to apply for a patent into electrofishing was a guy by the name of Isham Bags, and he was English in 1863, 1863. And he applied for a patent. He was going to use a battery, but the batteries at the time weren't powerful enough to, you know, to to be able to catch a fish. So with the second Industrial Revolution or the, you know, around World War One motor derived electricity was developed in the stationary station. So now, we did have enough power to capture fish. So in the 20s in the United States, but particularly more in the 30s and 40s, there was portable equipment that was developed. World War two saw major advances in portable equipment. But even before that, in the 30s, there was development in the United States, in what was called an electric seine which is basically a herding type of gear where you herd net fish to another net, but it's got droppers. And at that time it actually had a net with it. That's why I call it electric seine. Now there's electric seines that don't have nets. But you know, but yeah electric seines. And they also developed a handheld anode or electrode actually. And those were powered by generators that sat on shore next to the strange shore base shocking.
Cecilia Melton
So you had to be very restricted area where you can do it.
Alan Temple
Yeah. I mean, you it was more cumbersome, but you could move the generator equipment and we still have that today, it's call shore base shocking. And we still have electric seines today. But that's the first development. And there was one called the guard destroyer, which was sort of this barge somebody built. Colonel Burr built in the 30s, you know, and so but people were working on, you know, it was basically the portability was the big question. And World War Two really push that because of the development of portable generator for use in the field during the war. So that was used by these GI's that came back, you know, in fisheries in the U.S. and so in the 50s pulsw something called an electrical wave form really specific to electrofishing called pulsed DC. Your houses are alternating current AC and your batteries are DC. But this is a pulsing, electrically derived, pulsing DC. That was unique and that was developed mostly for portability. Because you didn't need heavy battery, you needed less power. So that was developed in in the 50s, the first electrofishing boat was developed in the 50s. That really served as the basis in the 50s. So I mean, we're not talking that terribly long ago.
Cecilia Melton
No, not too long.
Alan Temple
In the 1960s, we had safer, a little more reliable equipment because commercial development started in 60s. Some companies came in at that time. There was an international symposium on electrofishing concepts in the 60s, in the 70s, or as refinement of equipment and techniques. I also want to say that, you know, safety was not given a lot and neither was electrical output. It was kind of a black box, if you will know, you know. And that continued for a long time. But there were slowly improvements in the safety aspect and in the electrical output aspect, which is good for, you know, standardized standards. So we know what we're outputting. And that sort of thing. But the 80s, you know, that there was an emphasis on quantitative sampling. There was an emphasis on fish injury, really came to boar... to bear. Then, you know, how do we minimize fish injury in the 80s? And then finally, Fish and Wildlife Service had a very big, a massive contribution in the 80s with the development of the power transfer theory of electrofishing by Larry Kolz and Jim Reynolds to people that were Fish and Wildlife Service at the time, and both of them NCTC electrofishing after that. But Larry was a theoretician, an engineer and, in the late 80s, early 90s that that served as the basis for our standardized sampling, you know, which is still there till today. Yeah. To till today, where we're improving that, improving our use of that basis. Yeah.
Cecilia Melton
And you were somehow part of it to write the application of these techniques in the US.
Alan Temple
Yeah. I came in, the early 90s and got in with Jim Reynolds and Larry Kolz and kind of was a disciple of theirs, I guess, more than anything. And yes. And learned that way.
Cecilia Melton
So you get involved. But you were first leaving courses with them and you got very interested in the topic, and you started working with them.
Alan Temple
Yeah. You know, the discussions were always important. And then people coming in, taking the courses and this is true today that, you know, and that's a great thing about continuing education is you're not usually teaching folks with zero background in something, you know, and so they have their own experience they can bring to bear. And that makes it a much more richer, learning experience. So that that was good. You know, in classroom. And we still do that today, but we got a lot of data out of the class. So we, you know, we'd go out, we collect data, had the class collect data and analyze the data. And that would go into a bigger pot. And, so we could see the bigger trends. But but actually classes. In the process of learning and teaching, we generated quite a bit of data out and still do.
Cecilia Melton
I know I had the pleasure of, leading that course with you. And I know you said every time you teach a course, you learn something new.
Alan Temple
Absolutely. I mean, it's crazy. I either I'm just completely a pretty much of a blockhead and pretty dense, you know, which is, I think, you know, other people say that, but, you know, it's just crazy that I can say honestly that every time I teach a course and get a lot with people that, you know, fishery biologist and that I always learn something. There's always something. Always.
Cecilia Melton
Could you tell us maybe some projects that you've been involved or species that you work with that there are remarkable or.
Alan Temple
So you know, one one was snake heads, northern snake heads, invasive species. And we were trying to determine waveforms, electrical waveforms that would more effectively capture them. That was very good. Did some lab work on that and then gave a paper at, I think the first snakehead symposium down, not Georgetown, but Alexandria, Virginia, where it was. But, that was good. We did some work with the Candy darters trying to, which is an endangered species now in West Virginia, where we were trying to reduce mortality during sampling. And, that's still on going, but we made some real headway there in how you approach sampling, you know, the small benthic fish is to try to reduce mortality that, I really, really enjoy. I enjoyed consulting where I could when I was with Fish and Wildlife. I didn't get to do a lot of it, but one time I really enjoy working with, the Ashland fisheries office in Wisconsin. And they were one, their task was monitoring what they call Cosater brook trout, which are brook trout in the lake that reside in Lake Superior. But then come into the streams to spawn. And, and, they were monitoring them and they were trying to, they were switching their equipment, you know, their other equipment was dying. And they've got different types of equipment. And so we did a lot of some work one week just with the fisheries biologist there trying to determine what what's the best way for them for capture, you know, to get good capture responses and to show low injury with them. And in fact, we came up with a very kind of an unusual waveform, a high frequency. Usually we don't go over 120Hz, usually for trout, you know, over 30 pulses per second. But this is 300 pulses per second. And so it's unusual for in the United States to use that, but that's what they're using now up at Isle Royale, for sampling. So, you know, there's just a lot of possibilities there to help out these stations and their particular projects. I mean, it's pretty much endless what what can be done.
Cecilia Melton
I know you are just retiring and not quite, but, and I know other experts in the field that had been doing this for maybe even longer than you. They're also retiring, and they might not be teaching or passing on that knowledge for much longer. So yeah. What do you think is coming next?
Alan Temple
Well, you know, I will say in the whole fisheries universe of gears, it's probably a more dire situation in the nets. There's very few master net makers, very few left in the United States. And so it's getting to be a critical situation, particularly with the nets entangling gears and trawls in particular, that sort of thing. Design. Electrofishing sides a little bit better because we've had like 46 or more years of of training, the Fish and Wildlife Service, you know, and we've had other entities have also taught courses by the same instructors that we used at NCTC teach. Those, they're get the same message. There's a big scientific literature with a lot of manuals out, and there's a lot of people practicing these, you know, power transfer concept, you know, standardized sampling. And there's a lot of people doing that. But, you know, what it takes, though, is someone I don't know, like me, a nerd or something, but it takes someone that has to be interested in studying the hammer. They have to be interested in the nuances, in the concepts, you know, of, like fishing gear and how it operates and be willing to, you know, research that aspect. They also need experience. You know, you can do this, but you have to, you know, the the lab stuff and the concept stuff, but you also have to bring in experienced, you know, and so you have to have that person that I think a lot of times you have folks that have the experience and they use the techniques and they understand that. And that's good. Very good. It's super good. But, they may not really be delving into working on the concepts. And that requires continual research, continual testing of things. You know, with data, you know, almost theory and data interaction, you know, and kind of looking at that and a lot of people that their day job just doesn't allow them to do that. Yeah. And and so you have to have somebody that's interested and you have to have people that have the time and but there are those out there and it's just a matter of giving them the opportunity. And I'm hoping the Fish and Wildlife Service and the fisheries program in particular, you know, definitely addresses that because there are people within the fisheries program and the Fish and Wildlife Service that can do can.
Cecilia Melton
We follow your legacy? Yeah. So maybe, hopefully some of them are listening to us today and they would get inspired.
Alan Temple
I hope so, you know. Yes, indeed.
Cecilia Melton
And so do you have any advice for anybody that wants to follow in your steps?
Alan Temple
Well, you know, if if you're a course leader, you know, someone who teaches courses at NCTC, the course leaders are not like professors. You know, they don't. That was attempted a little bit at one point, but just didn't didn't work out. But I would just suggest that, you know, as a course leader that they try to become, they try to find a niche for themselves, you know, if they can find a niche that in whatever it might be where they can teach and they feel like they can contribute, I think that goes a long way for retention for them staying there, but also, you know, job satisfaction, but also effectiveness in teaching, you know, or effectiveness and learning experience. Yeah, be be involved where you can be and in the content. Absolutely.
Cecilia Melton
Well, thank you very much for joining us today. And thank you everyone for listening to thoughts From Home.
Thank you for listening to the National Conservation Training Center podcast series. If you have feedback, thoughts or stories you'd like to share, contact us at [email protected]
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