I have a new hero, no not a politician nor a big game hunter, not even the free soloist Alex Honnold. My heroes are wildlife researchers, and in this case it’s Arthur Middleton, a lowly assistant professor at Berkeley and a wildlife ecologist.
Middleton exemplifies what I believed to be a species doomed to extinction. A wildlife researcher who is at home in the field and imagines unique methods of structuring studies to gather data that lead to unexpected results. I had thought the age of great wildlife researchers of the American West was about to come to an end. The world seems to have moved more towards movie star pop environmentalism and to have left hard science behind.
The first time I heard of Middleton it was within the sarcastic comments of wolf advocates. The org I am a member of had helped finance a study that Middleton was soon to complete, and the results showed that the greatest predation on elk in the study was not from wolves. The wolf advocates found humor in this, as if structuring studies to give intended results were the normal way of doing things, and the Elk Foundation had blown it. The wolf advocates seemingly didn’t understand that the Foundation and the types of scientists we look to fund are not in the business of structuring science to fit pre ordained conclusions.
What happened is Middleton began his study with questions, not answers. And no, the question wasn’t how many elk were wolves eating. The questions were more along the lines of how many elk are being eaten where and why, as well as by who. There was a herd of elk, half of which was remaining at low elevations to feed on agricultural fields for the summer, while the other half went high into Yellowstone as they had done historically. Elk from both halves were collared, and there was data available from the wolves as they were already collared. Kind of like a control group and a study group.
The two biggest pieces I got from the study was that the highest mortality was in the portion of the herd migrating to Yellowstone because of grizzly predation, and the elk in both herds did nothing to avoid wolves. For those elk it was more advantageous to feed on the most nutritious food available and they didn’t change feeding behavior to avoid wolf predation. The landscape of fear did not exist, at least for those elk.
From that original research came a plan to map all of the elk migrations into Yellowstone from the surrounding ecoregion, and combined with other recent astounding discoveries of long distance mule deer and pronghorn migrations north towards yellowstone has come the effort to map and combine all the migrations of one of the last landscape scale wildlife migrations in the lower 48 and indeed the world.
Below is an award winning video made to bring the work of the data collection of the elk migration to the general public.
Go ahead and watch it, there are worse things one might do for half an hour.
The production is a joint effort of Joe Riis who might well be a familiar name, plus Jenny Nichol the filmmaker, also Arthur Middleton, and painting by James Prosek.
By getting the overall picture of things it’s possible to understand just how much all the animals we associate with Yellowstone depend on thousands upon thousands of migrating large game that is actually the food that sustains the iconic big predators of Yellowstone National Park, the grizzlies and wolves. Without the elk, deer, and pronghorn, there’d be fewer predators, and by maintaining a large prey base, predator populations are also high. Elk, at roughly five or more times the size of deer bring a huge amount of protein on the hoof, fertilizing and churning the earth as they migrate.
Elk Migrations of Greater Yellowstone from the Migration Initiatives Web Site.
An org I belong to, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF), is a proud supporter of this research. Every once in awhile a board member of the RMEF asks commenters on his web site what’s a good thing to spend money on, responses always include purchasing habitat (to be given to the US Government to be incorporated into existing Wilderness, Forest, BLM land, and Wildlife Areas.) There also is always mention of basic research such as that done by the Migration Initiative, of which Middleton’s work is only a part.
You too can fund this research via The University of Wyoming. Many of the researchers emails seem to end with uwyo.edu. Wyoming Game and Fish has experienced lots of budget problems lately. Mapping the migration routes of all species allows low budget population estimates to be conducted via camera traps strategically placed at migration bottlenecks. Accurate population estimates allow adaptive management of all species.
Watch the film, whatever you were doing will still be there when you are done.
"If we didn't have these wilderness areas that have been maintained and if people hadn't fought the battles to set aside these lands, we wouldn't see these phenomena today," explained Middleton. Like bison, elk were nearly hunted to extinction in the 19th century.
For Middleton, Riis, Prosek, and Nichols, their conservation medium may differ, but their mission does not. Telling the story of elk migrations underscores the underlying imperative to protect the environment on which they depend.
news.nationalgeographic.com/…