packs - The Environment Report

Recording Elephant Conversations

Elephants talk amongst themselves below levels we can hear. (Photo courtesy of the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park)
An image of a series of elephant calls. Researchers are using these calls to count how many elephants are in the wild. (Photo courtesy of the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park)
Project headquarters - the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (Photo by Emma Jacobs)

Biologists are always trying to
get a good count of the animals
they’re studying. You wouldn’t
think it’d be that hard to find
an elephant for a count, but even
some of the largest animals are
difficult to count in the wild.
So researchers are now trying new
methods. Emma Jacobs reports on
a Cornell University project which
is using audio recordings to learn
more about elephants:

Transcript

Mya Thompsons sits down in her lab and pulls up a set of recordings on her computer. She helped tape these sounds for the Elephant Listening Project in Dzanga National Park in the Central African Republic. She plays a recording made in the forest, late at night.

(sounds of the forest at night)

“You heard some insects, you heard some sort of the din of a nighttime forest.”

But you probably don’t hear elephants.

Next, Thompson takes the same sound and speeds it up on her computer. Suddenly, you can hear something else.
“This is 4-times normal speed.”

(sound of forest at night, but with rumbles)

Elephants make those low rumbles. When she speeds up the playback, they rise in pitch. It’s kinda of like the voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

It turns out elephants talk among themselves below levels we can hear. Biologist Kaity Paine discovered these sounds in the 1980s. She realized that because elephant rumbles are so low, they travel long distances. This should make them useful to track elephants over wide forests, but Thompson remembers that in the field, it was hard to see how.

“We’re collecting all this information and we wanted to know what the calls were like, but because we can’t hear them, we were almost totally in the dark about what was going on.”

When she got back to New York, Thompson and the rest of the research team started combing through all the audio and video collected in Central Africa for elephant calls. It took thousands of hours.

But with time, they could nail down a pattern. The key was a relationship between the audio recordings and the video of elephants they had made in one clearing popular with elephants.

“This is a communication system. There are a lot of other variables other than, ‘Hi I’m here,’ but, overall, the more calling, the more elephants and that was good news for us.”

Now Thompson can monitor elephants over huge areas of this dense forest using these audio recordings.

In the field, the team hoists their recorders into trees attached to truck batteries. They can stay up there a long time, which has real advantages.

“Usually, when you take a survey, you go, you count, and you leave. For acoustics, we’re able to have this recorder up continuously without all this human effort and make repeated estimates over longer periods of time.”

With enough information, Thompson can estimate at the numbers of elephants in a forest with twice the precision she could have before.

Marcella Kelly teaches wildlife field techniques at Virginia Tech. She says, when you can track animal numbers closely, you can see how they respond to changes in their environment. This is a must for conservation.

“We really need effective ways to estimate population size, especially because decisions are made on management based on what those numbers tell us, over time.”

The Elephant Listening Project recently started monitoring elephants in the African nation of Gabon.

“The authorities had allowed gas exploration to see if there’s any petroleum reserves there, and so our project was asked to monitor the forest for elephant calls before, during, and after this exploration.”

Thompson can already say that things have changed. Elephants have started coming out more at night than during the day to avoid people. In the end, hopefully she’ll be able to see just how disruptive changes have been and to pinpoint the human activities causing problems.

She also wants to protect other animals making noise in the forest, and outside it.

“We’re really hoping that these methods that we’ve developed, will be developed for not only forest elephants but for other species that are hard to survey that we really need to know more about before we can protect them.”

For right now though, Thompson is still in her lab, listening for elephants.

For The Environment Report, I’m Emma Jacob

Wolf Hunting Hurts Wolf Packs

The gray wolf is slated to be removed from the Endangered Species List. Many are worried this will have a negative impact on wolf packs. (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Fish and Wildlife Service)

This year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to officially remove the northern
Rockies gray wolf from the federal Endangered Species List. The agency will hand over
management of the wolves to states in the region. The states will allow hunters and
ranchers to kill wolves during specific seasons, or even year-round. But scientists and
conservationists are concerned about the hunting plans. Kinna Ohman reports some
conservationists think hunting could disrupt the way a wolf pack works, and even lead
members to seek out easier prey such as livestock:

Transcript

Biologists in Yellowstone National Park have had an unprecedented opportunity to study
wolves over the last twelve years. They’ve looked at everything from what wolves prefer
to eat, to why wolves kill big prey such as bison. But one topic they haven’t studied
much is how a typical wolf pack works.

Doug Smith is a biologist with Yellowstone’s wolf recovery program. He says they now
understand healthy wolf packs need lots of older, skilled members in order to hunt natural
prey:

“They’re very good at it. They have a lot of teamwork. They switch back and forth
about whose doing what job.”

In fact, studies have shown it takes 3-4 skilled adults to kill an elk. It takes more wolves
to kill a bison. Packs in Yellowstone are naturally filled with large numbers of adults.
But in places where wolves are hunted by humans, skilled adults are in short supply.

Smith says a lack of skilled wolves in a pack could mean they’d be more likely to go after
easier prey including livestock:

“If they don’t have that experienced age structure in the pack, they make do, and so
you will have probably inexperienced killers out there and inexperienced killers are gonna
look for easier prey. The elders of the pack, if there are only 2 or 3 of you,
are much more likely going to go after a sheep or cow than if there’s 7 or 8 of you.”

These concerns could become real when the gray wolf is taken off the Endangered
Species list in the northern Rockies. The states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming will
take over management. Suzanne Stone with the Defenders of Wildlife in Idaho says
hundreds of wolves could be killed as part of state management plans:

“They’re talking about killing now about 500 to 600 wolves after delisting. You
don’t manage any population of wildlife like that. The delisting plan, as it’s written
right now, is just a recipe for failure.”

Stone says the gray wolves were protected to build healthy populations, and how a wolf
pack works should be part of that consideration.

But the government is focused on how sport hunting effects just wolf numbers. Ed Bangs
is the wolf recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He says that
hunting won’t threaten the wolves:

“One thing that does happen everywhere in the world that wolves and people
overlap is that people kill wolves. And the answer is yes, that does have an effect on
wolf pack structure. And it certainly never endangered wolf populations.”

So it’s hard for conservationists to convince officials that the sport hunting of wolves
could change how wolf packs work and even lead to more livestock conflicts. Biologist
Doug Smith says that’s because the decision to delist the wolves is based purely on
numbers:

“Delisting is entirely numbers. Some conservation biologists have made the
argument that delisting should not occur until the endangered species is integrated
back within the ecosystem and functioning as a member as that ecosystem. That is
not how delisting occurs now for the Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s ‘do we have
enough?'”

Many conservationists and activists will soon be arguing that killing 500 to 600 wolves
leave too few. They’ll likely file lawsuits, stressing that the importance of healthy wolf
packs should be considered before hunting is allowed.

Ed Bangs with the Fish and Wildlife Service says he’s confident the agency has followed
the law. He says they’ll meet the requirements of the Endangered Species Act by
delisting the wolves and handing management over to the states:

“My deal with the Fish and Wildlife Service is: What is the purpose of the act as it’s
currently written by Congress, have we met those conditions for wolves, and the
answer is clearly yes and therefore we’re supposed to delist them. If people want the
act to say something different, they need to talk to their elected officials, not the Fish
and Wildlife Service.”

But the wolf’s defenders will argue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the
states need to understand how the wolf packs work before declaring open season on the
wolf.

For the Environment Report, I’m Kinna Ohman.

States Ready for Wolf Delisting?

Once hunted nearly to extinction, the gray wolf has recently rebounded under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to take the wolf off of the Endangered Species List and hand wolf management back to the states. (Photo by Katherine Glover)
A captive wolf at the Wildlife Science Center in Minnesota. (Photo by Katherine Glover)
Peggy Callahan, Executive Director of the Wildlife Science Center in Minnesota. Callahan works to minimize conflicts between wolves and people. (Photo by Katherine Glover)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to remove the eastern population of the gray wolf from the Endangered Species List and turn over wolf management to state control. But not everyone thinks the states are up for it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Katherine Glover has the story:

Transcript

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to remove the eastern population
of the gray wolf from the Endangered Species List and turn over wolf management
to state control. But not everyone thinks the states are up for it. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Katherine Glover has the story:

(sound of wolves howling)

The image of the wolf has always had a powerful effect on people. Wolves seem dangerous,
mysterious, romantic. They are a symbol of the untamed wilderness. Before Europeans came
to America, wolves roamed freely on every part of the continent. In 1630, the colony of
Massachussetts Bay started paying bounties to settlers for killing wolves. Over the next
300 years, wolf killing spread across the country, until all that was left was a few small
pockets of surviving wolf packs.

When the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, the only wolves left to protect in the
Midwest were in Northern Minnesota. By some estimates, there were as few as 350 of them.

Today, Minnesota has a healthy wolf population of around 2400 animals, and smaller populations
are growing in Wisconsin and Michigan. Becaue of this success, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
has proposed removing the animals from the Endangered Species List. This would mean wolves would
no longer be federally protected – it would be up to the states.

(sound of gate opening)

Peggy Callagan works with captive wolves at the Wildlife Science Center in Minnesota. She’s the
Center’s co-founder and executive director. She and her staff research ways to minimize
conflicts between wolves and people. Callahan is looking forward to seeing the wolf taken off
the Endangered Species List.

“It’s a good thing for the Endangered Species Act, to take a wolf off or an eagle off or a
peregrine off when it has recovered. The act was not established to provide a permanent
hiding place. It was established to protect a species until such time that they could be
managed in a different way.”

Wisconsin and Michigan have wolves because young born in Minnesota have migrated east to start
their own packs. Callahan says how Minnesota manages its wolves will affect wolf numbers in the
Midwest. And she isn’t crazy about Minnesota’s current wolf management plan, which has different
rules for different parts of the state.

“Now, there’s a boundary; there’s a boundary called a wolf zone, and there’s a boundary that’s
called the ag zone. And nobody likes it. We went backward.”

In Northeastern Minnesota, where the majority of wolves are, landowners can only kill wolves
if they can demonstrate an immediate threat to pets or livestock. In the rest of the state, where
there is more agriculture and more people, the rules are more lenient. On their own property,
landowners can kill any wolf they feel is a danger, without having to prove anything to the state.

The Sierra Club is opposed to taking the wolf off the Endangered Species list, largely because
of Minnesota’s management plan. Ginny Yinling is the chair of the Wolf Task Force of the Sierra
Club in Minnesota.

“They’ve pretty much given carte blanche to landowners, or their agents, to kill wolves
pretty much at any time in the southern and western two thirds of the state; they don’t even
have to have an excuse, if a wolf’s on their property they can kill it. Instead of this being
what should have been a victory in terms of wolf recovery and the success of the Endangered
Species Act, instead we’re afraid it’s going to turn into something of a disaster.”

Yinling is also concerned with the protection of wolf habitat, such as den sites, rendezvous
sites, and migration corridors.

“The current management plan protects none of those areas; it leaves it entirely up to the
discretion of the land managers.”

But wildlife managers say these are not critical for a large wolf population
like Minnesota’s. Mike DonCarlos is the wildlife program manager for the Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources.

“As you look at the range of species that are threatened by habitat change, ironically the wolf
in Minnesota is not one of them. As long as there’s a prey base that continues, wolves should
do just fine. The key is mortality rates and availability of food.”

In Wisconsin and Michigan, where there are fewer wolves, state laws will continue to protect
wolf habitat. Peggy Callahan says she has faith that the wolves will be fine, even if the
Minnesota state plan is not perfect. But at the Sierra Club, Ginny Yinling says they have
plans to challenge wolf delisting in court.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Katherine Glover.

Tag: packs

Wolf Hunting Hurts Wolf Packs

Transcript

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