What Good is a Wood Rat?

 

Key Largo Wood Rat. Image downloaded from the Internet with no attribution

I spent 6 months in 1992 on loan to the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuges where I tried to figure out how to reverse the negative impressions of the public toward the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  Our presence was a giant pain in the public’s collective ass because we were protecting endangered species of plants and animals and the highly independent Florida Keys residents, many of them future Tea Party Republicans, wanted nothing to do with us or our message.

For my study I had a series of 20 questions that I asked pro-environment people, anti-environment people, and those I assumed were in the middle (restaurant owners etc.) about the Fish and Wildlife Service.  My basic premise was “What has the Fish and Wildlife Service done right in past, what have we done wrong in the past, and what can we do better in the future?”

One steaming hot June day I talked with Shirley, the President of the Lower Keys Realtor’s Association.  We sat on the deck of her opulent house overlooking the water on Summerland Key and I grilled her with my questions.  A huge issue at that time was the Lower Keys Rice Rat, an obscure species with highly restrictive habitat requirements that remained at the edge of extinction in a few wetlands in the Lower Keys. 

When my interview reached questions about protecting endangered species, Shirley went for what she thought was my throat. 

“When the first person is told they can’t build a house because of a god damned rat,” she bellowed, “there is going to be a holy war in the Lower Keys.”

Giving Shirley time for her blood pressure to drop down out of the stratosphere I said, “Shirley, what does it tell you about the quality of the human environment when a rat is an endangered species?”  Shirley was dumbfounded and stopped in her tracks.  She pondered my question for a minute and said, “I never thought of that.”

 A week later she showed up at the Florida Keys National Wildlife Refuge and inquired about becoming a volunteer.

Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife biology and the first professor of wildlife biology at the incomparable University of Wisconsin once opined “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

In other words, who are we to decide if a plant or animal has “value’ beyond its mere existence?

I thought of that saying and of my long-ago conversation with Shirley the Lower Keys real estate agent this morning when I read this story about research on the Key Largo Wood Rat, an endangered species that exists precariously on one island in the upper Florida Keys.   Research on the rat not only helps us understand it place in a functioning ecosystem, but also may lead to breakthrough’s in understanding how to protect human health.

Long ago at a Lion’s Club meeting in Palco, Kansas, I was asked by a grizzled old man if I thought it was right for a lizard to halt development of a water project. 

“What’s a skink?” he asked me after waving his arthritic hand in the air for several minutes.

I said, “A skink is a species of lizard.”

He replied, “Do you think a lizard should be allowed to stop a water development project?”

Yes, I do, but I wasn’t going to tell him that so I probed him and discovered that a state endangered species of skink was getting in the way of yet another small watershed development project and this man thought it was the worst thing since the atomic bomb.  He completed his explanation by asking me if I thought it was a good idea.

Rather than answering him I asked him if he knew what an armadillo is, saying “it’s a little animal that spends most of its life dead along the sides of roads.”  He knew.  I then said, “Armadillos are the only species of mammal that cannot contract leprosy.  They carry the virus in their blood system but produce a chemical that keeps the virus from growing and causing the disease.  If fact sir, there is enough of that chemical in one armadillo to treat seven human victims of leprosy.  Now do you know what is in that skink?”

He didn’t know.  I then replied asking, “Do you want to take the chance?”

Answering soto voce he said, “No.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “That’s why we have the Endangered Species Act, to keep all of the parts no matter how seemingly inconsequential together.”  I then asked for the next question.

Questions kept flying until well after 10:00 p.m. and I answered each of them to the best of my ability.  Eventually the meeting began to break up and when perhaps only 30 people remained my original skink questioner walked up to me.  Figuring he was about to verbally abuse me as had happened so many times before, I was surprised when he stuck out his hand to shake mine and said “I want to thank you for opening my eyes.”

I gave him my stoic bureaucratic exterior look saying, “Thank you sir. I’m happy to hear that.”  Inside however I was giving him two thumbs up thinking to myself “He got the point!  He heard the message!” 

Maybe with luck tomorrow morning he would be in the local coffee shop chatting with his buddies and asking them if skinks can prevent leprosy and what would happen if we lost it. 

The same response fits the Key Largo Wood Rat and its bacteria laden nests, or a skink on the prairie of western Kansas or any number of other species that seem "useless" to human kind.  Whatever the avenue is that works to get the message across I am all in favor of using it.

 

I Shot My First Sharp-tailed Grouse 41 Years Ago Today

 

Male Sharp-tailed Grouse.  Photo by Joanne Bartkus

Growing up in northern Wisconsin, it was always a treat to find a Sharp-tailed Grouse.  At one time they were rather common in the Cheesehead State but the combined tragedies of fire suppression and conversion of grasslands to human housing and endless strip malls, took a substantial toll on Sharp-tailed Grouse distribution.

The first Sharp-tailed Grouse I ever saw was on April 10, 1968,  at the Crex Meadows Wildlife Management Area near Grantsburg, Wisconsin.  With my freshly minted permanent Wisconsin drivers license in my wallet, I drove over to Crex very early that morning.  It was a Wednesday and yes, I skipped school and not for the first time. I had heard about a dancing ground (a display ground) for Sharp-tailed Grouse there and I wanted to see the birds displaying.  Arriving well before sunrise I heard the mysterious hooting and pattering of Sharp-tailed Grouse displaying males. There were six males on this lek and I watched them trying to get lucky.  Later that morning I saw my first Sandhill Cranes.  It was a memorable day.

During my remaining 11 years as a Wisconsin resident, I found Sharp-tailed Grouse very sparingly.  I remember a pair in a Douglas County jack pine barren in 1971, displaying males at the Mead Wildlife Management Area in Wood and Portage counties on April 30, 1977, and additional birds at Crex Meadows on several occasions.  Most surprising was a pair (probably hatch year birds) on the Oakridge Waterfowl Production Area near New Richmond, St. Croix County, on October 15, 1977.  Historical records suggested these were the first Sharp-tailed Grouse seen in St. Croix County in nearly 80 years.  To my knowledge they have not been seen in St. Croix County since that freak encounter.

Until 1979, finding a Sharp-tailed Grouse was a major accomplishment and something that didn’t happen every year.  That scenario changed  on January 20, 1979, when I moved to the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota.  There I found myself in Sharp-tailed Grouse nirvana.  Staff at the Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge near Pingree, about 20 miles north of Jamestown, set up a viewing blind on a Sharp-tailed Grouse lek and in April 1979 I watched grouse dancing on several brisk prairie mornings.

I was an avid hunter in those formative years.  It all began with a Gray Squirrel I shot in Barron County, Wisconsin, from the side of a butternut tree behind my grandparent’s barn on October 1, 1960.  I was a month shy of 9 years old, a mere three years too young to be hunting legally.  There were very few things my grandparents looked the other way on, but one of them was a grandson's age and his ability to handle a gun.  From that morning forward, I was fanatic about hunting and would start in June counting down the days until the opening day of duck hunting season in October.  

For hunters in the 1970s and 1980s, North Dakota was paradise.  Name something you wanted to hunt and you could usually find a season for it somewhere in the Peace Garden State.  I still remember a day in October 1979, when I began the morning on Sibley Lake, Kidder County.  Hunting was legal at 7:00 a.m. and by 7:11 I had a limit of four male American Wigeon and a male Redhead.  I then set up decoys on the south shore of the lake and quickly shot a limit of five Snow Geese.  Beginning my trek home, I harvested a limit of 3 Sharp-tailed Grouse and 10 Gray Partridge and I was back in my office by noon.  Days of hunting success like that one were not uncommon.

Although waterfowl hunting was the main focus every October and November, what I enjoyed the most was hunting Sharp-tailed Grouse.  I shot my first one just after sunrise on this day, September 17, in 1979.

The Mount Moriah Waterfowl Production Area (now renamed in memory of my famous colleague Bob Stewart) is one square mile (640 acres) of native prairie and an abundance of wetlands.  There are 105 wetland basins on that one-square mile patch of ground – one of the highest wetland densities in the Prairie Pothole Region of the Dakotas, Montana, and adjacent Canada.

Satellite image of Mount Moriah Waterfowl Production Area downloaded from Google Earth.

Chester, my Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and I stepped onto the grassland of Mount Moriah shortly before sunrise on September 17, 1979, the opening day of Sharp-tailed Grouse season.  I had extensive experience (but not extensive luck) hunting Ruffed Grouse in Wisconsin but had no idea how to hunt Sharp-tailed Grouse.  Chester and I began our quest in the southwest corner of the Waterfowl Production Area, then walked toward the center of the area before turning right and walking east into the rising sun.

Chester sensed the birds before I did.  His ears always perked up in a certain way when he found any bird for me, and he showed the same behavior on Mount Moriah.  I took a couple steps forward and three Sharp-tailed Grouse erupted at my feet.  I leveled off on one bird, shot, and watched it tumble from the sky.  Turning on the other two I fired two shots in desperation because they had already flown out of my range.  Chester very excitedly bounced over to the grouse’s resting place, and with the bird in his mouth, returned to me. 

I was quite proud of myself and placed the bird in the game pouch of my hunting jacket.  Chester and I continued walking over the prairie for another hour flushing seven more Sharp-tailed Grouse of which two didn’t see the sun set that day.  With my first limit of grouse in my pocket by 8:30 that morning, Chester and I returned home.  It was the first of many times my dog and I returned home with a limit of Sharp-tailed Grouse in my game pouch.

There, my daughter Jennifer, who then was two years old, couldn’t take her hands or her attention off the birds as I prepared to clean them.  This continued to be a pattern on subsequent hunts when I carried her in a kid-pack on my back as we tromped across the prairie waiting for Chester to flush a grouse.  Invariably when one did, a tiny hand would jet past my right eye and I would see a tiny finger shaking as the voice in my ear yelled “Grouse, Daddy!”  When I missed a bird, she was as disappointed as my dog was but when I scored Jennifer instantly called it “my grouse” and insisted on carrying the bird for the rest of the hunt and many times in her arms the entire way home after we finished for the day.  Three years later her sister Dana reacted the same way as Jennifer used to now that Jennifer was walking beside me and Dana was in the kid pack.

Sharp-tailed Grouse remained my most preferred quarry for hunting during my remaining time in North Dakota.  When I lost my dog in 1983, however, my desire to hunt evaporated and I have not picked up a shotgun or rifle since that year.

After leaving North Dakota I lived in Georgia, the Bahamas, Nebraska, southern California, northern Virginia, and now in retirement on the west coast of Florida.  Only the six years of that period spent in Nebraska were in Sharp-tailed Grouse range and I have seen this species only three times since I moved from Nebraska in February, 1993.  Twice when I returned to Nebraska to watch migrating Sandhill Cranes, I ventured north of Grand Island to the Taylor Ranch where both Sharp-tailed Grouse and Greater Prairie-Chicken display alongside each other. 

The last one I saw erupted at my feet while walking across the tundra of Denali National Park, Alaska, in September 2017.  When that single bird flushed in front of me, I instinctively pulled up an imaginary shotgun and fired an imaginary shot just like I did for real 41 years ago this morning.  The Alaska bird flew away unharmed.  The North Dakota bird wasn’t that lucky but its demise made me a feverish advocate for protecting habitats where Sharp-tailed Grouse continue to survive.

Why Bob Woodward Kept Silent about tRump's Covid Comments - An Example from Wildlife Law Enforcement

 

People are Monday Morning Quarterbacking Bob Woodward's decision not to reveal to the public what he knew about tRump's inaction on Covid-19 last winter. The real outrage should be against tRump but its easier to blame the messenger at times. Although Woodward had no obligation to reveal anything to anyone there might be a good reason for his silence. An example from wildlife law enforcement might explain it.

John Cooper, a Special Agent with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Pierre, South Dakota, was sent to coastal Louisiana to work undercover on hunters who were killing large numbers of Snow Geese. There was also some evidence the geese were being illegally sold in food markets. In the late 1980s when this happened, the maximum number of snow geese a hunter could possess in a single day was five birds.

John told me about watching one hunter kill more than 200 snow geese before he took any action. As soon as he killed the 6th goose, John could have cited him but he chose to wait. Allowing the hunter to kill 200 snow geese made the case that much stronger in court. Showing a judge 200 dead geese when the limit was 5 was pretty strong evidence the hunter knew what he was doing and he kept at it.

I wonder if the same can't be said for the Porcine Pussy Grabber, his comments to Woodward about Covid-19, and Woodward's decision to keep a lid on the information? tRump made it obvious on February 7 that he knew exactly what was going on with Covid but Woodward just let him keep talking. Doing so now provides us with abundantly clear evidence tRump knew what the truth was and chose to look the other way with no regard for facts - just like that goose hunter with 200 more geese than the limit allowed.