Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.
The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
(Fall 1918)
This simple phrase, uttered by Theodore Roosevelt beside the Grand Canyon in 1904, has been a loadstone for our class, a constant reference point for our thinking about National Parks. In 1916 the Organic Act, creating the National Park System, made essentially the same point with a few more details. The purpose of the parks was to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and… leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
During the past few weeks we have learned that the process of preserving things as they are has been and is more complicated than at first assumed. For decades park managers have wrestled with big universal planning challenges, such as whether to allow cars in the parks, and with more local issues, such as whether to banish wild turkeys from Capital Reef National Park.
A book I have been listening to during the past few days reminds me that wildlife management is another crucial arena for park administrative decision-making. (I listen to a lot of books these days as the best way to “read” while doing chores, driving, hiking, and the like.) The book was written by Kim DeLozier, a long-time wildlife ranger in the Great Smokies and Carolyn Jourdan. It is both entertaining and instructive. Oh, and the title is: Bear in the Back Seat: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The bear in the title was sitting in the back seat of a helicopter with Ranger DeLozier. It was sedated and harmless — or was it?!
I realize that these days we tend to overuse the acronym LOL, but in this case, and others in the book, I did indeed Laugh Out Loud.
Now to the lesson. “Leave it as it is.” OK, but what has that meant in terms of park history? We have seen that at one time, it meant eliminate some rough edges in park wildlife: goodbye to cougars, grizzlies, and wolves, for example. At other times it meant arrange public feeding of the less dangerous bears at garbage dumps with tourists sitting nearby on bleachers to watch. Nowadays we would regard the first approach as pushing the wild critters too far away and the second as bringing them too close.
The hallmark these days is to allow nature to take its course. (Think of the wasps and the “special deer” we encountered recently on Blake Island.) I have selected two chapters from Bear in the Back Seat that illustrate the painstaking degree to which park rangers go to keep wildlife, well, wild. Here are some things to ponder while reading these chapters:
1) In the two instances below the rangers nudged the wildlife in a predetermined direction. Does this kind of management seem natural to you? Is it leaving things as they are (were)? Was this kind of intervention needed to restore a balance to nature?
2) Note the complexity of the work of the Appalachian Bear Rescue folk: what things did they do to help the bears stay wild?
3) As to the skunk relocation: why was that done? Who was “at fault” for the underlying problem? Why were the skunks reluctant to leave the truck?
I have copied two chapters below from Bear in the Back Seat. I offer them up to you with an apology and an explanation. I am a great fan of good paragraphing as an ingredient in good writing. But in copying these passages from the Kindle version of the book, the software perversely eliminated paragraph breaks. A nuisance, but look at it this way: I’m not asking you to capture bears or transport dozens of skunks — so things could be worse!
Here are those chapters:
(1) “Appalachian Bear Rescue”
I’VE HAD TO EUTHANIZE perfectly healthy little bear cubs when they were orphaned, for example, because the mother was killed by poachers or a car, or maybe a cub was abandoned and became separated from its family. In those days, there was no legitimate place to raise them and keep them wild so they could be released back into the wild. If we simply released them, they would die of starvation or be killed and eaten by other animals. Putting them down was terrible and one of the toughest things I ever had to do while at the Park. I just couldn’t stand to put any more little cubs down. There had to be a better way. In the late 1980s there was a major covert operation, called Operation Smoky, that exposed a significant amount of illegal trade in bear parts, mainly selling gallbladders. News about the poaching was upsetting to the public. Many people came out of the woodwork wanting to do something, anything, to help bears. One lady from Atlanta wanted to buy machine guns for Park rangers to use to shoot poachers. In a conversation with this lady, I tried to educate her about bear management and the real needs we had. Once she heard that little orphaned cubs were being put down, she asked how she could help. I explained to her that we needed to get a place set up where we could take orphaned, starving, sick, or injured wild black bears. To help protect the wild behavior of the animals, people had to be restricted from interacting with them. We needed a place where they could be taken care of for a short time, then as quickly as possible transitioned back into the wild. We wouldn’t keep bears forever, but we could help them get over the hump and save a lot of young injured or orphaned bears. So over the years and with the help of a lot of good people a facility was developed that came to be known as Appalachian Bear Rescue, or ABR. The Park is a tough place to live, even for wild animals. So when we see an animal having a problem, we try to help it out if possible. For example, one morning some people noticed a small bear limping around behind the Park Headquarters building. We investigated and discovered it was a yearling bear with broken hind leg. Because of its limp, the bear was nicknamed Chester after a character on Gunsmoke. The malnourished little bear weighed only about thirty pounds. That’s small for a recently weaned yearling bear. We didn’t know how Chester got hurt, but we suspect he was accidentally injured by his mother when she was trying to wean him. We captured Chester and took him to the University of Tennessee Veterinary Hospital where they put a plate in to repair his broken femur. Then we took him to Appalachian Bear Rescue where he was kept for nearly a year. He actually hibernated there over the winter. In the spring when he woke up, Chester had to go back to the vet school for a follow-up surgery to his leg. Luckily everything went well, so after a short stint back at ABR we released him just above Park Headquarters near where we’d first seen him. The limping thirty pound yearling was now a healthy 150 pound adult bear ready to go back into the wild. A month or two following the release, I got a call from Deener Matthews, innkeeper and owner of a world famous bed and breakfast inn called The Swag located along the Park boundary between Cataloochee and Maggie Valley, North Carolina. Deener was seeing a bear eating apples from her tree. It had an ear tag. She gave us the number and we identified it as Chester. Rick Varner went over to capture Chester and confirm that his leg had healed properly. We also wanted Rick to move Chester away from The Swag. We didn’t want the bear hanging around that close to people. We hoped the capture would be a negative experience associated with that particular area and he’d stay away in wilder territory. Even though we’d released Chester back into his home territory in the Park Headquarters area, he travelled on his own in excess of thirty miles as the crow flies, on rough ground through the mountains. So clearly his leg was healed. After Rick released Chester, there were no further reports of him, so we hope everything continued to go well. We believed it was a happy ending to the story. If we didn’t have Appalachian Bear Rescue, Chester wouldn’t have gotten a second chance. But because of many caring people, he did. ANYONE WHO WORKS AROUND BEARS can tell you—People who feed bears, kill bears. Period. The biggest problem wildlife rangers face in dealing with black bears is that people feed them. Human food is an enormous threat to wildlife in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Visitors have been told for fifty years that Garbage Kills Bears and A Fed Bear is a Dead Bear, but somehow it doesn’t sink in. For various stupid reasons, some people won’t stop feeding the bears. Bears who eat garbage don’t just eat the food in the garbage, but they chew up whatever inedible material is in it as well. It is quite common when a garbage bear is trapped, to see that its fecal matter includes aluminum foil and plastic wrappers. Human food is also hard on a bear’s teeth. It can rot them or they may get broken chewing garbage. Bad teeth make it very difficult for the bear to survive. People don’t remember this nowadays, but before humans gained widespread access to dental care, one of the leading causes of death was from tooth problems. Wild bears don’t have reliable access to dental care, so problems with their teeth have devastating consequences for them. Rotted, broken, or missing teeth significantly impair their ability to adequately feed and survive. If you can’t eat, you won’t live. To help Appalachian Bear Rescue get started, the wildlife crew donated labor and we built the fences using whatever scraps and leftovers we could find. We repaired and donated old broken bear and hog cages and traps, so there’d be a way to move the cubs to and from the Park, ABR, and the vet hospital. This provided a safe way to handle the cubs while they were being cared for. The cub compound is surrounded by a tall chain link fence, with a wide alley just inside it. Then there’s another tall chain link fence covered with a thick black Geotech fabric to obscure the bear’s view of the people who provide their food. This inner chain link fence is also fortified with several strands of electrified high-tensile wire. Wild animals hate electricity. An electric fence is more of a mental barrier than a physical one, but they work. No bear has ever escaped the confines of ABR. There’s a huge amount of labor involved in feeding and caring for bears and it’s done 24/7 by a tiny, dedicated staff. Appalachian Bear Rescue has helped nearly 200 bears so far and only one of the animals following release from the facility has ever been reported as a garbage or nuisance bear. That’s an impressive record, especially since some of the bears they receive have already had some contact with humans. ABR attributes this record to the strict procedures established by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, which is responsible for overseeing the facility. ABR can’t display black bears. Other than a zoo, no facility is allowed to do that because it would create a demand for illegally captured wild bears. A cub is accepted at ABR only when it’s known to have been orphaned for a certain amount of time, to give the mother the chance to return, if she’s still alive. If the mother doesn’t return, the cub can be captured by wildlife officials and brought to ABR. ABR has received malnourished bears and bears with a variety of ailments and injuries such as broken legs, serious lacerations, infections, neurological problems, or loss of an eye. One of the most common types of bears they receive is orphaned cubs. Cubs left unattended in the wild won’t live long. They’ll die of starvation or be killed by a coyote, bobcat, dog, or even another bear. Their chances of survival would be zero. If the cub is young and weighs only a few pounds, it’s immediately placed on a commercial formula and bowl or bottle fed every three to four hours. It’s normally housed with other cubs for comfort and companionship. If the cub is a newborn, wildlife officials immediately begin the search for a suitable surrogate mother in the wild while the cub receives interim care at ABR. There are usually ongoing bear research projects where mother bears are wearing radio-collars so the researchers can locate them in their winter dens and check on their overall condition and see if they have any newborn cubs. Ideally a cub will be kept wild by being introduced to a surrogate mother and siblings very quickly. If that’s not possible, the cub is raised at ABR with minimal human interaction and later released back into the wild. Other injured, sick, or malnourished bears arriving at ABR are, depending on their condition, placed in a one-acre bear enclosure which has hardwood trees, natural dens, and man-made streams and pools. Some may need veterinary care before they’re released into the larger enclosure. Once they’re put inside the bear enclosure, the cubs rarely see humans or receive human contact unless they need medical attention. This is their last stop before being released back into the wild. During feeding times the keeper tosses food over the eight-foot-tall covered fence and scatters it so the cubs have to forage to find it. The bears’ diet consists of fruits, berries, nuts, and some vegetables that are similar to the natural diet they’ll find in their normal habitat. Guidelines from TWRA state that bears must weigh at least fifty pounds before they can sustain themselves in the wild. ABR makes sure the bears are an acceptable weight and in good health, and that they exhibit normal foraging behavior and interact and vocalize with other bears. The little bears must also have climbing skills. They should exhibit positive bear behavior by staying up in trees during the day and coming down at night to eat. If they are moving around for short periods during the day, they should immediately retreat to the trees when they hear unusual noises or smell unusual odors. This is normal behavior for survival in the wild. The goal at ABR is to make sure the bears don’t associate with people on any level. During their months in residence without any human contact, the bears are naturally cautious and afraid of people and will retreat to the trees for safety if they hear humans or strange sounds. This is one of the reasons why TWRA doesn’t allow visitors. When all the criteria are met, bears are prepared for release back into the wild. Bears from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will be returned to a place close to where they were found. Cubs admitted from Tennessee but outside the national park, will be released in one of the TWRA’s wildlife management areas or bear sanctuaries that offer thousands of acres of plentiful food, water, and a safe habitat. Bears admitted from out-of-state wildlife agencies will be returned to their home states. When they’re ready for release, bears are trapped and put into small holding areas. They’re injected with a sedative when officials arrive to transport them. This gives workers approximately an hour to perform a final health check and to measure and weigh them. During this final exam, if the animals are large enough, they’re given numbered ear tags and lip tattoos for identification purposes. Because the bears are sedated they’re not aware of any of these procedures. Then they’re loaded into a special cage for transport. ABR tries to release the cubs in pairs, though there’s no scientific data to support the idea that the cubs stay together in the wild. Bears tend to be solitary animals, except during breeding season or in areas where food sources are concentrated and abundant. Though they may have had interactions with other bears while at ABR, their natural instincts will tell them to make their way in the wild alone. One exception to the hands-off procedure is when an injured cub or yearling is admitted to ABR. In that situation, the injured bear is typically treated at the University of Tennessee Veterinary Hospital and allowed to recuperate at ABR. Then the hands-off procedures are reinstated. There’s normally no time limit for recuperation of an injured animal. Every case is different. The injured bear is given all the time it needs in order to heal and rehabilitate from its injury. From time to time the recuperation period requires that the injured bear has to be kept all winter at ABR.
Jourdan, Carolyn. Bear in the Back Seat: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Smokies Wildlife Ranger Book 1 (pp. 70-76). Zo’o Media. Kindle Edition.
(2) The Great Skunk Rodeo
THE GO-TO GUY for tough wildlife jobs is Rick Varner. Rick is a former U.S. Marine. He’s brave, smart, strong, quiet, thorough, and totally reliable. Rick is a cross between Rambo and MacGyver. There isn’t anything he can’t do and nothing he’s afraid of trying. He’s a meticulous planner who takes advance measures to avert disaster. He mentally prepares for difficult situations before he starts a task, dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s. So whenever we were given a task that was nearly impossible, or bound to be extraordinarily unpleasant, or challenging, or difficult, I called on Rick. One of these times was what came to be known as The Great Skunk Rodeo in Cades Cove. For many years, the most popular wildlife attraction in the Cades Cove campground was a herd of skunks. The technical term for a gang of skunks is a surfeit. Countless generations of these skunks had been born and raised amid a swirling mass of tourists, RVs, cars, and tents. Skunks have few natural enemies aside from a few birds of prey with a nearly non-existent sense of smell. This happy fact, in conjunction with year-round access to visitors’ food and garbage, resulted in a population explosion. The cove campground was truly skunk heaven. Inevitably, skunks occupying the same area as visitors are an accident waiting to happen—and one did. On a weekend when the campground was full, I got a call at home saying a young boy had been bitten by a skunk and since the responsible skunk wasn’t captured, the little boy was going to have to get post-exposure rabies shots. It happened that the little boy’s father worked for the National Park Service in the Washington Office. So, news about the incident ran quickly through the National Park Service ranks. On the Monday morning following the incident, Superintendent John Cook was sitting in my office when I got to work. That didn’t happen very often. From the look on John’s face, I knew the Cades Cove campground skunks were about to get a new home. We knew the best option for the skunks was to relocate them to a less populated area where the health of both tourists and skunks would be better protected. We decided to take the skunks several miles away from the cove, across a ridge, and into another watershed. But first we had to devise a sneaky way of catching them and suppressing their spraying defense. There was no known technique for how to do this. After much thought, we decided to use blowguns to subdue the skunks and the boar, a powerful Dodge 4×4 pickup truck fitted with a wild hog cage in the back, for transport. Small darts carrying 1 cc of animal tranquilizer, shot from blowguns, would knock the skunks unconscious for a couple of hours. We figured that would be more than enough time to drive them ten miles to a new home at Sams Gap on Parsons Branch Road. The skunks never saw it coming. Rick and I started our walk through the campground one evening, puffed little darts at each of the skunks, and down they went. When I bent over to pick up our first critter, Rick told me there was a trick to handling unconscious skunks. “Skunks can’t spray unless their tail is up in the air,” he said. “The tail has to be folded down over the rear end of the skunk when you pick em up, even when they’re asleep, or the scent can leak out. But they can’t get you if you keep that tail locked down.” This sounded ominously similar to my Dad’s famous last words about how to hold the tail of a cow to keep her from kicking your brains out. I hoped Rick’s advice would work out better than Dad’s. As quickly as we could, we walked from one end of the campground to the other, blow-darting skunks. But, even working as fast as possible, by the time we were darting the last of the skunks, the ones who’d been darted first were starting to wake up. This wasn’t a good situation. So, even though we hadn’t captured all the skunks, we decided we already had enough skunks—possibly more than we could handle. Seventy-seven skunks seemed like a good night’s work. And we figured we’d better not wait any longer before moving them. A truckload of angry drunk skunks wasn’t something we wanted to deal with. When we finally got them all loaded, Rick took pity on me and volunteered to drive the skunks to their new home by himself. That’s just the way Rick is. “There’s no reason for both of us to get sprayed,” he said, the brave Marine to the bitter end. I agreed to let him martyr himself. It was shortly after midnight when he slammed the tailgate and took off. I watched him drive away, worried about how the evening would end for him. I’d learned the hard way that strategies for wildlife management rarely go as planned. The next day when I got to work I expected to be able to smell Rick before I could see him, but that wasn’t the case. He was at work before I got there, which was the norm, looking fresh and bright as always. “How’d it go?” I asked. “As I went around the Loop Road,” Rick said, “I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw a skunk rared up against the side of the truck bed, trying to look out. I was pretty surprised to see that one of em had managed to get outta the cage. “I kept checking in the mirror as I drove and more and more of the rascals were getting out. In a few minutes, a row of little black and white heads was lining both sides of the truck bed. “I figured there must be a hole in the cage and decided I better fix it, so I stopped the truck and went back to take a look at what was going on. Well, at least half the skunks were awake and they were milling around, coming and going through the chain link cage with no trouble at all. “Only then did I remember that skunks are members of the weasel family. They’re all hair! But there was nothing I could do about it, so I jumped back in the truck and took off again. “As I drove, more and more of em woke up until it looked like all of em were outta the cage, rared up, looking out over the sides of the truck. “My original plan had been to get to the new location while all the skunks were still asleep, lay em out on the ground, and then take off before they woke up. But now, I needed a new plan. “Let me tell you, seventy-seven skunks is a boatload. And every one of them was wide awake by the time I got to Sam’s Gap. I was afraid to grab any of em for fear they’d spray me, so there was nothing else to do, but park the boar with the back of it downhill, jerk the tailgate open, and run. “So that’s what I did. “I watched from about ten yards away while the skunks milled around in the bed of the truck. Some of them glanced over the edge of the tailgate outta curiosity, but not a single one jumped out. So, I waited some more. “Then I realized I’d never actually seen a skunk jump. I wondered if maybe they didn’t know how to jump. Maybe they were never going to be able to jump outta the truck. I waited a little longer to be sure, but it was getting really late. “I decided to build a ramp for them to walk down, so I looked around for some logs or something. But I couldn’t find anything to use. By this time it was nearly three in the morning and I was tired. It’d been a really long day. “I sneaked up to the back of the truck and watched for a flash of white near the edge of the tailgate. When I saw it, I snatched the skunk by the tail and tossed it to the ground. I did it again and again, every time one of em came near the edge of the tailgate. It took a long time. But because they’re so tame, they never did get scared or mad at me. “After I’d off-loaded the last one, I turned to go get in the truck and felt something on my boots. I looked down and there was this huge cluster of skunks at my feet. Not one of them had run off. “It dawned on me that they’d been raised around people and underneath campers, so they didn’t think of the woods or a field as home. They were staying underneath the truck or right next to me because that was all they knew! “It was surreal. Skunk’s eyes glow really bright at night and they were staring at me. I shuffled through them to get to the driver’s door, got in, and started the boar. I eased away, creeping along until I’d gotten away from them. It wasn’t hard, skunks don’t move very fast. “I could see all those glowing eyes in the rear view mirror, then I floored it and got outta there so fast there was no way they could follow me. And I never did get sprayed.” Interesting Skunk Fact Although nobody got sprayed during the relocation process, several hours later the boar and Rick and I all began to smell like skunk anyway. Rick and I washed everything really well and Cloroxed our hands several times. The skunk smell would go away for a while, then it would come back. This fading and re-appearing of the smell went on for about two weeks. It was crazy. Rick mentioned it to me and remarked that there was no odor in the morning, but it came back at about two in the afternoon and then again at about six at night. I said the same thing had been happening to me! Well, it turns out that brass is oily and absorbs odors. Our Park Service belt buckles are made of brass. Our hands and clothes were clean, but after we touched our belt buckles a few times during the day, our hands were picking up the skunk smell again. So, we soaked our ranger badges and belt buckles in Clorox and that solved the problem at least for our hardware. Twenty-five years later, my wife still swears that she smells skunk when I sweat. So, in consideration of my wife, I do my best to never sweat anymore.
Jourdan, Carolyn. Bear in the Back Seat: Adventures of a Wildlife Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Smokies Wildlife Ranger Book 1 (pp. 99-104). Zo’o Media. Kindle Edition.