Elk Conservation in Yellowstone, LIVE! | Yellowstone Live

Yeah, it's more like my hair. You look, you know people pay to have wind blow swings, right? Great! Hi, I'm Amber Ghoshal here with Arthur Middleton. He's an animal ecologist and a NatGeo Explorer. We are in very windy West Yellowstone at Under Canvas. It is pretty windy out here.

It is windy, but it's not as windy as it usually is. Yeah, no kidding! It seems like this picks up throughout the day. Arthur is an amazing guy with an incredible story. He is, like I said, an explorer for NatGeo Society. Can you tell us a little bit about what you study at UC Berkeley?

Yeah, so I'm a professor at UC Berkeley. I am an ecologist. I work mostly on large mammals, and a lot of my work is in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. So it's trying to understand why these big mammals, like the hoofed mammals, the ungulates, and the carnivores, the big tooth mammals, are important in ecosystems and how their wide-ranging movements end up getting them into conflict. Then how can we help reduce some of those conflicts with people over time?

Yeah, so in case you guys don't know, the animals, of course, do not know, make up national parks. They kind of go into the Greater Yellowstone area, and they need to be able to migrate in order to reproduce, right?

Right, right, right. So these animals have evolved this behavior, migration, which we define as occupying two entirely distinct parts of the landscape at different times of the year. In this landscape, they're in one area in the winter, one in another area in the summer, and those might be ten miles or 175 miles apart. There's a range of migration distances. What they're doing is they're following the flush of green grass up into the high mountains and onto the plateaus in summer. That grass stays green all summer, even into the fall when it turns brown down low, and it's better food for these animals.

So elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, moose, bison—ooh, am I forgetting bighorn sheep? Those are the six migratory hoofed mammals, or ungulates, we call them in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. They're going up to get that green grass. That's how they build fat. They use that fat to nurse their offspring through the summer to be able to conceive again for the next year, and then they bring the rest of that fat with them down to the winter ranges where it helps them survive through the long cold winter. They're mainly going down to those winter ranges to get away from deep snow up at the higher elevations.

So they're using those big migrations to optimize their reproduction and survival across the landscape. And you're right; they don't understand the boundaries. We've made a lot of boundaries on the landscape.

And it kind of sounds like these ungulates are kind of like bears in that they're built for the winter, right?

No, they don't hibernate, but they're building up.

That's a great point, Amber. So hibernation and migration are, you know, to speak a bit crudely about it, there are two strategies to deal with the same seasonality in this landscape. Summer is awesome; winter sucks! Unless you're a skier or whatever.

Yeah, or a wolf. Actually, for wolves, it's great because that's when everybody else is vulnerable, and so they take advantage of that. But the point is all these animals are deploying some strategy. For the ungulates, it's often migration to deal with the seasonality of resources and risks across a huge landscape.

Now, guys, we are taking your questions in the comments of these videos, both on Facebook and YouTube, wherever you're watching. One of the questions we just had come in is: Are there any species of ungulate that migrate that are also invasive to Yellowstone?

That's a good question! I was thinking, as I said, the white-tailed deer. The white-tailed deer is present in this landscape in really low numbers. They're not necessarily evasive, but as the West has been settled, they benefit from—they've come in greater numbers from the Midwest and other areas. They benefit from irrigation and cultivation, and so that's kind of boosted their numbers in the West. So that would be the closest.

So, you know, a lot of our viewers at home, a lot of you guys are sitting on your couch in suburban America. You're not out here in all of this vast nature. Why should these people care about these ungulates at all?

They should care about these ungulates! I'm gonna give you two main reasons. If they want to experience Yellowstone or they want to experience Yellowstone in the future, when you see one of these animals—an elk, I’m going to use the example of an elk—there is a very good chance that animal, for the other half of the year when it's not on display for the park visitor, is on say a private ranch 60 miles outside, far outside the park, or is managed by a state wildlife agency that has to do a lot of work to manage that population.

So it's really important for people to understand and support the kinds of activities outside the park that will keep those wildlife healthy and abundant. And you know, if they want to experience Yellowstone as we know it, it's not a box. The animals depend on a much larger area.

The second thing I would say, that's the story of parks around the world, no park—almost no park—is big enough to sustain entirely the wildlife that we associate with it. Even Serengeti National Park, you know the wildebeest, which are like the Hulk, you know the counterpart to the elk and the deer and the pronghorn right here? They move far outside that huge park.

One of the world's biggest, the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the biggest protected areas in the world, the porcupine caribou herd is outside of that protected area for part of the year. It's crucial for people to understand if they want parks to produce the natural wonders, you know, the wildlife that dazzle them, then they need to be a part of thinking about that transboundary dimension and how to get a lot of stakeholders across many jurisdictions, you know, into that story and contributing to conservation into the future of those populations.

Yeah, so you mentioned that for part of the year a lot of these animals are outside of the protected areas. So what do people do or should they be doing outside? Do they get trapped in fences or anything like that?

That's a really good question. When people ask me why are the migrations so important, you know, one of the things I sometimes say is like you do a thought experiment—Yellowstone National Park. If its boundary had a fence that these animals couldn't pass through, and they were trapped inside there, populations would crash. The carnivores and scavengers that feed on them with those populations would, after a few years, begin to crash.

We're never gonna put a fence or a wall around Yellowstone, but what we are doing is in little ways, all over the place over time, clogging up these migration routes, nibbling away at the winter ranges that are out there. People love Yellowstone; they want to buy a second home next to Yellowstone. Well, often—often without necessarily, you know, understanding it—if those developments aren't well planned, they're snarfing up a little bit more of that critical wildlife habitat that's important to the park.

So it's residential development in some of the outlying valleys—some much, much more extreme than others. It's fences because just old fencing from sheep ranching, you know, up to a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, that's maybe not even active anymore. But those fences haven't been taken down; they create blockages to migrations. They cause animals to get hung up or to waste energy looking for, you know, new routes—roads with a lot of highway traffic and collisions that kill animals that endanger drivers as well.

Sometimes it's energy development. There are ways to do these developments responsibly, and there are ways to do them less responsibly, and that can really matter to these populations. A really intensive development—residential or energy development—we know can erode the productivity, the survival of some of these populations.

So it's kind of a, you know, a little bit of all those things. And one of the scariest things about migrations is it's not often that we lose them suddenly all together in a dramatic fashion that's noticeable. It seems like it's this kind of death by a thousand cuts.

Yeah, and so what we need is for, you know, we need to think about how and where we're doing different types of development. We need to think about making fences wildlife friendly or removing the ones we don't need anymore. We need to think about protecting, you know, habitats in some cases when they're really, really important.

We need overpasses and underpasses on highways that allow safe passage, land bridges, right?

Yeah. Call them whatever you want. They can be really important for these wildlife to move and for human safety. So, you know, what's happened is we've got this revolution in collaring. We're starting to see the migrations because of all this GPS data, and hopefully that leads to revolution in how we're doing conservation to essentially design a landscape that's going to keep these animals moving freely so that we can keep Yellowstone and similar landscapes healthy.

So one question we did have from another viewer is which of these ungulates, if any, are endangered or are they close to becoming endangered?

That's a great question, and I get asked it a lot. With these ungulates, really, I mean, none of them are formally endangered as in listed, you know, under the Endangered Species Act. Few in this landscape are, you know, even sort of loosely what we would call endangered.

What's endangered—and it's a little of a conceptual leap for people because we so often think about rarity and endangerment—what's endangered around the world is migration. Wow, so that behavior. So there are lots of ungulates in the world, but not all of them still retain their intact migrations. There are lots of mule deer in the world, but a lot of them are losing that ability to migrate.

So what's confusing, understandably, is it's not always that we're losing the species; it's that we're losing their ability to engage in a behavior that makes them thrive and abundant. The reason that's important is because when they can't migrate anymore, they will occur at lower numbers, or they will have to depend on irrigated agriculture. They'll be eating people's crops, things like that. And when they're occurring at lower numbers because they can't migrate, you can feed fewer carnivores like grizzly bears and wolves. You can feed fewer scavengers like golden eagles and foxes and coyotes and ravens. You can allow less hunting, which is economically important in many areas.

So it is that behavior—that behavior of migration—that we're trying to conserve as much as possible because it provides us such a diversity of, sort of, goods and services, if you will. And so that's a really important thing for people to understand. If by the time we're talking about these species being endangered, we will have lost all the migrations and this beautiful, traditional, important behavior of these populations.

Yeah, so it's kind of important to act before it's too late, is what it sounds like. I know you mentioned a couple of birds just now. We have some, like, pretty interesting things behind us. We've been having—or at least we have been having—some swans, some geese. Is there anything very interesting about their migrations as well?

Yeah, there are. So, I mean, I actually have a friend I took into the field once, named James Prosaic. He's an artist, and I was with James over to another catastrophe to explore. Talking Joe and I were kind of getting out on the Gillett Sepang. Horn that oak, James said, "Hey guys, that little red bird in the tree up there next to our fire in our camp one morning drinking coffee said that's a Western Tanager."

And it came here from probably Mexico or Costa Rica. And we all kind of, you know, it—and that's so we talked about the ungulates. They migrated impressive distances up to 175 miles. Actually, there's a mule deer collared by my friends in the Wyoming Migration Initiative, where you can go to learn a lot more about the migrations. That is in near West Yellowstone this summer, and she's more than 200 miles from near Rock Springs, Wyoming, down by I-80.

That's the 200 miles that way. Wow, so that's how far she's traveled now. But you go to the birds, and we get into thousand-mile migrations and the transcontinental migration. So there's a thing that the trumpeter swan behind us—those swans come down much further north for the summer. We've been hearing some sandhill cranes. There's a pair of sandhill cranes not too far away from us. They spend the winter down in, well, over in Nebraska, down into Texas and parts of the southwest and the southern Midwest.

So yeah, I mean, there's Harlequin ducks in Yellowstone; they go to Vancouver, you know? So this gets back to that thing about why should people care. If you want to see the richness of life that we expect in Yellowstone and enjoy other parks, we have to take care of the rest of the planet because these animals are coming from the rest of the planet.

Yeah. One other question we got from a viewer on YouTube is, is climate change at all affecting these migrations?

That's a really good question. The short answer is, it seems, the answer is yes, but the real question is how well can they kind of adapt to those changes? So to be more specific, we are seeing some changes in the timing of migration when these animals depart and arrive on their summer ranges and winter ranges. We have seen in one elk study I was involved in what seemed to be some effects of the most severe drought, the hottest summer temperatures in, if not thousands of years, depending on kind of which climate records you look at, that affected their pregnancy rates of those animals.

So we're seeing some of that. It's, you know, it's sometimes it's hard to determine whether we're having this really severe drought—well, this is a drought-prone landscape—but it seems like droughts are more frequent and more severe. So that does seem like an effective climate change.

I think one of the big questions going forward is how well can these animals adjust? Migration is a very flexible behavior, so they might be able to adjust their timing to still be able to take advantage of the food and take advantage of the shelter at slightly different times of the year. My lab at UC Berkeley is working actively with some colleagues on trying to figure some of that out. In fact, we've got data aggregated with partners around the system - the state agencies, the federal agencies, other universities—a big kind of big data set on these migrations to be able to ask some of those questions, I think, pretty powerfully.

So ask me this again in six months or a year or two years, and I'll have an even better answer!

I'm going to hold you to that!

Okay! Sometimes these issues can seem so big, so out of our reach. What are a couple of things that people can do at home to kind of help not only just the animals here that are migrating but just animals throughout the world that aren't migrating?

I'm gonna get a little philosophical.

Alright, get philosophical! Let's do it!

Get a little esoteric here. I do have a Doctor of Philosophy, so let's break it out loud to do that. One of the things that scares me the most right now is how polarized and fractured people are in our country and in the world. And I'm going to tell you why from a standpoint of wildlife. When you look at migrations, these animals depend—when you follow a migration corridor that's a hundred miles long—they depend on 20, 30, 40, 50 private landowners. They depend on multiple state and federal agencies. They depend on public lands and private lands.

They depend on a lot of people's decisions who are working under overlapping but not always totally aligned missions and perspectives. People have to work together. And people who are listening, I know it's hard, but when you're thinking about conservation, I know there's a lot of passion and a lot of controversy and a lot of reasons to be alarmed. But we need people to encourage collaboration. We need people to understand other people's perspectives and be able to work across the fence lines, so to speak.

That's one of the things that's so great about studying the migrations—nothing illustrates it more clearly. We could be talking about, you know, grizzly bears or wolves or any of these animals that move big distances. We need people working together, but not pushing each other further into, you know, other ends of the world.

There's a huge need in conservation for collaboration, for partnership. We don't always have to agree; we're not always going to. But how can we just put some extra effort into it? Because if we don't do that along some of these migration corridors, we will slowly lose them, because we won't be working together to identify solutions, find common ground, and mend those fences, you know, those differences.

There are also specific things. I mean, think about fences and roadways and habitat conservation and sensible development. Not we're never going to develop anything, but just we need to use landscapes like this wisely and carefully and work in sort of common cause to do that.

Great! Well, thank you so much, Arthur. Where can people go to find out more about what you're working on?

People can go to my lab's website at the University of California, Berkeley—the Middleton Lab. We're in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. I work at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, in the summer. That's my sort of summer lab, so to speak. They can come see us at the Buffalo Bill Center in Cody. Or, finally, I'll say the Wyoming Migration Initiative.

I'm affiliated with Stone and Laramie, Wyoming. They've got an amazing website, Facebook pages, and research coming out all the time. For example, that doe mule deer who's up here spending the summer here—you can see updated maps of her movements and sort of follow along and root for her and other migrating animals. So go to the Wyoming Migration Initiative's website and social media!

Amazing! And then NatGeo Society, our friends over there, also have a great initiative that is all about kind of like helping out the species here in Yellowstone. It's called Beyond Yellowstone. Definitely go check that out! We'll put a link to it in the comments down below. They're really great.

And of course, be sure to tune in for Yellowstone Live starting this Sunday at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo and Nat Geo Wild. Arthur, you're going to be in it a little bit, too!

Yeah, I guess if I sound good!

You are great; you are great!

Yeah, go watch it! I'm gonna watch it, too! Amazing! Thank you so much, guys! Thanks for watching, everyone! Bye!