Gray Wolves

Alex Re

Hello, welcome to on wildlife. I'm your host, Alex Re, on this podcast, we bring the wild to you, we take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every week. And I guarantee you, you're gonna come out of here knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before. Now this is a little bit of a topical episode because of some recent legislation that's been passed in Idaho that has to do with our animal. I'm no law expert, but luckily, I got to sit down with someone who is you're going to hear me have a chat with Colette Atkins, who is the carnivore conservation director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. So join me as we traveled to the forests of North America to talk about one of the top predators in their respective ecosystems. gray wolves.

Grey wolves can be found in the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia. And they can get to be over five feet long and weigh almost 150 pounds. And usually where they live. They're the apex predators, meaning that they're at the top of the food chain. This also means that they're carnivores. They mainly eat deer and other deer like animals, but can also eat smaller mammals. And they can eat over 20 pounds of food every single day. Wolves are really intelligent animals, and they hunt in packs, which is important because they're usually taking down prey that's a lot bigger than them. When they chase their prey, they even watch to see what weaknesses they have so they can take advantage of it. This pack hunting strategy requires a lot of communication and strong relationships between each member. And gray wolves are an integral part of the food web where they live, but their populations have been hit really hard since the 1800s. Fortunately, because of conservation efforts, some populations have been slowly making a recovery. But a recent bill passed in Idaho might change that. This bill allows hunters to kill around 90% of the wolves in that state. This could be devastating to the wildlife there. So Colette is going to talk us through that and how we can help. Okay, there's a lot more information to get through because after the break, you're gonna hear my interview with Colette Atkins.

On this week's episode of notable figures in science, I want to recognize Florence Nightingale. She was born in the early 1800s and has done so much for the practice of nursing. She housed British soldiers in the Crimean War in Turkey, and even worked to rebuild the hospital there. There were a lot of sanitation issues in this hospital. So she was able to fix these problems, which caused mortality rates to drop dramatically. On top of all this, she also created the nightingale training school, the nightingale Fund, and the Royal Commission on the health of the army, all of which made significant impact on modern nursing. We can thank her for many of the practices that nurses use today to treat patients. If you want to learn more about Florence Nightingale or this series, check out on wildlife.org

Okay, we're back. Here's my interview with Colette Adkins. Hi, Colette, how are you doing? I'm just fine. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you so much for coming on. I really can't wait to start talking about wolves and your life experience with you. Oh, I appreciate that. I love talking about wolves. And I appreciate the opportunity. Awesome. Well, first, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in helping wildlife?

Collette Adkins

Sure. So I am the carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. And this really is a dream job for me. Even as a young child, I wanted to someday work to protect wildlife and getting this to this point did require, you know, whole a whole lot of I went to graduate school to study wildlife conservation, and I went to law school to get a law degree focused in wildlife law. And then now I've been at the center for about 10 years. And really, every day I get to do what I I love which is to fight for these really magnificent and ecologically important animals like wolves and grizzly bears.

Alex Re

That's amazing. And it's really you're you're doing such great work. So could you just talk a little bit more More about what you do on a day to day basis.

Collette Adkins

So the Center for Biological Diversity is a national nonprofit organization. And our mission focuses on protection of rare wildlife. And what I do on a day to day basis is, you know, really using both my background in science and law to find ways to advocate for some of the nation's rarest carnivores. So, wolves, for example, that we think still should be protected as endangered species working to try to get them back on the list of endangered species through court arguments. We do a lot of work trying to convince decision makers to do right by wildlife. So submitting comment letters of writing action alerts to our members where they can do, like, click here to send the letter to President Biden to ask him to, you know, that kind of thing. And then also trying to get species listed under the Endangered Species Act. You know, once an animal gets those protections, it's one of the really the best tools to put them on the path to recovery. So using the science, about the threats to species and their status, we put all that together and documents and submit them to the the Fish and Wildlife Service. But that's the federal agency that manages wildlife here in the United States, and ask them to to get them protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Alex Re

The Endangered Species Act was a law that was passed in the 70s. And it was meant to support and protect endangered species. That's great. And I can't imagine that trying to change people's minds about you know, making certain laws and stuff can be pretty tough. So I'm just interested to know, what are some of the biggest challenges you faced at the Center for Biological Diversity?

Collette Adkins

Yeah, that's absolutely right. It really is hard to get to the result that you that you want, and especially with controversial species, like wolves, where it seems like people either love them or hate them. And there can be really powerful special interest groups that are that are aligned against wolves, for example, trophy hunting groups, or big, big agar business that runs into conflicts with wolves, livestock. So those those groups have a lot of power in our government and have really been pushing to prematurely remove protections for wolves, that's been the biggest challenge we face in the wolf work. But in even with like grizzly bear work, it's the species that were once found across, you know, a huge chunk of the United States that are now reduced to these small little core populations. And unfortunately, the, the governmental agencies that are in charge to recovering wildlife, they, they seem to just want to ensure survival of wildlife instead of ensuring conservation and allowing them to once again fulfill their important ecological roles by being found across various ecosystems. So you know, like with, with grizzly bears, for example, they're only found now in the Northern Rockies, and maybe a few scattering up in Washington, but they are wants found data from the west coast all the way to the Great Plains. And we would really like to see them again, in places like the Sierra Nevada of California, or the southern Rockies, you know, in in Colorado, but it seems like the Fish and Wildlife Service is satisfied to just have them only in the Northern Rockies, you know, in Alaska, and that's just not good enough.

Alex Re

Yeah, that's really sad. And just because a species isn't technically endangered, doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to protect them and and help them thrive as much as we can.

Collette Adkins

Yeah, they play such important ecological roles. I mean, think of wolves, for example, they are reintroduced into Yellowstone. And because they are protected under the Endangered Species Act, and they had this huge impact on the environment, but also think of all the people that traveled Yellowstone in the hopes of seeing wolves and then from being reintroduced there, they expanded so that they're, you know, with the you know, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and then spread from there up until the northern cascades that we have them now and Washington In Oregon, and then they spread down. Now we've got a few populations down in California. With protections, they can come back to these places where they once were. Yeah, we really would like to see that happen in more places like, for example, Colorado.

Alex Re

Yeah, definitely. And that's such an awesome example of us helping with the conservation of an organism that was once very rare and, and their populations are doing a lot better now. So, and one of the animals that you were talking about is the gray wolf, and they have a history of struggling population size, were they ever on the brink of extinction?

Collette Adkins

This is really about righting a wrong of the past, because we once had probably 2 million wolves here. And the government funded an extermination campaign, because they were considered, you know, competition for game, a threat to the livestock industry. So the government put down poisons paid people to hunt and trap them. And they went from being found across almost the entire United States to just, you know, far extreme Northeastern Minnesota, in the wilderness and a couple other places. And with the protections of the Endangered Species Act, which made it so that it was illegal to, to hunt and trap them, their populations grew. And it really does show that, you know, if we can, that we can do right by these animals and make a real difference. So now, their populations have grown to the point where the Fish and Wildlife Service has now removed their protections. Unfortunately, what we've seen now is that those old hostilities to wall still remain in some places. So in Idaho and Montana, for example, just in this last month, our legislation was passed in Idaho that would require the killing of 90% of that state's population just absolutely. just devastating. It would lose decades of recovery progress, and kill wolves and really cruel, cruel ways like snares, and leghold traps. And we've just really think that that's a tragedy, and it will bring us really repeating the errors of the past. And so we're hoping to get them protected once again, so that we don't lose all these amazing animals.

Alex Re

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like because wolves are these big predators, people feel maybe threatened by them or feel like they hunt so we can hunt them or something like that. And that's one of the reasons why I feel like there's such a big issue with people going out, and specifically hunting wolves. And do you think that this could have an impact on the rest of the wildlife there?

Collette Adkins

Oh, for sure. I mean, wolves, for example, strengthen populations of their prey, like elk and deer by removing the old animals and the sick.

Alex Re

Wolves are what we call keystone species, because they're absolutely critical to the environments that they live in.

Collette Adkins

When you don't have a predator. animals like elk will just stay quite stationary, and they can really wreak havoc to the environment. That was one of the things we saw in Yellowstone is that when wolves were reintroduced, elk began to have to move rather than to just stand in herds next to the rivers. And then the willows along, the rivers began to regrow. And then he had some bird populations that had been declining started to grow. And even the way that the rivers flowed change, because the willows stabilized the banks of the river. So we see these it's called a trophic cascade, where you see these ripple effects of improved environmental health because of the restoration of this top predator.

Alex Re

That's amazing that you could see such a such a change in the entire ecosystem, just from the reintroduction of one population. That's, that's awesome. Yeah. And you kind of deal with science and law aspects. So in your experience, how intertwined are animal conservation and government policy?

Collette Adkins

Oh, boy, it is absolutely intertwined. I mean, the law that I mostly use as a lawyer is the Endangered Species Act, and it has a requirement that the decisions be based on best available science. So that's really the task of environmental advocates like me is to show the government that the science proves that either you know, the animal needs protection, it needs to be recovered in additional places and faces these additional threats that you need to address. That's the role we face and then and then in the the lawyer hat comes on if the government nevertheless doesn't do what we think the science demands, and then we can bring the agency to court and force them to follow the science.

Alex Re

Okay, great. So that it's pretty, pretty intertwined. Really, yes. Yeah. And how can the average person fight for animal conservation within politics

Collette Adkins

was, it really makes a big difference to have public support, and especially with local, state level wildlife management now that we've seen protection that the federal level removed from, let's say, wolves, for example, these decisions are being made by state wildlife agencies. So in Minnesota, where I live, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is now in charge of wolf management. So they're contemplating whether or not to have a hunt this fall, if so, what the quotas would be. And they're having lots of ways for the public to be able to participate in that through like online surveys, you can testify through zoom at hearings, there's even a stakeholder group to help rewrite the management plan. And that's a citizen stakeholder group. So there's just that's just one glimpse of a way that, you know, other dedicated activists could really get involved in state management. But that's, that's in Minnesota, but this is happening all across the country. And Wisconsin is going through that same process for wolves and Michigan. And when that legislation came up in Idaho and Montana to decimate those wolf populations, there were so many people that, you know, called and write, wrote letters to their, their state legislators, sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. And, you know, fighting the good fight, at least, helps you know, at the end of the day, you did what she could.

Alex Re

That's awesome. So there's, there's a ton of ways that people can help. And you might think that maybe just one person can't do something. But if one person changes the mind of another person, and they change the mind of another person, you can really cause a really big stir.

Collette Adkins

Oh, for sure, yeah. When the the Fish and Wildlife Service put forward the proposal to remove protections from wolves nationwide, the center launched this big campaign to get just ordinary people to go to libraries and farmers markets and co ops and set up tables to tell people what was happening and to gather signatures. And there were more people that submitted comments on that proposal than any other action in the history of the Endangered Species Act. You know, millions of online comments and nearly 60,000 handwritten letters to the Fish and Wildlife Service. And first day of Biden's first day in office, he issued an executive order, demanding that the Fish and Wildlife Service take another look at that decision. And that review is happening now. And we're absolutely convinced that that was because of the huge public outrage.

Alex Re

That's so cool. That's, I mean, it's just so awesome that the average person can have a say in these huge legislations. For me, it's part of being able to,

Collette Adkins

to like cope with the emotional burden of knowing that bad things happen in the world. if if if we were just watching this extinction crisis happening and all these wildlife populations declining, but not having anything to do about it. That really would be pretty sad situation. But knowing that you can fight to make things better. I think it just gives us some hope, like allows us to keep working to do good work.

Alex Re

Yeah, that definitely gives me hope, too. So how can we support the Center for Biological Diversity?

Collette Adkins

Well, one of the best thing is to sign up to get our action alerts because then you can do those things like, you know, click here to find the phone number of your governor to you know, whatever. So if you go to our website, which is your biological diversity, that org, you can support us that way. And we also appreciate and rely on donations from our, our members. And by signing up for those e newsletters and the action alerts, it will just give you so many other ways that you can participate

Alex Re

That's awesome. So everybody, please go check out the Center for Biological Diversity. And Colette, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with me. Well, I really appreciate the chance to chat with you about it. It's something I really care about. Colette really taught us how important gray wolves are to the ecosystems that they live in, and why they deserve to be protected. I love her enthusiasm about getting members of the community to work towards change. And I think it's important to know that we all have a voice in helping this cause. Of course, definitely go check out the Center for Biological Diversity to other organizations that are working to help grey wolves right now that you should really go take a look at our the international wolf center, and the National wolf watcher coalition. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me as we explore the world of grey wolves. You can find the sources that we use for this podcast, and links to organizations that we reference at on wildlife.org. You can also email us with any questions at on wildlife dot podcast@gmail.com and you can follow us on Instagram at en underscore wildlife and on Tick Tock at on wildlife. Don't forget to tune in next Wednesday for another awesome episode. And that's on wildlife.

Jess Avellino

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai