Wildlife on the Wind: A Field Biologist's Journey and an Indian Reservation's Renewal

Chapter 3: First Elk

49 3 First Elk T wo weeks after arriving in Wyoming, I saw my first reservation elk from a Cessna 182 airplane. Dick Baldes cobbled together the dollars for six hours of flight time over winter ranges in the Wind River Range and Owl Creek Mountains. The new wildlife program’s budget made no allowance for such niceties. For the remainder of fiscal year 1978 it was spartan. Typically, wildlife surveys are flown during winter or early spring, when snow restricts big game to limited areas. As a further advantage, the snow background makes animals stand out like Winnebagos in a parking lot. Well, not quite that clearly, as it turns out. Besides counting observed animals, biologists classify them by sex and by age—sometimes distinguishing just young of the year and adults, and sometimes including additional age classes depending upon the species and objectives of the survey. From these classifications, we determine sex ratios (expressed as adult males per 100 adult females) and recruitment (number of young per 100 adult females). Wildlife managers then estimate the size and makeup of populations, charting trends over time like financial planners gauging the past and future performance of an investment portfolio. Later in my career, I would use computerbased population models to do the math. In minutes they Wildlife on the Wind 50 would churn out predictions of population growth and harvestable surplus that I had to painstakingly derive from simple calculator computations while at WRIR. Because this first flight occurred on May 20, animals were scattered. Males had shed their antlers already, and last year’s calves, fawns, and lambs—now nearly one year old—were putting on post-winter growth, making them hard to distinguish from older animals. It was little more than an orientation flight—an opportunity for Dick to show me areas where he knew elk, mule deer, and bighorn sheep wintered. Flying conditions can be iffy in spring. That day was clear but winds aloft were gusty, up to 40 knots as my stomach recalls. As the westerly flow tumbled down the eastern tilt of the Wind Rivers, the turbulence buffeted our single-engine, four-seat aircraft with bumps, lurches, and sudden drops in altitude that were downright unnerving. Compounding the effect, our pilot steeply banked and tightly circled each group of animals so we could count them. I felt my cheeks trying to peel off the underlying bone as a trickle of sweat traced my spine. Eyes glued to animals slipping by at 60 miles per hour, I often lost track of the horizon; the reference to which way is up. That is when the head grows light. Then the Cessna pitched onto its opposite side, and hello vertigo! Welcome to wildlife surveying. Some sage wildlifers advise eating nothing before a flight. Others hazard the emptying of a well-filled stomach when air sickness strikes. Sitting behind the wing in the back seat, I had only an oblique view of the horizon ahead. Worse yet, each bump was exaggerated in the back compared to Dick’s wing-side seat next to our pilot. Fortunately, I had been through this before. By now I had logged over 200 hours in single-engine airplanes—Piper Cubs, Super Cubs, Citabrias, and Cessnas. During two seasonal appointments with the USFWS in First Elk 51 Elk surveys in Wind River Mountains from a Cessna 182, May 1978 Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1976 and 1977, I worked with five other biologists capturing and radio monitoring grouse, eagles, owls, hawks, pronghorns, white-tailed and mule deer, bobcats, and coyotes. We fitted hundreds of animals with radio transmitters embedded in collars and tiny backpacks , or glued to the base of tail feathers. I was the newcomer to the project and did whatever the others needed. Several of my colleagues had no stomach for three hours of tight circles in cramped cockpits, so I became the designated radio-tracker. I learned the art of directing pilots to the “ping, ping, ping” cadence chiming in my headphones to pinpoint a signal. I saw the big picture of our study area spanning the Wyoming-Montana border and witnessed in “real time” how each species used the landscape. I savored the challenge of finding the nesting location of wayward sage-grouse or the summer retreat of a pronghorn 40 miles distant from its winter capture site. Each flight brought new surprises: another glimpse into the life of...