Hilary Eisen:
The topic is wildlife and winter recreation. You know, this is a topic that I get really excited about because before I was a conservation policy nerd, I was a wildlife biology nerd, so just kind of combines my interests here. And as we heard about in just the panel right before, we touched a bit on, like, there's a lot of people out recreating in the winter. We maybe don't know exactly how many, and we have different ways of capturing what they're doing, where they're going, who they are, but the general consensus is there's a lot of us, and just based on, you know, our collective experience, I think we can all also attest the fact that there are more people recreating in winter now than there were previously. You know, we have more ways of recreating our technology has made it easier to get out in the backcountry and to go further whether you're on foot or on a machine or using some combination of those two things. So this has really become a growing conservation concern because winter is also a really tough time for wildlife, particularly for ungulates. So for deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, those are animals that their whole survival strategy, and Sarah, maybe the true biologists on this can correct me if I'm wrong here, but their strategy is basically like, eat as much as you can in the summer and the fall, and then starve your way, hopefully not all the way to death until spring and green up and you start the cycle over. And so, you know, ungulates survival strategy in winter is like, don't move, you know, conserve resources. And, but it's also don't get eaten by predators and we are perceived as predators. Sometimes we are predators, sometimes we're not, but that's how we're perceived. And so when wildlife, ungulates in particular, interact or encounter humans in the wintertime, you know, there's, they can be habituated in certain cases, but particularly in the backcountry, that's a startling thing. They move or they become more aware. One way or another they end up burning more calories, which messes with that equation of eat as much as you can, starve your way, don't die. So this is a big conservation concern. And Winter Wildlands is really fortunate to be working with a number of really interesting and smart people and organizations across the country on solutions for how to address this. And today we're going to hear from three of those partners. So I'll just have folks introduce themselves. Sarah, I'll start with you, and then we'll come back this way.
Sarah Dewey:
I'm Sarah Dewey. I'm a wildlife biologist at Grand Teton National Park in northwest Wyoming, and I am primarily the ungulate biologist there in the park, and as Hillary mentioned, those are the mammals with hooves. So for us, think bison, elk, moose, bighorn sheep. Those are the critters. I've been there in the park for about 20 years;worked on all kinds of issues, and Also done a little bit of work with black bears and grizzly bears and wolves.
Mike Crosby:
My name is Mike Crosby. I'm a retired Guy, that's what I do. But I my career was I was a wildlife manager for the state of Colorado In the next County just to the west here called Grand County. It's called Middle Park. There's three parks in the state, North Park, Middle Park, South Park, and the San Luis Valley. They're all high mountain parks, and it's a sagebrush basin, basically. And in my job, I manage wildlife, and that was multipurpose in the sense that we did law enforcement, big game management, sheep transplants, and I focused myself pretty much on habitat work.
Kurt Hellmann:
My name is Kurt Hellmann. and I work with a nonprofit based in Washington State. It's called Conservation Northwest. We connect, protect, and restore wildlife and wildlands. I was hired on a couple years ago with this nonprofit to get mixed up in wildlife and recreation coexistence and how to improve the dynamics between wildlife and recreation use across public lands. And to be perfectly frank, I am not a scientist. I actually come from a recreation background. I used to be a hiking guide. I worked for the Mountaineers, which is a part of Outdoor Alliance. Used to work for a trails association in Washington State, but I've always been a conservation nerd for quite some time. But yeah, I help connect wildlife science to recreation management policy, and then also connect that same science to outreach and education materials in the recreation community.
Hilary Eisen:
Cool, thanks everybody. And as you can see, good diversity of different landscapes and geographies here. So Sarah, I'm gonna start with you as the Grand Teton National Park biologist. We all know Grand Teton is a world-renowned winter recreation destination, and people come to the park to do everything from snowshoeing to skiing, some of the most challenging descents in the world. It's also renowned for its wildlife. It's part of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and you listed off some of the creatures that you're working with. As the park's wildlife biologist, what are you focused on in terms of winter recreation and wildlife conflict?
Sarah Dewey:
So a general paradigm in wildlife management is to provide secure winter habitat for primarily the ungulates, and what that means in practice is that some areas that are of high winter use by those ungulates might be closed to human entry for a period of time in the winter, and that and Hillary really did a bang up job like describing what the what is going on for ungulates in the winter, but you know winter is the is the most stressful time. It is a period of resource scarcity, and so what animals do in seasonally variable environments, so by that I mean like in in in Jackson in the winter it's snow-covered it's really cold, there's high winds, if there's any food it might be covered in snow so it's not accessible. And so those animals are in energy conservation mode, and if we can eliminate disturbance to them and or an additional stressor, that may make the difference between them either not surviving or not being able you know these females are pregnant throughout the winter it may make the difference between them not being able to give birth to a viable young, and so this is a paradigm in wildlife management widely applied throughout the West well across the the US probably and in Grand Teton National Park, and also in the adjacent agencies there's a number of winter closures that have been in place for a number of years, and those are to protect primarily bison, elk, and mule deer. And the park has two small closures at high elevation to protect the bighorn sheep that live there, and because of the change in we've seen in visitation and the the growth in backcountry winter recreation we're now seeing more people and an expanding footprint of people going to places in the Tetons that they didn't used to go before, and so, you know, the National Park Service we have a really strong conservation mission. It is also to provide for the enjoyment of the people. But in order for people to enjoy those natural and cultural resources, they have to exist. And so we have a strong interest in protecting all of our wildlife resources. So I'm gonna shift more specifically to the bighorn sheep situation and provide a little bit of context for what kind of shaped how we approach this issue. So the bighorn sheep that live in the Tetons are a relic of a much larger historical population. And so if you think about large populations, they're way more robust and resilient. Now we have a pretty small population, and so we have to be pretty cautious in terms of how we monitor them. The other thing to know is that the landscape, the Tetons, there's multiple management jurisdictions involved. So there's two national forests, a national park, and the state wildlife management agency. So that provides for sort of a complex management setting. And bighorn sheep, they don't recognize jurisdictional boundaries in case you were unaware, but and so to address that, the biologists way before me more than 30 years ago, they formed a working group of all those members as a way to cooperatively do research and coordinate management across all those jurisdictions. One other consideration for the sheep is that because of the development in Jackson Hole and in Teton Valley, Idaho, they've lost access to what was their low elevation winter range. So now these sheep eke out a living exclusively at high elevations where, arguably, conditions are a lot more extreme and difficult than they were down in the valleys. And so essentially, the sheep have nowhere else to go. At the same time, it's becoming more appealing to backcountry winter recreationists, and so we've seen a big increase in those activities. And so, back in the 1990s, the working group developed a strategic plan, and even back then in the mid-'90s, they identified winter recreation as a concern. And so eventually there was a whole list of concerns and the working group had been plugging away at those for a long time. In the in the the late 2000s the working group initiated a study, a university-led study, where we deployed GPS radio callers on bighorn sheep and then asked skiers to carry GPS units so we could look at what the potential impacts might be of that overlap between skiers and in bighorn sheep. And essentially, and this is going to be like in a nutshell super distilled, happy to talk more about the results, but in a nutshell what came out of that work was a habitat model so that we knew what was the highest quality habitat for bighorn sheep in the Tetons. And then also what came out of that work was that bighorn sheep avoided areas of high backcountry winter recreation, even when those areas were really high quality habitat. So they just, in the wildlife profession, we call it indirect habitat loss. The habitat is still there. They just don't use it. Also, that avoidance behavior, in the most extreme cases, resulted in a loss of up to 30% of a habitat for some individuals. And both bighorn sheep that were in high-use and low-use recreation areas demonstrated that avoidance behavior. But those exposed to the highest levels, they showed increased daily movement rates. So equate that to burning more energy, and they had larger home ranges, again, also burning more energy. So how do you deal with this? You have an iconic species, and you have a place like the Tetons, where backcountry winter recreation is just entwined with the identity of the place. You know, the communities of Jackson and Victor and Driggs in Idaho, that is why so many of the residents live there is for the backcountry skiing. And so because the Tetons and backcountry winter recreation hold such deep value and emotional connection for many, many people, our working group recognized that we need to do something. We needed to try to come up with solutions for how to deal with this conflict. But we also recognize that our community engagement was really going to be vital to our success, and we needed to take a new approach. You know traditionally us federal agencies were all top down. Here's what we're doing. What do you think? okay I don't care, you know, we're doing it anyway, and and we didn't want to take that approach given the importance of backcountry winter recreation to our community, we opted to try a bottom-up approach which was pretty new and different, and if you can imagine four different entities trying to do this together it, you know, it it it didn't always go smoothly, but I think it's a good attempt. And so we tried what we called a collaborative learning process and I'll talk more about that later.
Hilary Eisen:
Great, thank you Sarah, and Kurt, jumping over to you, so Sarah talked about you know some of the work they're doing in this sphere around bighorn sheep and winter recreation and teased us for more later, and this is in the Tetons, and is there any overlap with what she's working on in Wyoming and what you work on in the Pacific Northwest? And what's similar? What's different? you know, tell us a bit about what goes on over there.
Kurt Hellmann:
Yeah to be succinct there are tons of parallels to what Sarah is speaking to and but to note one very stark difference is that Sarah's working on one specific species with its back against the wall in a lot of ways with a really increasing pressure that is recreation in addition to other pressures that wildlife face including climate change, including increasing residential and commercial development, but we're seeing a lot of those general themes in Washington State which, you know, the west side of the Cascades the Puget Sound is you know Seattle is nestled right in there is continuously one of the fastest growing cities in the lower 48 or in the US. So we're seeing this tension growing and growing with providing abundant accessible recreation opportunities, but also really being proactive in our wildlife management because we do know the general science that recreation can displace and disturb wildlife. A lot of my work for the past year was writing a literature report on the existing science for 15 Washington-specific species and what does mountain biking mean for elk? What does snowmobiling mean for wolverines? And in short, it's really complex stuff. It's extremely context-dependent, depending on what recreation activity you're talking about, what species you're talking about, what landscape are you talking about. You're talking about the high alpine or are you talking down in the lowlands? It really, really is truly context-dependent. So with that said, we need to invest in more research, more finer specific or like a finer scale specific management ideas that can work for wildlife species in a specific context and also for recreation in a very specific context and so given the complexity you know like there's there's themes that can help guide us, and I think I'll point out just one in the sense of winter recreation, a lot of the studies that we looked at and reviewed talk about the increased response that wildlife have to unpredictable off-trail recreation, particularly during the winter. So there's a higher onus on the recreation community to be mindful when we're out, to keep wildlife in mind and to keep those disturbances and displacements minimal where we can. And so, you know, that sounds pretty cool in the abstract, but when you get down to it it's a lot harder. And so with this literature review we've kind of extrapolated the data into kind of what does that mean for land management in the lens of recreation going forward and step one what we recommend is to map the overlap between critical habitat for species and recreation areas and I was super stoked at the last panel to hear like that's already already commenced in a lot of different ways. and then number two is to measure the recreation intensity to measure the data knowing where people are going, and again, like, I super jazzed to hear a lot of those themes in this last panel or two. And then three, to Sarah's point and what she's doing in the bighorn sheep issue is we really gotta seriously protect the critical habitat areas for wildlife and the critical times for wildlife. And so that can look like a lot of different things depending, again, on what species and what area you're talking about. But really when it comes down to it, you gotta protect wildlife migration corridors. you really got to protect denning or mating areas for certain wildlife and you got to protect winter range because as we know especially for ungulates that's just a really trying time and we got to give them the time and space that they need free from disturbance, and then four, where the rubber meets the road, that we recommend is adaptive flexible management. I think someone in the audience here was talking about that in the last panel and super stoked to hear that because we need dynamic management that's flexible to the changing needs of of our landscape and its diverse resources. And we hear this theme really come alive when talking to a lot of First Nations in Washington state. It's a slightly different context than I think in other places of the West is that we have a lot of federally recognized tribes, actually 29 of them across Washington state. And then additionally, there's probably a half dozen more tribes that don't necessarily have treaty rights, but have an important voice on the table when it comes to protecting first foods and cultural resources. some of which include elk, some of which include huckleberry, some of which include mule deer. And so what does recreation mean for the longevity of those resources that again are protected under treaty rights that were signed back in the 1850s? And so there's there's definitely a high need in Washington to to address this coexistence piece, and so maybe I'll stop there.
Hilary Eisen:
Well thanks, thanks Kurt, that's a lot to chew on. And Mike, you know, you're retired Colorado wildlife manager Colorado you know I feel like is is the crux you know there's so many people recreating here and there's still you know amazing wildlife resources, and you helped to initiate this new project that winter wildlands is working on with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Colorado Mountain Club Theodore Roosevelt conservation partnership called the wintering wildlife conservation initiative. Can you tell us a bit about it, and what some of the issues and challenges are that are here in Colorado that this initiative is hoping to address?
Mike Crosby:
Sure thanks again for inviting us to this. I think it's a great group and a great conference. So back to Middle Park where I live it's like a great big bowl, if you will, and in the summertime there's ample summer ranges calving and fawning grounds. As the snow starts to lay in, which it's a high mountain park the bottom of the parks about 7600 feet, so as those snow layers come in it compresses and starts all the deer and elk start migrating and antelope start migrating to lower elevations, and so our critical winter ranges are the south facing lower elevation slopes primarily are sagebrush and that's where they that's as low as they can go. Now when if the snow gets bad like last year we had a severe winter those animals end up getting pressed down further on to the private lands in the bottom. So back to Hillary's question when while I was still working I had to deal with road injuries, road damage things, and because at the very bottom of that winter range, there's two things. There's the railroad and the highway, and so it behooves the deer and elk to stay above the railroad and not get compressed down lower on to those high mortality scenarios. And so as I retired, and I talked to a friend of my daughter's that was involved in a film called Denizens of the Steep up in Jackson. I got to thinking what can we do? I mean that's a wonderful educational film. What can we do to minimize some of these impacts in our areas, in Colorado. And, you know, in my life, I'm a native here, who started skiing 60 some, or about 60 years ago on wooden skis with hardwood edges and leather boots, the technology has rapidly increased up to into the 90s to where now you can go so much further, so much faster with this new technology, the skins and the wider skis that and and you've got on top of that we have you know the population is blown four times what it was when I was a kid, so you've got a whole influx of people that really are coming in into an environment that don't have any experience there, so I thought we should really be doing some education as far as what impacts in the winter which are so critical because and Let me go back just a sec to capitalize on what Sarah said. The you know deer now come into the winter just after breeding season in a stressed state of condition, and then it's starving time from December on it's starvation starvation and same with domestic cattle You know they starve all through the winter even though they're getting fed. And you hope they come out at the end of the spring, and you hope they have their progeny, their offspring. Every stress adds against them through that process. So my goal was to try to get some education out there, thanks to Hillary's help and some others, to educate folks and make a new paradigm, if you will, where people are accustomed, and they think about wildlife, they think about tracks, They think about what happens if they get into a moose and how to get away. What happens if their dog runs into a bunch of deer in the winter, which is very stressful for them. So with that, I guess I think I answered your question.
Hilary Eisen:
You want to explain what's on the screen here?
Mike Crosby:
Well, I was gonna do that next.
Hilary Eisen:
Okay, we can wait. It's full of anticipation in this first round. so yeah, well, we'll turn it back to Sarah then. And can maybe tell us a bit more about the Bighorn Sheep collaborative process, you know, it's garnered a lot of attention in the backcountry ski community, not just in the Teton region, but nationally because the Tetons are so iconic, and yeah, I think it's a notable process and would love to hear more about it, and where it's at today as well.
Sarah Dewey:
Sure, so the idea of the collaborative learning process, and this is, you know, if you think about the federal agencies, and I understand the frustrations that people have expressed in the terms of the time frames, and how it just feels glacially slow and whatnot, you know, but the way these federal agencies approach things comes from policy, and this process was totally outside the box, and because it was totally outside the box there was a lot that us biologists had to do to garner support up our agencies for us to even be able to to take take a chance on a different way of trying to do this. So the idea was to identify community-based ideas and solutions that balance the winter habitat needs of bighorn sheep and backcountry recreational opportunities within the confines of our policies, you know, so it wouldn't be okay for sheep to go extinct in the Tetons for for the National Park Service just given that our mission. So we had a series of public meetings. The meetings were open to everyone and anyone and were designed around the principles of shared learning and transparency and collaborative development of potential solutions that were supported by the community. So we worked with a facilitator and that was a really key thing who had experience with really thorny natural resource issues and we held five workshops. We began in February of 2020 and then of course COVID came and so we were able to get three meetings done in person and then we had to shift to virtual. So the workshops were all structured so that they included information sharing from the working group about the science, about bighorn sheep ecology, but then a really key thing and I think really the most important part of my learning and learning of others on the working group is that we ask key members of the backcountry recreation community to represent their community, and we heard from them about why they are, you know, what's important to them in skiing, what areas are important, you know, and it was a I think it was a lot of learning on on all sides. And then at each meeting we had facilitated small group discussion and it was randomized what group you were in so that it wasn't just a group of say skiers and conservationists were in another group. It was structured so that people would have some of those hard discussions while they were brainstorming possible solutions. And we tried to give people a time to kind of vent, you know, any change is difficult, And so we asked people to tell us in the first meeting, what are your interests in terms of being here? What do you value? And what are your concerns with this process? And then in the following meetings, we got into conceptual solutions, and then into more like geographic on the ground solutions with literally drawing on maps. And I agree that it would be way better if there was a way to do that digitally so that we hadn't had to draw on maps and then digitize those maps, but that's where we were. So after the conclusion of those five meetings, the working group spent probably a year trying to sift through, compile all that information, and then we developed a recommendation document that was shared with the public in another virtual meeting in which the heads of all our agencies were there and available to answer questions. And I can't remember specifically, but there might have been more than 200 people. And they weren't just from the Tetons. They were from all over the country, because by that point the word had gotten out and there was a lot of interest in what we were doing. So the recommendations included potential actions that range from increasing public education and outreach because awareness, frankly, was one of the key things that we learned is that some people didn't even know there were sheep in the Tetons at all. And so, and then you have a community where there is a fair amount of turnover. And so you have to be thinking about how do we continually educate people about this. Other actions included like enhanced monitoring of both bighorn sheep and humans to understand how they're both using that habitat, if you will. Also, potential habitat treatments, or more likely, because most of this is wilderness, is like how can we use natural fire to improve bighorn sheep habitat. And then also new habitat protection zones. And some of those with designated routes through them. And this speaks to something that David mentioned earlier about some of those older folks in our community. And we're fortunate that some of those folks participated and told us the way in which they had enjoyed the Tetons was doing these crazy traverses, you know, on those like old skis like you're describing. And so we tried to capture some of that as well in terms of putting designated routes that might have gone through a habitat protection zone, but it would allow people to continue to do those sorts of traverses. And so each agency has taken a different approach in terms of implementing those recommendations. I should mention that Grand Teton actually has the most winter habitat for bighorn sheep in the Teton range, about 79%. And so the park is pursuing an environmental analysis to evaluate implementing those recommendations and looking at different alternatives to how we might do that. And the other agencies were more interested in taking a voluntary approach to begin with, and in part for one of the forests anyway, enforcement was a big concern. And so they wanted to see whether or not, you know, we could get at this by making it voluntary. And so in winters of 2021 and 2022, and again this past winter, we did identify these voluntary habitat protection zones for bighorn sheep and asked the public to stay out of those. And so the park is working away on our environmental assessment. It should be ready for public review in this winter sometime. And I just wanna say one outcome of the process that really struck me was that It's how this effort turned into a community conversation. that it started with the working group but it actually, I think the best conversations were those that were going on in the backcountry winter recreation community itself. There was a lot of blogs and like stories in magazines, and it was just a really thoughtful discussion of people were looking at themselves maybe some for the first time in terms of, yeah I guess maybe there could be an impact and and how do I reconcile that, because I think at heart most recreationists are conservationists as well, and yeah, so it was a I think it was a big learning process all the way around.
Hilary Eisen:
Thanks Erin. and the learning is ongoing. I remember working with Gary on our our comments for that draft EA and you know Winter Wildlands and Teton Backcountry Alliance put out a big survey to you know the backcountry community to try and inform you know our input into, you know, the parks documents and we're continuing to work on that together. So Kurt coming back to you. you know, the the Teton collaborative process has attracted a lot of national attention Sarah mentioned you know they had people tuning in from all over the country but they're similar are there similar efforts I guess I shouldn't say there is happening elsewhere and what are you finding to be successful for approaches for reducing recreation wildlife conflicts or educating recreationists about wintering wildlife in the region that you work?
Kurt Hellmann:
yeah for sure. Well to answer your question directly, yes, certainly lots of similar issues that might not get as much media attention thankfully, but you know, what Sarah outlined it's like, man, those are like some of the recipes or key ingredients for success and some of these like really messy and complex and frankly just tough issues of like how do we balance recreation with wildlife needs. But to your point Sarah of transparency, I'm finding that a lot of our state land managers particularly the Department of Fish and Wildlife is kind of changing its tune a bit to be more transparent and honest with, you know, we are making decisions about recreation management with limited data. There's certainly a lot of stuff that we don't know, but here's what we think is best based on what we know. And to keep that like open line of communication open with the cross country skiers, with the snowmobilers, with the back country skiers, like that is just so, so, so key. also just it's really really hard, and so a lot of my job is to actually facilitate workshops facilitate stakeholder meetings where we kind of get into the nitty-gritty sometimes it's certainly pretty messy, and sometimes it's great, but that transparency piece on the land manager side is super super critical, and with that, you know, I think on the recreation side because to be honest a lot of folks that I gather from the recreation side I ski with them, I rock climb with them. I like, yeah, so like they're my buds, so I get it. There has to be an openness when recreationists come to the table to think a little bit more holistically about what our recreation means for the landscape and understand that public lands why yes like they can be described as our playgrounds for the weekends, particularly me as a weekend warrior, like heck yeah, I love snagging rad lines and just getting out there, and sending it but our playgrounds are much more than that they are radically alive ecosystems and there's a fragility to that relationship that we have as we kind of walk through mule deer winter habitat or walk past a denning site for a black bear that, you know, I might not cause a bear to abandon its den, but maybe 15, 50, a thousand people behind me could like slowly accumulate that disturbance that causes a significant impact to a black bear to her mule deer. And so that openness pieces is super super critical from a recreationist perspective, and then also I think just in the community sense there has to be a sense of togetherness. I've seen a lot of workshops kind of digress into finger-pointing of like oh my recreation isn't bad it's the snowmobilers or like well, hey, like the snowmobiling isn't that bad we got to be worried about those hunters like and it's just like it just quickly devolves into a stalemate where like we all need to recognize we do have an impact to the landscape as soon as we step out of our cars into the trailheads. It's like, yeah, let's note that we accumulatively together have an impact, and what are we going to do about it together? I think that's pretty key. And so maybe I'll share an example that something I've been working on all this week is in the Met Howe Valley, which is a super, super popular cross-country skiing destination. They actually pump out US Olympians every five years. It's pretty cool. great place also fantastic backcountry skiing location, and the community is pretty rural, pretty tight-knit, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife which owns quite a bit of accessible public lands is introducing a proposal to better protect wintering mule deer especially in their critical winter range habitat from recreation disturbances. And this proposal has been met with a lot of pushback, a lot of hesitation, and and so we've been conducting workshops and presentations that can increase the transparency where land managers can talk directly to that cross-country skier, talk directly to that hunter, talk directly to that snowmobiler, and say like this is our rationale- we are limited in what knowledge we have and we perhaps don't have the time and resources to do a 20-year study about the dynamics between mule deer and cross-country skiing like they might have in other parts of the country like in the national park system, perhaps, but yeah we got to make do with what we have, and we all are kind of in it together so it's like certainly tough hard going but in the Met How you know like there's there's been some really good progress where, you know, it's not only of, you know, getting pinpoint in management it's pinpointing that outreach and engagement like you know instilling this L&T ethic that's a bit deeper than what we might be familiar and comfortable with, like really asking questions of what does it mean to actually follow that, I think it's the sixth principle of respecting wildlife, what does that mean to me when I'm cross-country skiing or backcountry skiing? And so you know kind of instilling that deeper thought on the outreach side of things is pretty key, especially in the Metow where I'm working currently. I'm glad you brought up that sixth L&T principle because I was trying to remember which one it was because that's my segue into Mike, is you know one thing when we were talking about, you know, how do we educate winter recreationists about wildlife, and it was like you you see leave no traces respect wildlife recreate responsibly has something about respect wildlife. Ski kind I think we have a you know respect wildlife, but there isn't any there to date has not been much detail on what exactly that means, and I think that's you know what one of the things we're trying to accomplish with the Wintering Wildlife Conservation Initiative. So Mike, can you tell us a bit about that?
Mike Crosby:
Well, thanks. And about a couple, two and a half years ago, I got a hold of Hillary and a couple other folks that were interested in this. And we started brainstorming for about a year on where do we go with this issue? We don't want to have closures per se, because like in our area, I mean closures could be good in certain spots but the snow level changes and moves around the valley from year to year and we don't always have these severe winter range issues. So we started getting together and brainstorming and in coming up with some an idea for a program or an effort initiative, and we decided to the first thing we did is last winter is winter approach we got together these posters which you can see on the board and just as a way to to do some blanket education because there really wasn't anything being addressed through the industry or parks or wildlife other than you know it's against the law to harass wildlife, it's against the law to have your dog chase deer, and the dog can be shot. Instead of these strict rules, we wanted to come up with kind of an educational format to to go forward with get getting everybody to understand that everyone makes an impact every day everywhere we go, and so we want to be able to understand and minimize some of those impacts with our neighboring wildlife species around us. So but I, personally, I distributed these posters all around Grand County in the state of Colorado via email, and then I'm sure Hillary and Liz and Shannon did too, and then I started realizing that, well, this is this is a bigger deal than just Colorado within Middle Park, or where I'm at or, or the Tetons. It's it's almost worldwide. I Set some up to Alaska a friend of mine was up there, and she said they have an issue with the caribou and people skiing into them, and they're just really not aware that they're causing a problem. I don't think people, recreationists, want to cause a problem. I think everybody wants to do the right thing, and so if they can just know what they're doing, and that realize that everybody does have an impact I think it can really minimize some of these impacts. So we were able to put this spring in a grant application to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. It's a GOCO fund called the Governor's Selection. What was the name of that?
Hilary Eisen:
Something it's like the outside the box program. I don't know what it's called.
Mike Crosby:
Anyway we were able to get a grant so we finally have a little bit of money to go forward with some marketing with this information and then a short animated video that will get out there, and hopefully get some real good coverage, and we wanted to use Colorado as a template first and hone our efforts through that, and then we can go bigger scale, because as I'm understanding, this is a not just an issue in Colorado or in the West, but it it's an issue with moose in the east and Ibex in Europe, and It's amazing when you start to dig in and see what's going on there's kind of a big collaborative mental process happening across the world because a lot of people are starting to think about this, so if we can all get together on it and accomplish some good tools in a toolbox, that we can minimize those impacts, I think we can have the wildlife resource for seven generations or more, and and and we'll be able to have our good skiing too, we encourage people to go to the middle land, the middle country between the winter range and the alpine where there can be goats in our area and sheep in a few spots, but try to follow that snow load to where you don't run into tracks, and where you don't run into herds of wildlife that you could displace because once something's displaced, like in the Tetons, it could be fatal. And some of these populations are rather limited in size. So I think I got to where I was going.
Mike Crosby:
Yeah, thank you. And there's a whole pile of this poster sitting on the table here for people to take. And as Mike mentioned, you know, this winter we're, we have some funds to, this is kind of draft one, and we're gonna be working with a professional designer and with Eric's firm to put together a more polished campaign with a website and social media and all that as well as some animated videos, and but please do share share this in your communities as well, and with that we have about 10 minutes for questions before the one o'clock lunch breaks
Audience member:
one thing I noticed on this, do we are we comfortable talking about how photography plays into the process of wildlife harassment?
Mike Crosby:
that's a really good point. it does play into this process, and I mean even Parks and Wildlife encouraged people they have a photo contest, but when photo photo journalism or photo photographers go out into the wild sometimes they get so focused on the species they're trying to get or the shot, that they displace them, and that can have a very negative effect and we haven't talked about that very much. I I mean, this, I think, is part of that picture. We didn't want to call out snowmobilers or snowshoers or photographers, per se. We wanted to make it fairly general so that everybody kind of, it rings a bell with everybody. But that's a good one.
Kurt Hellmann:
And I'll just say from a science perspective, wildlife photography is that quintessential, off-trail, unpredictable type of recreation for wildlife. so it has in theory a pretty intense impact compared to more predictable forms of recreation, and That's something we're trying to dial our messaging in on in Washington because our wildlife photographing community is often Shoulder-to-shoulder with us and a lot of conservation issues, so it's kind of sucky to point fingers at your best buddy. But again it kind of honing in on that togetherness piece is is really really critical when talking to photographers, especially when they're trying to take pictures of pretty elusive and sensitive animals.
Audience member:
Thanks you guys, really appreciate all the info. I'm just a little curious, you know, I know moose have long legs, but why do moose typically not migrate down out of deeper snow zones in the winter, or would they if there was not pressure down below?
Mike Crosby:
That's a good question. I, when I was in College in Montana a guy termed mooses snow phagic and that they just love deep snow and they'll up there they'll call have these channels, these troughs that they get into, and they stay in those areas because their forage base which is alder and willow and cottonwood and aspen they you know they can just get right to it, and they can paw it down. we do have moose that go into the sagebrush. I've seen them eating sagebrush, but I think they're just more of a Pleistocene remnant and the snow is deeper in the Pleistocene, but they like this deep snow. It could be a problem for skiers or snowmobilers because they are territorial in the sense that they defend their own space, so that's one critter we in wildlife always say, run. You know, get away from that zone of influence, and they go back to eatin'.
Audience member:
Another question I had is, you know, I've heard that human-powered users actually have more of an impact on wildlife than motorized, simply because the motorized, the critters can hear them coming, whereas human-powered, you know, often quote-unquote sneak up to them, sneak up on them without knowing. Any any feedback there?
Kurt Hellmann:
I'll say generally it's extremely context dependent, but yes there are certainly some small studies that show that animals elicit a higher flea response to slow-moving human powered recreation because they move more closely like a predator as opposed to a snowmobile as opposed to a car as opposed to an ATV which is gone in a second, and so a lot of ways to measure that is like the stress levels that they find in fecal matter, or like other ways of like measuring the heart rate of particular animals, and maybe Sarah can speak more on that specific study, but there are ways to measure higher stresses according to different recreation activities so for some ungulates, yes, there might be a higher stress response or a higher flea response to slow-moving human powered recreation, but again very context dependent.
Sarah Dewey:
yeah I would just add that it's it can be the unpredictability to of people, I mean, maybe you're talking about humans on a trail, but and that could be predictable but it's when people are just going cross-country and have basically a surprise encounter with an animal that that can be stressful.
Mike Crosby:
and they're one of the research projects was done over just south of Kremlin where a guy had hot heart monitoring stuff on deer and he measured the snowmobile heart rate deer heart rate response versus one with a skier, and then skier and dog, and the one with the skier and the dog was the highest and highest sustained rate of stress because it's very under oriented, you know, and of course it's higher if they're coming towards them versus going off to the side, so there is some evidence to that. But you're right on. I mean a snowmobile, unless they're playing, I mean, they're through an area of wind range generally speaking where they can get through there and on up to the deeper stuff.
Audience member:
Aside from just increased usage, y'all talked a lot about how you know changes in technology have increased and expanded access, more people, more pattern, you know moving in similar patterns. Is there any thought leadership that's being done or looking at like what's coming next in terms of technological advancements and have trying to get ahead of some of that in terms of education or anticipating the impact that that could have?
Mike Crosby:
boy I don't know when the hovercrafts are coming, but they could really be a problem the latest thing that's come onto the scene was these snow bikes, and they're getting up into some really tough spots that snowmobiles couldn't get to that skiers can barely get to, so I don't know. I don't know what's coming next, but I'm sure there will be something. Humans are really creative.
Hilary Eisen:
yeah I mean that's that ties into maybe all the panels that we had this whole conference of like how do you plan for sustainable recreation when when you don't know what uses you're going to be doing. I think, Anne, you were talking about electric snowboarding upon Vail Pass, so maybe this afternoon we'll hear about that. But yeah, I mean, there's been research on how drones stress out wildlife. And yeah, who knows what we're going to have. And so I think that's where the education comes in. If no matter what you're doing, if you're aware of potential impacts on wildlife, and then you have land management planning, travel management planning, recreation planning that tries to be proactive in protecting habitat, getting to what Sarah started with about you know the paradigm of like if you just have places they can go where they're not disturbed, then doesn't matter what we're doing outside of those places but Sarah I'll let you wrap it up here.
Sarah Dewey:
Okay so I don't have I don't know what's coming and because we don't know what's coming. you know one of our goals is to ensure that wildlife populations can be resilient in an uncertain future future, and that means uncertainty in terms of how people are going to be using the landscape and what, you know, how they'll be going on the landscape, and it also means in terms of the environment itself, because it is changing. And so given that we don't know, we are kind of operating under the precautionary principle where we need to provide them a place to be for the winter.
David Page:
Well, thank you guys so much. That was amazing, super interesting.