Sometimes the right conservation path takes time and requires dabbling farther afield to set the stage for future action.
I could be obsessed with moose. When I was seven, on a trip to Algonquin Provincial Park, my father set out to show us a moose. We drove for hours scanning the landscape and hiked for days on end stepping quietly and peering into the deep woods. Ultimately we found only a shed tuft of hair - my father convinced me it was a shed dewlap (do dewlaps shed?) - and from a very far distance, a silhouette of maybe a moose swimming across a lake.
That was clearly not enough.
Fast forward 20 years and as part of the Wildlife Conservation Program's nascent Living Landscapes Program, the Adirondacks team identified moose as a priority species. Having been extirpated from NY in the 1880s, returning nearly a century later, and then experiencing a relatively rapid increase in public sightings, moose garnered a lot of interest. However, we, the collective team of people interested in NY moose, didn't really know much about them in the Adirondacks.
We organized a few projects over the course of a decade to facilitate the thinking around and add some data to the dialogue. From organizing meetings with experts from other moose-y areas to creating a process for hunters to provide information on moose or moose sign seen in the woods, we quietly pushed the conversation forward in the state.
An opportunity arose in 2008 to test the use of scat-detection dogs to find moose scat as a noninvasive way to learn more about the Adirondack moose population. With this project being a typical under-resourced conservation project, and with me having just submitted my dissertation in Natural Resources Policy and Management and transitioning back to full-time work with WCS, I naturally was a perfect fit for running the project.
Not really.
I was (and still am) a social scientist and this project was a field based project that ultimately had more relevance for biology and genetics, a definite learning curve for me. That said, I knew that ultimately questions about moose in a populated state like NY would involve understanding more than just biology. Moose, with their ability to eat 40 lbs of vegetation a day - be it from gardens or forestry lands, crush cars of unsuspecting drivers on foggy nights, yet inspire residents and tourists to bushwhack through miles of hobblebush for a fleeting glimpse, raise as many questions about what the people want and how management actions might be perceived by the public as questions about how many are out there and how fast or slow is the population changing.
However, the biological questions were far more pressing. Some reports were coming in from Minnesota that moose were dying from potential climate related issues, other reports emerged from different states of moose dying from thousands of winter ticks. We needed a method for studying a small population of moose in a large and mostly difficult to access wilderness.
Sometimes an NGO is just the nimble organization to run with a pilot opportunity and add capacity to a state wildlife management agency. I talk about that process in this paper, and by doing so and providing useful information that assists with decision-making (e.g, a different paper published in Alces, a journal devoted to moose) you build credibility for future projects.
Now nearly 20 years since we first started thinking about moose in the Adirondacks, WCS is working with a team from NYSDEC, USGS, Cornell University and SUNY ESF that has used the initial projects to build a more comprehensive approach to understanding moose abundance, moose population trajectories, moose health, and now, finally, using social science to understand the human dimensions of moose in NYS.
Check back for more updates as the project continues, I'm sure you'll agree it's worth the wait!