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An Interview with Howard Ferguson was named the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) Employee of the Year for 2000, in part for discovering and saving one of only a few known maternal colonies of the extremely rare Townsend's big-eared bats in the state. He was also recognized for initiating many projects to advance WDFW's knowledge of many groups of wildlife species, for developing public support by working with many volunteers, and for working with an "obstacles-are-no-obstacle" philosophy. Howard has worked for WDFW since 1993, first doing computer database programming for the game management division in Olympia, serving as urban wildlife biologist in Spokane since 1995. He has a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of California - San Diego, a master's degree in wildlife biology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and has almost completed a master's degree in computer science from San Diego State University. |
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Q: What do you do as an "urban wildlife biologist"? A: It does seem like an oxymoron, doesn't it? But what we attempt to do is keep wildlife in and around our urban areas, compensating for loss of natural habitat through development planning efforts. We need to determine what wildlife still exist in and around our urban areas, and then try to optimize what's there, and also educate people about urban wildlife. I think the public education is actually most important because those urbanites are the department's largest clientele in the state. Many of those people don't know that we deal with anyone beyond hunters and fishers, and yet they like wildlife, too, just in more non-traditional ways. I work some with county planners on land use planning under the Growth Management Act (GMA), using WDFW's Priority Habitats and Species (PHS) database. Sometimes when I suggest that more of our district wildlife biologists should be doing the same, I get some resistance, some responses like "I'm not an urban biologist." But the point is they're all becoming urban biologists. If you look around, the reality is that more and more of Washington is becoming urbanized. We can save some of the wildlife habitat through long range planning. Q: Do you ever feel hopeless about saving wildlife habitat that's so quickly changing? A: Well I worked as a consultant biologist in southern California for awhile, and part of my work was surveying and inventorying wildlife and habitat for environmental impact statements for development. I found some very neat places left, with some very rare species, and eventually I'd go back and see that they were developed. That burned me out, but it also made me realize that one of the things that's important to do, and something that has been done since in the San Diego area, is long-range land use planning and zoning, to try to preserve the hot spots or important ecological zones and wildlife habitat linkages and corridors, while at the same time allowing some development because it's inevitable. I learned that it's important to work with developers and planners, not fight them. But with the burn-out there in California, I think I looked to the Pacific Northwest as a part of the country that still has a lot of wildlife habitat left, where there's still hope that if we involve ourselves early on in the process, through the Growth Management Act, that we can preserve the diversity of wildlife here. And of course preserving that diversity is important to the future economic development of this state and region. Q: Do developers realize how valuable wildlife is to people? A: I think they're starting to now, but it's an evolutionary process. A wildlife-informed and educated public puts pressure and demand on developers to plan wildlife friendly projects. And it turns out they make more money on those kinds of projects. You can go down to southern California now and see that those developments that were planned with open space and wildlife habitat are some of the most expensive properties in the area. I hope that we can inject that idea earlier in the process in Spokane County and other parts of the state. But it starts with a wildlife-educated public.
Q: How do we educate urbanites about "diversity" when many might think English sparrows and starlings are abundant wildlife? A: That's the public education part of my job, and I interact with people in one way or another, through presentations, volunteer projects, local conservation organizations, and community events. Before I can explain the value of diversity, though, I need to make sure they know that the department is interested in their needs and desires, that we're not just a hunting and fishing department, that we're responsible for ALL wildlife, and that we can help them enjoy, protect, and enhance wildlife. I also help them understand the needs of wildlife and what they can do to help wildlife, not just in their backyards, but on the landscape level as well. I think the best influence or education is some type of experience with wildlife firsthand, or at least through family or friends. They eventually grow and realize the value of many other species. That's why the Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary program and its promotional yard signs are so important. Neighbors are curious about the signs and they talk about it and learn more about wildlife and the understanding spreads. Q: What's the Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary program? A: It's basically an information and education program of the department to help people enjoy wildlife in their own backyards by developing year-round habitat through things like landscape planning, nestbox placement, and supplemental feeding. People purchase five-dollar information packets from us to get started, then they can enroll in the program for another five dollars to get the yard sign, a certificate, and a twice-yearly newsletter. There are about 7,000 program enrollees across the state, most of them in the Puget Sound urban area. I coordinate the program in eastern Washington and we have about 1,200 eastsiders. I think it's been an important way for urban and suburban folks to experience wildlife in their own backyards. And once they do that, many become interested in overall county, region, and landscape planning for wildlife. Most of those in the program have some initial interest in wildlife, and we can teach them more about how important it is to preserve areas that provide linkages and corridors for lots of other and bigger wildlife than what they see in their own backyards. [See the Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary website for more information.] Q: Is backyard wildlife watching a kind of recreational "hook" for the department, like fishing or hunting? A: Yes, I think anyone's interest grows through key, fun experiences. It can be awesome, thrilling, or just relaxing to watch nature. Going beyond the Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary program, there's winter bird feeding survey programs through Cornell University and through our own department . In these surveys, people can contribute to the scientific study of wildlife, and that feeds their interest and education, too. I use lots of such volunteers in many of my studies. Q: How can you use untrained people to collect scientific information? A: First of all, the volunteers I get are already interested and somewhat knowledgeable about some wildlife from their own experiences. They've been in the field a lot and in their own right they are "experts" in their hobby. All it takes is a little time to train them on the scientific method and how important it is to be correct in details in observations and record-keeping. As long as people are closely supervised, there's no problem with the data they collect. Even in unsupervised situations, like our own winter bird feeding surveys, the data can give you indications of trends. If a whole lot of people are reporting a species in an area that wasn't known to harbor the species, or a habitat type that hadn't been mapped before, it gives you cause to check it out. Without the volunteers, you probably never would have found it. Some volunteers don't want their watching to be hampered by all the numbers, and so they don't last on projects. But the ones who stick with a project for years realize that the scientific rigor opens a whole new avenue of information about an animal when you discover little details. With our bird surveys, for instance, it's things like how long they live or whether they come back to the same spot every year, how far they travel, where they winter.
Q: What bird surveys are you conducting? A: I started two Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) surveys in Spokane County in 1996 and started one in the Olympia area when I worked over there. This is a standardized, nationwide type of survey in which you string mist nets, which look like giant hair nets, to capture birds, remove them, take measurements, and put bands on their legs so that when they're recaptured elsewhere, we learn where they go and how long they live. Among my many good volunteers on this project are Marian and Russell Frobe, who are just tireless and were honored as WDFW's Volunteers of the Year in 1999. I also use volunteers for point-count work on neotropical birds - that's counting birds at set points along survey routes during the summer when those species that spend winter in the tropics are here to breed. I also use volunteers on wintering raptor surveys, butterfly inventories, and my new gyrfalcon and suburban elk studies. Q: So you use a lot of cheap labor? A: Yes! In this agency, with budgets what they are, it's often the only way to get work done! So it's important that we develop good relationships with those volunteers. It's also important in making that information and education effort. These volunteers go back to other parts of their lives and relate their experiences to family, friends, and co-workers. And as a result, I get more wildlife information out there. At this point, I also get more volunteers than I can use! Q: You were honored as 2000 Employee of the Year in part because you saved some very rare bats that year. How did that happen? A: I've long been interested in bats, mostly because there's so little known about them. One day I was out bird-watching just north of Spokane and I found this barely-alive bat stuck on a teasel bush. I tried to revive it with water, but it died of dehydration I think. I examined it closely and I knew from some of my study of bats that it was a juvenile, because its joints were still widely separated. That meant that it was raised close by, so I started looking around for where it might have come from. I talked to landowners in the area and found out that there were some old buildings near a lake in the area where people had sometimes seen bats. I checked it out, and sure enough, in this one old cabin there was a maternal colony of about 125 to 150 Townsend's big-eared bats, a pretty rare species in Washington. Shortly after, the 120-acre parcel where the cabin was located was split into 20-acre parcels and sold. The new landowners, with little understanding of bats, planned on remodeling the old log cabin into a bunkhouse where friends could stay on vacations and holidays. Luckily enough, when I approached them, they were very interested in wildlife and very cooperative. With lots of effort on both our parts, we were able to reach a signed agreement that protects the bats by providing the landowners another building for their plans, and allows us to study and monitor them. Studying bats isn't easy because many species, like the Townsend's, don't tolerate much disturbance. So my challenge was to find an unobtrusive way to collect information on them. I thought a remotely-controlled videocamera mounted in the cabin might work, with tapes reviewed regularly by Eastern Washington University graduate students looking for a project. Between those equipment expenses and the cost of the landowner provision agreement, I set out to find funding help from everyone and anyone I could think of. With the help of Bats Northwest, a private, non-profit organization, I applied for grants and in six months raised over $20,000 from Bat Conservation International (BCI), National Fish and Wildlife Federation (NFWF), Washington state's Aquatic Lands Enhancement Account (ALEA), and Disney Foundation's Wildlife Conservation Fund. By that time, WDFW's "EagleCam" had become so successful that our Watchable Wildlife project manager Chuck Gibilisco was looking to set up another Internet website connection to a stationary wildlife viewing opportunity, and the camera set up we were preparing for the bats seemed like a natural. If it could remain unobtrusive, I thought it would be great way to inform and educate so many more people about bats. Only there was no phone line or electricity out to the property, so I went begging again. Getting this "BatCam" website up and running first took Jasper Technologies donating the installation of almost a mile of phone line, Ziegler's Building Center and the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council covering the cost of getting electricity to the site, Huppin's Hi-Fi Photo & Video donating a VCR and some tapes, the Inland Empire chapter of the Safari Club International providing a TV-VCR unit, Tim Brown supplying the cameras, and B.E. Meyers helping set up the web server and modem to make it all work -- a real community effort! [See the WDFW WildWatch Cam website for more information.] Q: Has the effort been worth it, and are the bats OK with all the technology used? A: Well we learned a lot already, like that the bats move around a lot depending on temperature, and that we needed more than one remote-controlled camera to keep track of them! It appears that the bats aren't affected by the cameras. The only question I had was about the mounting of an infrared source so we could look at them at night without disturbing them, and I wondered what that would do to temperature. But in reviewing all the tapes, it appears they were not disturbed by that either. There's always a fine line or maybe tradeoff between wildlife research and disturbance, and certainly between informing and educating people about wildlife through technologies like this and disturbing the wildlife itself. You have to balance the need for information about a species to manage it for the future, with the risk of intruding on them and impacting them in a negative way. I think it's important that you're always reviewing the possibility of that, and erring on the conservative side. This is all of course quite a contrast to the techniques of the past, like Audubon and other scientists blasting birds to study them in hand, with no idea or concern of whether they were impacting populations. Research has become much more sensitive to animals' requirements and sensitivities, even in the last ten years. I think it's important to find out more about these animals that we don't know much about, especially if at the same time we're lucky enough to provide educational opportunities for the public. Most people would never see these bats in their lives without the video and computer technology. And because of this experience, maybe if they find some bats in their attic or in their neighborhood, they'll attempt to conserve them, rather than call a pest control company to destroy them. I've always been intrigued by technology, from the early days of large main-frame computers, because I see the benefits of using the latest technology in the study of wildlife. With the bats we've been able to use very small, remotely-controlled cameras to transfer almost-real-time pictures of them to the world through the Internet. The next step is to try to follow the bats after they leave here, using radio transmitters that are the size of pencil erasers, to learn more about their life history, including where they spend the winter. Someday we'll be able to use satellite transmitters to do that, and collect all the data in computer downloads, but for now that technology is only available for larger animals, like the gyrfalcons we're going to track and try to learn more about. We'll be using GPS (Geographical Positioning System) transmitter units on those suburban elk in southern Spokane County to figure out where they're crossing the highways and causing problems. We use the Geographical Information System (GIS) to map the information we collect and incorporate it into our PHS database, which can theoretically go out to the public immediately via the Internet, providing that information about wildlife and habitat that's necessary for long-range community planning. |
