Fuzz, p.11
Fuzz, page 11
The advantage of RISUG, said the Hindustan Times piece, is that it is injected. So there would be no stitches to scratch and pull out. But this wasn’t true. Sanath sent me the official forest department description of the procedure, which ended with “and the site will be sutured.” The advantage of RISUG over vasectomy is that it’s reversible. This is of course no advantage with the macaques of India, but it is an advantage for human men (and the women not presently interested in bearing their children). The reason we know that RISUG works on rhesus monkeys is that the human version was recently tested on them.
The woman who’d carried out the tests is Catherine Vande Voort, division director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the California National Primate Research Centers. We spoke by phone, and she confirmed that incisions were necessary. Though I had called to talk about macaques, I was curious about the future of (human) male birth control. A variation of RISUG is headed to clinical trials in the United States. Could people trust it?
VandeVoort thought things looked highly promising. “If you can block a male monkey’s fertility, you are golden,” she said. Where tens of millions of sperm would constitute a respectable ejaculate for a man, a macaque launches hundreds of millions per wad. “And monkey sperm compared to human sperm look like they’re jet-propelled. I’ve had people who are used to doing human sperm evaluations come into the lab and they look at the monkey stuff‡ and they’re like, My god, how can you even count them, they move so fast!” In other words, if it works on a macaque, it ought to work on a human.
However. As a way to reduce a population of wild animals, any form of male contraception comes up short. One busy untreated male can take up a surprising amount of the slack created by his sterilized cohorts. For male sterilization to have a significant impact on a wild population, you’d need to treat 99 percent of the males. Whereas with females, treating around 70 percent should get you there.
Partly for that reason, the sex hormone–suppressor GonaCon is only registered for use on females. Additional reasons are set forth in “Observations on the Use of the GNRH Vaccine GonaCon™ in Male White-Tailed Deer.” When the bucks’ testosterone was suppressed, their scrotums shrank, their antlers came in all weird, and they failed to develop “the muscular appearance … of mature bucks in rut.” Pictured next to a bull-necked control, they’re pipsqueaks. Is humiliation an emotion felt by deer? I posed this question to Doug Eckery, who oversees fertility control research projects at the National Wildlife Research Center and serves as its assistant director. “I don’t know,” he said sensibly.
I asked Muliya how close the state of Himachal Pradesh has come to sterilizing 70 percent of the female macaques in conflict zones. Unknown, he said, because no one has followed up with a population count. I tried to imagine how it’s possible to take a census without knocking on doors or mailing out forms. How do you know you’re not counting the same individual more than once? Like the anxious San Franciscans whose sightings§ led them to believe the city’s Presidio woodlands held hundreds of coyotes—when in fact it was one wide-ranging pair and their pups. How do people do this?
* Researchers in the UK are gearing up to attempt it, though not, of course, with monkeys. After decades of mass extermination efforts, a National Anti-Grey Squirrel Campaign, and an order of Parliament failed to eliminate “this most undesirable alien”—to quote his lordship the Earl of Mansfield at the June 29, 1937, meeting of the House of Lords—science is stepping up. Researchers have been testing immunocontraceptive bait set out in tree boxes designed to exclude the nation’s beloved red squirrels, whose turf the gray immigrants have steadily overrun. So far, as determined by biomarkers in the bait, most of the targeted squirrels in test forests seem to be taking the dose. Good luck, Britannia. Only 120,000 redcoats remain, while the American invaders number in the millions.
† When Donald and Melania Trump visited the Taj Mahal in 2020, the security detail included paramilitary forces, Armed Constabulary units, National Security Guard commandos, and five langurs.
‡ To get the monkey stuff, VandeVoort’s team developed a low-intensity penile electroejaculator. Why not just use a vibrator? “Oh, we tried. Oh my god, we tried. You could get a good erection but they wouldn’t ejaculate.” They also tried a dummy mount with an artificial vagina. Not happening. “A monkey is not smart enough to understand what we want from him, but too smart to have sex with a dummy.” She emphasized that the device does not hurt or burn. Quite the opposite. She told me about an orangutan who’d come running at the sound of her voice. It was memorably uncomfortable: “Having an orang gaze longingly into your eyes as you try to set up your gear.”
§ And, likely, what they heard. In a 2017 study by R. Kyle Brewster and colleagues, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of one to four coyotes howling and “yip-yapping” and then guess the number of animals making the sounds. Regardless of background (urban, rural, suburban), subjects overestimated the number of coyotes by a factor of two. Likely leading to “the misperception that coyotes are more abundant than they actually are,” and lots of anxious yip-yapping to local and state authorities.
6
MERCURIAL COUGARS
How Do You Count What You Can’t See?
For fifty-seven years, California’s mountain lions had a price on their heads. The rancher complained because the cats kill livestock, and the hunter, because they prey on deer. And the state listened. From 1906 to 1963, California paid a bounty for each hide or scalp or set of ears brought to a county courthouse or shipped to the Fish and Game Commission. The payments were logged in ballpoint in a series of ruled leatherbound logbooks that now reside in the state archives in Sacramento. On the inside cover of each logbook, someone has penciled the totals for the year, and a foldout map displays the number of payouts county by county. California excelled at counting dead mountain lions.
Counting the live ones has always been trickier. You cannot fly overhead and take photographs, as you might with herds of wildebeests or walruses hauled out on beaches. You could bring in volunteers to tromp through the woods, as you might on a drive count of deer or a line transect of sloths or an Audubon Christmas Bird Count, but it’s unlikely any cats would be seen. Cougars are elusive loners. Their presence is knowable mostly by their “sign”—tracks and scat and other unique traces they leave on the land. The most prolific lion hunter in California’s history, Jay Bruce, killed more than five hundred cougars in his years on the state payroll, but only once in all that time did he catch sight of one that wasn’t under pursuit by his hounds. Up until the 1970s, bounty logs and county kill maps were the closest thing California had to a statewide cougar count. A county with few dead cats was a county with few cats, period.
Ironically, today, if a wildlife agency wants to know how many cougars live within its governance, it may make use of the same expertise that once brought them down. That is why the only state that prohibits the hunting of mountain lions—California—still has houndsmen on its payroll: to count, not to kill. The same skills serve: “cutting” (searching for) sign and, once fresh tracks are found, putting hounds on the scent to tree the cat. What’s different is that the dogs will hang back and the lion will be darted and lowered from the tree. Because California seeks not only to estimate the lions’ regional numbers but also to assess their genetic health and monitor their habitat use, a handful per region will be GPS-collared and a DNA sample taken.
The Statewide Mountain Lion Project is being undertaken by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. More specifically, Justin Dellinger. Dellinger’s job title sounds like something you’d hear if you asked an animal-besotted ten-year-old, What do you want to be when you grow up? Mountain Lion and Gray Wolf Researcher. That is what it says on his business card. Dellinger has a PhD in wildlife biology, but it was not just his academic standing that landed him the job. It was also his upbringing. His woodsmanship. He grew up in South Carolina, where he divided his time between the woods and his grandparents’ horse barn. His hometown is small enough that any time Dellinger was interested in a girl, he had to “go ask Mamaw and Papaw” how he might be related to her. As the first in his family to go to college, he is a source of parental pride, and a little melancholy. He explained to them that he “had to disperse for genetic purposes.”
I first met Dellinger at the CDFW Wildlife Investigations Laboratory, where he has a desk that he occasionally and not very joyfully sits at. He wasn’t immediately located, so I sat in the waiting area, in the company of the taxidermied specimens I’ve come to expect at all government offices with fish or wildlife or game or forest in their title. A mountain lion crouched, snarling, on a faux rock ledge above the receptionist. A hawk was coming in for a landing beside a rack of hunting information, its talons extended as though reaching for a brochure. Eventually someone brought me back to Dellinger’s office, cramped and narrow and rendered more so by a skein of antlers on the linoleum. He finds these and other “l’il wildlife trinkets” at mountain lion kill sites—meaning places where lions have devoured prey. Dellinger is a trophy scavenger, but not a trophy hunter. Killing bucks for their racks is, he said, “not necessarily something I understand.” He hunts to be outdoors tracking and to “fill the freezer.” As someone who lets slaughterhouse workers kill the birds and animals she eats, I respect that.
At this moment, the meat Dellinger is consuming is pepperoni, on a pizza at the only restaurant in Alturas, California, that is open at 4:30 in the afternoon. A 4:30 dinner is what happens when breakfast happened at 3:30 a.m. and lunch was a granola bar and a tangerine. There is soot on his clothes and face from this morning, when he was following a cougar through a stand of charred pines. It’s not that he’s had no time to wash up and change. I think it just didn’t occur to him to do so.
Though Dellinger is comfortable living out of a tent—is probably happiest living out of a tent—he is by no means a hermit. He doesn’t reject civilization; he’s just uncharmed by it. His home is less than two hours from San Francisco, but he has never been.
While we wait to order, I ask Dellinger to explain how the counting gets done. I have braced myself for math. The classic animal population estimation method, capture-mark-recapture, relies on proportions and a tolerance for word problems. Say a biologist wants to know the number of woodchucks in a forest. She sets out traps and she Marks, with leg bands, all the woodchucks she catches (M). We’ll say she captures 50. She returns them to the forest. A week later, she puts the traps out again and notes how many she Captures this time around (C). Let’s say 41. She also notes how many of them have leg bands—that is, how many are Recaptures (R). We’ll say 27. She lets them go. She gets out her calculator. Using the formula* M × C over R, and showing her work, she can estimate how many woodchucks live in the forest. In this case, 76. (In a higher-tech version of the technique, it’s images of the animals that are captured and recaptured, using motion-triggered camera traps.)
Because the Statewide Mountain Lion Project is a more qualitative survey, Dellinger’s method is unique. He calls it “collar and foller,” foller being follow in a South Carolina drawl. Between bites, he describes how the counting part goes.
“It’s like, We found this animal, a male, right here.” He puts his finger to an imaginary map. The male is given a tracking collar. “Now say we come across another tom track. We pull out the telemetry equipment and check on that first tom. We see that he’s nowhere around here, so this must be a different male. Next day we find a female track. Now we’ve got a minimum count of three.” And so on.
“You don’t have to collar any of them, honestly, if you have a few good sign cutters and you use basic reasoning. Let’s say you cut a male track over here on this ridgeline.” That would be the ridgeline between the oil-and-vinegar caddy and the table’s edge. “Now about five ridge lines over”—the back of my chair—“my houndsman finds another tom track, and they’re not even close to traveling in the same direction, and they’re both from last night. Chances are, those are two different males.”
To someone skilled at cutting sign, the absence of it is also telling. Very quickly upon arriving in an area, Dellinger knows whether or not there are lions. If not, he moves on. Still, it will take eight years to cover the whole state. I ask him why more people aren’t hired to help. A waitress stops to clear the salad plates.
“Say that one more time? I was distracted.” By the busy hand and the remaining pizza slice. “I didn’t want to lose it.”
One reason the state doesn’t hire more trackers is that they don’t exist. Aside from the houndsman currently on the job, Del-linger knows of only two others in the state whom he would work with. Both are in their eighties. As for wildlife biologists: “Maybe two percent of them can do this.”
I have questions about the “this.” How can you tell a mountain lion’s gender from its tracks? How do you know where to start looking? How can you be sure a track is fresh from the night before, rather than from the day or the week before?
These things are more easily shown than told, and that is why I too will be eating breakfast at 3:30 a.m.
Tracking wild animals always struck me as something hushed and hidden. I envisioned someone walking with intense focus, head bent, through deep forest. Stopping to examine a broken branch, kneeling beside a watering hole. Moccasins might be worn.
So far it’s been louder and less verdant. Dellinger looks for sign while standing at the handlebars of an ATV, driving slowly down a dirt logging road. Driving covers ground faster than walking, and tracks show up well in the fine-grained dirt. (Winter snow provides the other clean canvas for tracks.) We are deep in a forest, but the pines are charred and bare. Twenty thousand acres of Modoc National Forest burned last year, and that is where Del-linger is looking for lions this week.
Where I see blackened trunks in a lifeless moonscape, Dellinger sees the bright green shoots that have sprung up since the fire, thriving in the newly admitted sunlight. Tender new growth is what deer love to eat, and deer are what mountain lions love to eat. Dellinger uses the term “deer specialists.” That’s what it says on their business cards.
To find mountain lions, one heads to the places that would be, as Dellinger puts it, appealing to them. Mountain lions want to be where there is food and water—for them and for their prey—and unstrenuous routes through their territory. A male cougar may walk ten-plus miles in a night of hunting and checking up on his females. A saddle, or pass, between hills or a ridge along the top of them provides an easier, faster way to move through the landscape. Dellinger starts to say that cougars are lazy, then corrects himself. They’re efficient. A “she” cougar, in particular, can’t afford to squander calories. Almost always, a female is either pregnant or has young to feed. A male cub may be as big as or bigger than her by the time it heads off on its own. “Depending on the size of the litter, she may have to kill every day,” Dellinger says. “That takes a toll.” When he arrives in a new county, he takes out a topo-graphical map and looks for saddles, ridgelines, and draws (small valleys with streambeds).
And national forest logging roads. “A road like this one,” he says to me over his shoulder, “that’s pretty straight, that gets them from point A to point B pretty quick—they’re going to like. And this one is peripheral to the water down there, so it’s good hunting for them.” Why is there a logging road in a national forest? Because national forests began as—and to some extent remain—managed tree farms for the nation. They were set aside in part, to quote the Organic Administration Act of 1897, “to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” (And free grazing space for their cattle. The only animals I’ve seen in the woods so far this morning have been cows.)
Away to our right, the sun crests a ridge. Bye-bye, moon sliver and Nivea-blue sky. Cue the bird chatter and side-lit glory of a California wilderness dawn. Dellinger is missing it. His mind stays in the dirt. Today he’s stopping more than he normally would, to highlight interesting tracks for his backseat city dweller. He just idled the engine to show me a set of badger tracks. Badgers are un-weaselly members of the weasel family who went their own way, specializing in bullying through ground squirrel burrows to eat the occupants. They evolved long, sturdy digging claws that give their tracks a spindly Edward Scissorhands appearance. To spend a morning cutting sign is to marvel at the surreal variety of feet and dance steps in the animal kingdom. Earlier we saw tracks of a mule deer stotting. The verb stot means to spring into the air and land with all four feet at once. (Various theories exist for why deer and antelope stot, as well as several names for the practice, of which pronking is the author’s favorite.)
Dellinger stops again, this time for the fine-toothed imprints of a ground squirrel’s claws. It’s been scurrying all over the place, perhaps having caught wind of you-know-who with the Tim Burton manicure. Ground squirrels perform a cousin of stotting, wherein they leap and land with all four feet bunched together, leaving a track that looks like it was made by one large paw. Dellinger says he’s watched people track a ground squirrel thinking they were on the trail of a lion. His boss periodically sends “aides” along; most are quietly sent off to cut sign in an area Dellinger knows to have no cougars, lest they drive over or trample tracks they’ve failed to see. When I first emailed Dellinger asking to tag along, he wrote back, “How are you at tracking?” Attached to the email were two photographs: examples of what I’d be expected to recognize as a mountain lion track in the dirt. A Leatherman multi-tool had been set alongside for scale. Because I could not, at a glance, see any tracks at all, I was puzzled. It looked like a photo shoot for Leatherman.
