Category: Ecological Restoration

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bison buffalo Ecological Restoration Ecology first nations native americans reservation species reintroduction tribal

First Nations become First Restorationists Part II: A Bison Case Study

In Part One I wrote about how I had noticed that American Indian Tribes were using their tribal autonomy to do species restoration on their reservations all over the central and western part of the Contiguous US. I was surprised because I hadn’t seen any mention of it as a phenomenon other than one article in the New York Times. It turns out it has been quietly happening for some 30 years or more.
I meant for this post to be a survey of all that is happening, from black footed ferrets to buffalo, but I got so much info on the buffalo I have decided to make a post just on it, Tribal Buffalo Restoration, and then do another final post on the other species that have been popping up (in the case of Prairie Dogs and Black Footed Ferrets, quite literally) all over the west. So this is part two of a three part series.

Right now is the golden age of the return of the Buffalo.. it’s happening all over the west, 120 or so conservation herds and growing, in addition to countless meat herds, and it feels like half of those restorations are on government land, and half are on Reservations, and as I dig, a lot of the groundwork was laid as early as the 80’s, and the herds are now in some cases becoming big and viable wild herds.

The numbers reflect that that is indeed true. After a quick but deeply informative interview with the head of the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council, a gentleman by the name of Jim Stone from the Dakotas, I now feel like a bit of an expert on all this, and it’s true, according to Jim, there are about 60 preservationists herds in the west, herds managed for pure ecosystem restoration, kind of to that National Park System level of ecosystem restoration, bu government agencies and even the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, and then there are about 60 herds that are for the Indians ( Native Americans if you like, they usually don’t tend to mind either way).. and by the Indians, and they have a neat and different perspective on it, but all roads lead to Rome, Rome being that they get them on the land where they should be, grow the numbers and maintain herds that help secure the genetic diversity and survival of not only this species but all the interlocking species of the Midwestern and Western fauna and flora. The distinction is, and Jim will tell you this flat out.. these buffalo ain’t just for looking at, they are for eating and enjoying and maybe even taking part in ceremonial life as well.. they aren’t museum pieces, but they are gonna be there all the same, disturbing and restoring the land, snorting and galloping and doing what buffalo do. The ITBC distinguishes itself from the mostly government herds on one side and the commercial herds on the other side by being a bit of both. They are there to meet a lot of goals, from Tribal self sufficiency to ecological restoration to pride and fun, and that’s the way it was 400 years ago so why not have it be that way again. Jim will tell you, there weren’t even Midwest buffalo without Indians, not since the last Ice Age anyhow.. they grew on that land together as the glaciers receded some 10,000 years ago, so why screw it up with too many rules now.
The Story goes like this.. we all know how it started  15 million buffalo charging over the plains, and in woodlands and meadows from the Alleghenies at least clear out to the west coast. Then the Europeans came. They gave horses and rifles to the tribes, but it didn’t do to the natural balance nearly what westward expansion, trains and barbed wire did to the prairie.. wiped the herds out until they were down to about 2,000 individuals of Bison Bison at the turn of the last century. In a story that would be familiar to the followers of my Elk posts and many other conservation sagas, conservationists like Roosevelt and Horneday stepped in to cease the almost extinction as the progressive era began and created the first public conservation and preservation herds in places like Yellowstone, the Henry Mountains etc. From perhaps 70% of the Continental US, they were down to two small herds on small bits of land.


On reservation lands they suffered the same or similar fates. many reservations were land that had already been eaten over, or suffered from the destruction of the large moving herds perhaps hundreds of miles from where they were. The Dawes Act of 1887 conspired to privatize land to integrate herds, fracturing the ownership of many reservations and undermining tribal unity and governance. Other herds that might have been taken from the surviving herds or other remnants were destroyed by the power of the Cattle industry to stamp out TB and Burcellosis in the 1930’s where progress had been made towards restoration on a few reservations.
Time went by as the conservation herds stabilized, the Parks became successes, and tribes tried to regrow on their native lands now reservations, or grow onto reservations they were deported to from lands further east. As time went on they had a resurgence of patriotism with the American Indian Movement in the 70’s and started to see opportunities in their autonomy. While mostly a casual affair, they figured out ways to get by in the new way of doing things, with casinos, tax free opportunities, and in using the land. They began to develop tribal fish and wildlife programs to do similar things to their state and federal counterparts, and the more radical and passionate of them started to agitate for better environmental ethics and restoration of the way the land was before the white man came west. Why eat beef from the store when you can eat bison from the land? Logic began to return.
A lot of these herds were created by one or two tribal members who just got a flea in their bun to make things happen. In the casual way of reservation life, sometimes it was just as simple as finding where some buffalo were and getting them, or to quote “Some tribal man or wife and got em and kept em here!”. There was always a sponsor of some sort who felt it was important and did the work. As Jim pointed out, many of these tribes didn’t have wildlife or food programs at first, and some still don’t. I bet a few designate one person to represent them because the ITBC needs a point of contact!
At some point these wildlife programs on all the reservations got together and created an organization to coordinate all their efforts, to have a common voice and a place to share their experiences and help each other in 1983, some 33 years ago, after what I imagine was a period of informal coordination between the more active tribal wildlife programs. It was called the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, (NAFWS) and today might have 225 members plus Alaska villages. To the unfamiliar, Alaska doesn’t have a reservation system (with one exception in SE, the Metlakatla Tsimshian tribe. ) but instead is organized around something called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, signed by old Tricky Dick Nixon in 1971. Instead of creating reservations, it created corporations and private land ownership for all the unclaimed lands of Alaska to be given to the native groups through the corporations. They have 45 million acres split among about 100,000 Eskimos and Indians, compared to 54 million acres split among 5.4 million Native Americans in the lower 48. It’s collectively about 5% of the surface area of the US. For perspective, the National Parks cover about 14% of the US. Not a bad chunk of land, but a bit rough to think they used to have it all, but they have moved on from worrying about that to taking care of what they have in most cases.

While I’ll write more about the NAFWS in the next post, the hero’s of this post are it’s offshoot about ten years later in the early 90’s, 1992 to be exact with 7-12 tribes. a group called the ITBC, the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council. People started to feel that there were so many buffalo issues, it was so popular, that it needed it’s own group. The original members were mostly from the northern plains with some token Wisconsinites and a group or two from the Southwest Pueblos. Today in 2016 the ITBC has a membership of 60 tribes in 19 states, some 52 of which have at least a few bison, up to the grand wild herds that first got my attention to write any of this last year on about 3 reservations, and growing. As I said before, they have a purpose that puts the tribes first. They are not Buffalo-centric as the preservationists are, they are Tribal-centric, but it works out pretty well for all involved. You can’t hunt bison on federal lands, but you can on Indian lands, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t meeting all the other goals of restoration ecology as well, they just like to eat, and they have been eating buffalo for ten thousand years. Unlike a lot of regular american producers represented by groups like the National Bison Association and a lot of local groups, they don’t have much pressure to maximize their return on investment. They are tribes, not businesses, so they have latitude to meet as many goals as they see fit.
While the holy grail of Ecosystem restoration is obviously free ranging tribes, it is worth nothing that the majority of their tribal herds are not, maybe 40 of them or more. They are either pen stocked, or contained geographically, but for the survival of the bison, it’s great for genetic diversity and for whatever land they inhabit, which they treat much better than their usual tribal competitors, European Sheep and Cattle. Some of the reservations are small so Free Ranging Herd’s are not viable, and others have Cattle and Sheep on them so it’s a it of a negotiation to get the Tribe to accept a newcomer. In most cases Jim said that it was one tribal member who got really passionate about it, and reminded his fellow tribesman of what was. The pen stocked herds help supplement local diets and offer ceremonial parts and even craft and other secondary product options.
An example of one of these small managed Herds is with the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin. While buffalo did roam in small amounts through the woods of Wisconsin in the days of Old, it would not have been in the numbers that Thundered along the planes, so this is in keeping with the local ecology to some degree.
http://www.oneidanation.org/farm/page.aspx?id=3902
You can see from the information provided that they are basically farm raising organic or near organic Bison for slaughter. It’s not exactly ecological restoration but for the acres they live on, but it’s a nice start and a good idea culturally and environmentally.
Now onto the big herds, the ones that are in some way full restoration of Buffalo to the ecosystem. Now they might not be introducing wolves as well, their partner in population control, but they are moving across the west at their own pace, and it could be argued the populations need to grow on their own to be capable of surviving such an onslaught someday, and furthermore, Indians don’t necessarily want that competition. They can think of plenty of things to do with the ones they take. What they don’t mind is free ranging herds on some of their larger reservations where the land used to have them and can sustain them. I haven’t heard it said but it’s my hunch that they are easier on the land than Cattle, move around more and disturb the land in a way more appreciated by the other local fauna who co-evolved with them. The Navajo Reservations of the 4 corners, which it has been mentioned to me have a fondness for sheep herding of all things, are one place I have seen erosion issues and degradation associated with cattle herding. I once drove through it, conscious to avoid the human wolves of the tribal police variety who seem to love speed traps, and saw more than a few dust storms that looked out of place despite my desert surroundings. as a contrast to this, Buffalo are what are described as Intelligent browsers. Since they evolved with the local flora, they have better instincts for preserving it to keep growing. There are other animals like bird species that have adapted to taking advantage of the ways in which they disturb the prairies they dwell in. They are the antithesis of a goat, which eats anything and everything it can get it’s hands on.
The tribes who have hit the ultimate mark by this writers standards are these:

Crow Tribe of Montana
Fort Belknap A’aninin and Nakota of Montana    Yellowstone NP pure bred
Fort Peck Assinibone and Sioux  of Montana      Yellowstone NP pure bred
Northern Cheyenne of Montana
Tesuque Pueblo of New Mexico
Uintah and Oouray Ute Tribe of Utah
Pubelo of Pojoaque (this is a tiny res in northern NM, 3 square miles, but it manages a herd on nearby Rio Mora Wildlife Refuge)
Yankton Sioux of South Dakota
click here for the full list

When I asked Jim who might be another great candidate for a free ranging tribe he didn’t hesitate long before mentioning the Cherokee of Oklahoma as being one of the places where free ranging herds had room to grow if allowed to. They are growing a herd taken from NPS herds in South Dakota and North Dakota but they are still kept in a fairly large enclosure as their numbers grow into the hundreds. It’s all about expanding herds and in some ways tolerance he said, balancing environmentalism, conservationism, commercial and sustainability issues, but these free ranging herds go out on a limb towards the fruit of land restoration.
There is still a lot going on in this world. Indians have become the buffalo wranglers of note since they have so much experience, with the feds sometimes borrowing their expertise. Things as common as a roundup for inoculations and testing require a skill and experience no longer commonplace, and sometimes the feds and other conservation groups come to the tribes to get it done. There is discussion of the USFWS turning over some or all management and possession of the National Bison Range, a smallish preserve with a herd numbering in the mid hundreds in western Montana, to nearby Salish and Cootney tribes. If so, this wouldbe yet another Free Ranging herd to add to the list. Montana really does seem like the hotbed of restoration and growth of the wild Bison, not just the wild tribal Bison, and not just thanks to Ted Turner anymore.
Much of the work is reportedly grant driven, with the feds through USFWS and other entities handing out money to get projects done that the tribes can’t self fund. One notable recently granted project was for wildlife corridors in Salish country that might someday support wild bison.
http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/tribal/twg.cfm
On the Fundraising front, in addition to ITBC, two organizations have popped up to raise money for this cause. I can’t say vouch for them one way or the other, but all effort tends to be good effort. They are the
http://www.tankafund.org/about and
For more information on the Tribal Buffalo Movement, check out the ITBC website, or check out the Tribal Guide to Buffalo Management, which was written in part by Jim Stone of the ITBC. Another resource is a book called Buffalo Nation by Ken Zontek who followed this movement and had the courage and the brains to write about it for the printing press.
In addition to the ITBC, two organizations that exist but I know very little about have arisen, the Tatanka Fund and the Adopt a Buffalo Program from the Sacred Ground Coalition..  http://www.adoptabuffalo.com/  have a peek if you wish..
Hope doesn’t always come exclusively from the future.. for me, perhaps as with some of the more environmental and nostalgic of the Native Americans involved in these programs, hope comes from wanting to make the future as great as we know the past was.

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modern buffalo herds of North America c 2014?
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American Indians Ecological Restoration first nations native americans Re wilding species reintroduction Tribal Land Restoration

First Nations become First Restorationists: How Native American Tribes are Cutting Through Federal Red Tape by Doing Species Reintroduction on Tribal Lands Part 1

This is a pretty simple idea, and I wish the New York Times hadn’t beaten me to writing about it first. I better write about it better.
The gist of it is this:

There have been dozen’s of animal species extirpated, which is a fancy word for hunted out, poisoned out, or habitat destroyed out of wide portions of their range in North America, most particularly the inhabited parts south of the Arctic. Think of the pieces I wrote on Elk, or one I plan to write on the Plains and Wood Buffalo.. they used to roam free in Pre-Colombian America, before a combination of disease, colonization, wars, barriers and deforestation and treaties closed the American Frontier sometime in the late 1800’s.. it had taken about 400 years to completely disfigure the landscape and interrupt the ecosystems almost beyond recognition from the first arrival of European man in any significance. It had created one of the world’s most fascinating nations, but it had come at a cost to both the original inhabitants and the flora and fauna. What had been places for Buffalo to roam hundreds of miles were now criss crossed by barbed wire. Forests where the Lynx or the Elk had roamed had been cut down for timber for firewood and building materials worldwide. Huge swamps like the Great Kankakee had been filled in for farmland, and the deserts had been stunted by cattle grazing. This was the new reality of America: not a corner of the country had escaped some sort of monetization and degradation, and it had chased out a lot of species to remote corners to ride out the storm if they weren’t put into extinction entirely.
 The Progressives came in, led by Muir and Roosevelt, Pinchot and Mather, and small parks sprung up to preserve last bits, and legislate what had been informal animal efforts to survive and some human efforts to not put the final blow in by preservation groups. We started National Parks, and then State and Local Parks, as much for recreation as for Biodiversity and even single species preservation. The Department of Interior grew, but then under the second Roosevelt and the Acts of the great depression we bought up huge tracts of neglected and abused forestland and nursed them back to health for both economic and ecological reasons, creating National Forests and Nature Preserves and Wildlife Preserves, and National Grasslands Etc. Etc. through the Department of Interior and it’s many reporting organizations like the USFS, USFWS, and the BLM.
But the whole time, one group seemed to shake it’s head, like the famous Commercial from the 70’s of the American Indian who is saddened by so much degradation and litter.

It was the American Indians, who had spread out to Reservations, mostly in the American & Canadian West, where they are called Reserves, from homelands all over the US and Canada. Some where nearby, like the small reservations in the east in places like Connecticut and Florida, and out west, Utah and Arizona and Washington, where it thankfully made contemporary sense to give the Natives land where they already were, and some, as many know from studying the Trail of Tears and it’s many associated displacements, were as much as a thousand miles away in completely different parts of the country with completely different ecosystems, places in Oklahoma where tribes from the North East and Midwest ended up.
The Native Americans, First Nations, or Indians are many of them are comfortable being called, despite it’s now renown as a misnomer, tended to live in rural areas no matter how close or far away from their ancestral homelands, and collectively are reputed to never having lost instincts for the importance of ecology and stewardship. So as not to get caught up in Stereotypes of the Nobel Savage, it’s fair to say that by lifestyle choices and perhaps even some economic ones, they stayed active as hunters, gatherers, fishermen and outdoorsmen, more so than their new neighbors, and never collectively abandoned good stewardship as a virtue, with some notable exceptions like the deforestation of Haida Gwaii. Due to this, based on idealism as well as fact, they became symbolic of ecological harmony, due to famous quotes from people like Chief Seattle and the obvious fact that the Alteration of American Ecology was much more dramatic after the arrival of Europeans. They became symbolic, as if a national image and reminder of the consciousness of a Pre Colombian and Pre Industrialization healthier North America.
This brings us to the present day, and the trend I want to discuss. We have this situation where almost every ecosystem outside of the North of Canada and Alaska has some sort of missing species or link in the food web that used to be there before the real arrival of outsiders en masse in the 1600’s. In some places it’s wolves or grizzlies, Black Bears or Cougars, animals that instill fear in those who raise children and profess to lead a normal American life as predators who might not distinguish between overpopulated white tail deer and a kid playing in a yard. In other places it might be top Ungulates like the Buffalo, Elk or Caribou, maybe the Moose or Key Deer, whose habitat was so altered or diminished that they fell on hard times and were eliminated back to strongholds in the areas established by Governments to preserve them, but it’s a pale shadow of their former ranges. And in rivers and streams, nonnatives like Pike, Salmon, and Zebra Mussels in the Great Lakes, and over fishing, both commercially and by individuals, as well as dam’s, bridges, and other public works projects, screwed up balances and habitats that drove fish species like Great Lakes and Missouri River Sturgeon, all sorts of Trout, and Salmon species throughout the river systems that drain into the Pacific from the Sacramento River north.
Native Americans were not above participating in these eliminations it’s said, and it’s rumored in places like Northern Alaska that the Muskox did not face extinction until the Athabaskans and Inuits got their hands on guns which made them far more effective than they had been in the past at hunting, but they might have been meeting bounties from outsiders, and surely it was controversial. Every species in every place has a different story, ones that have been told, or will be told with a little look at the records, but what is happening now is a neat spin on things, a nice shift in a different direction.
By the end of settlement on Reservations around 1900, the consensus was that these tribes were almost independent entities, free from US government oversight on all but the most major things. They couldn’t commit felonies, but were in almost all other cases allowed to autonomously run their own affairs, including their land management. It didn’t go well in all cases. In Navajo reservations overgrazing can cause huge dust clouds today, and there are many instances of everything from Casino’s to fishing causing environmental headaches, but what has started to happen is that many tribes are using the nimbleness, almost casualness of their small Nations, to repopulate their lands with extirpated species in a way that would take years and millions of dollars for Federal and most state governments to do.
One need look no further than the reintroduction of the Wolf to Yellowstone to see what a long road it can be. The Reintroduction was a huge success, one that has spread all the way to the Cascade Range of Oregon as the Wolf resettles it’s old haunts in the North West, but it took forever, and was and still is contentious. Like so many things in America on that scale, calm negotiation cedes to populism and posturing for all sorts of reasons, and in this particular case the Cattle Industry started screaming bloody murder over a stubbed toe, and the Hunters followed suit, wanting to maintain the comfy last century of them as the only apex species to cull overpopulated prey. People like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, while a friend of more complete eco-systems, took somewhat unconscionable positions to maintain relevance with their main donor base, and two out of three state governors, those of Idaho and Wyoming, acted like jackasses, with only the Governor of Montana taking a measured approach that helped guarantee success.
But what if an ecologically sympathetic municipality or county with large land holdings wanted to do something on their own. Well, in the majority of the country, it would be an uphill battle. Most small governments have to go through state authorities where Cattle, Timber and Industrial interests often hold sway. Even in reintroducing the Wood Buffalo to the great wilds of Interior Alaska the Mining industry was a huge damper on 2 out of the 3 selected spots from all rumor, for fear that a species considered endangered as soon as it is released back into the wild ( a proven breeding pair in the wild of any creature engendered kicks in the ESA) would create addition red tape for miners and other industries in places they might or might not be currently even working.
But what if that Ecologically minded small nimble government was a tribe, and that tribe didn’t even have to answer to a state game board or Governor or anyone, since they have sovereignty over their territory. Now that’s a whole different ball of wax, and recently, and in greater and greater numbers, it seems as if the Tribes and the Wildlife professionals they hire as Wardens and Environmental Officers are catching onto the opportunities of that sovereignty, mixed with maybe a little casino cash in some cases, and are doing in small numbers what requires so much effort and inertia changing for the Federal and State Governments try to do in Large Numbers: They are reintroducing extirpated, AKA locally extinct species, all over the place, and it’s good for all of us!
I first noticed this on a recent Buffalo Hunt near the Ute Indian Reservation in East Central Utah. I was happy back in the great north when an old high school buddy of mine and I began to plan a hang out after a long time not having seen each other. It started to be a plan to go skiing or hang out in Moab in his native Utah and a state that I had gotten to know well over the years, due greatly to my love of the Canyon Lands and the endless possibilities for exploration and beauty there. All the sudden he told me that a buddy of his had pulled a once in a lifetime tag to Hunt Buffalo and that he wanted help. I agreed in the first phone call, and we began to plan to meet around Christmas in Salt Lake City and move out to scout and then hunt in the zone he had been designated, south of Vernal, while staying with some family of my buddies who lived out there. The hunter was a great big and boisterous friend of his we will call Tommy Boy, and Tommy boy had explored his territory and was stymied by it, and good naturedly accepted the offer of help and friendship to be part of his hunt, and the great caper began.
As I researched, I was surprised to be told our territory was in the Book Cliffs. If you have read my writing, you know I am a big nature geek, and I was familiar with only one Buffalo herd in Utah, down in the Henry Mountains, west of the Canyon Lands and one of the remotest areas of the Contiguous United States (it was the last area to be mapped in the late 1800’s of the entire contiguous 48 states). I didn’t know that there was another wild herd, as the effort it takes to establish one and mollify ranchers that they won’t pass diseases to their stock has made the Buffalo/ Bison lag well behind the Elk in reintroduction, also since they don’t have the backing of an organization as well funded and effective  as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
What had happened to the best of my ability to research was this:
The Ute People live on three reservations across Eastern Utah and Western Colorado. Members of the Northern Branch, 20,000 strong, living on the Unitah and Ouray Reservation at the top of the Book Cliffs, decided to take a few Buffalo from a Montana Herd in 1986.  28 more came from the Henry Mountains in 1993, and now the whole herd counts in the hundreds, 550 for the whole book cliffs is thought to be ideal, and have been managing them and letting them grow in numbers ever since.

The State Plan for Bison in the Book Cliffs

They both allow a hunt for their tribe members and the state of Utah was forced to get into the game, because Bison don’t seem to care too much about boundaries in one of the most forage rich areas in the west, issuing what are know as ‘once in a lifetime permits’ by lottery to Utah resident hunters. Basically, you can win one by lottery when you put in for your hunting tags, and the hunting plan as we learned is this: High Snows force the Bison out of High territory on the Res and into bottom lands to the north, near the Green River. If you are lucky and it snows enough, you will find one near a place called Algers Pass. People made it pretty clear.. don’t go on reservation land to find them.. they won’t like that and they will catch you.. just let em come to you.

We didn’t know this until pretty late in the game, although we had a good time bombing all around our game area over the course of a few weekends before The Big Kill. Not only Buffalo, the book cliffs were loaded with more mule deer, Elk, wild horses and pronghorn than I knew existed, plus some signs of Mountain Lion were present (we found a cave filed with kill) and is likely the best Wolf Territory yet undiscovered by the Yellowstone packs spreading out. They have made it all the way to Western Oregon, but Utah and it’s crafty coyote of a Governor Gary Herbert ( doesn’t he look like Governor Lapetamine from Blazing Saddles?

), has a 50 dollar bounty on coyotes going, hoping for some accidental shootings before the endangered species act triggers a major sovereignty showdown between a state dominated by Mormon cattle ranchers and natural gas pumpers and the feds if one breeding pair makes it into these tasty hunting grounds in Utah.
Since I am about to go on an expedition for weeks, I am going to call this Part 1 and wrap up with this thought: It occurred to me during the hunt, if this happened with this reservation so quietly here, when every time the Feds do something like this it’s national news, what other tribes have made similar admirable restorational steps?
It turns out dozens, led by dedicated tribal members and their wildlife biologists and game managers, restoring everything from Bison and Elk to Black Footed Ferrets and even fish species.. but that will have to wait until I get back from a great trip to someplace quite far south.. trust me there is a lot here.. sorry for the cliffhanger, but it will be worth the wait… Hopefully when I get back I can flesh out what is a great but quiet positive trend in North American Ecology from perhaps the best place it could come from.. First Americans..

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Aleutians Aucklands Campbell Islands Channel Islands DOC Ecological Restoration Feral Pigs Invasive Species Island Restoration Islands Rats Seabirds USFWS Whaling

Island Restoration Worldwide

For some reason, this is among the purest and most satisfying types of conservation and ecological restoration projects. I love it.. it usually involves remote places, peaceful and exotic.. places where birds congregate their chattiness juxtaposing the serenity off the surroundings, where the sea meets the land and the outside world doesn’t seem to exist. This story takes place in the lands that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel DeFoe, and the movie maker and King Kong creator Marian Cooper. It also is finite, accomplish-able, and the results can be incredible, and uncompromised. What I am talking about is Island Restoration.
Now let me explain.. most islands are not disappearing, they don’t need to be pushed back up.. well, the people of Vanuatu and Tuvalu, might disagree these days, but this term means something specific, it generally means the removal of invasive species from ecosystems that have evolved in relative isolation. These invasive creatures seem to have most often come from the Whaling Industry of yesteryear, although natives and 20 and 21st century man also contribute endlessly to this problem, but it’s a case of a distinct act, usually of culling or relocating invasive mammals, having a measurable result that improves the survivability of the worlds biodiversity, and somehow restores of rescues nature’s, or even perhaps some divine power’s, intent for the complexity of the world, if only in these remote corners.

As Whalers spread around the world in the 1800’s, first entering the Pacific on the recent coattails of Cook and the British Navy, who despite Magellan being the first, were the most thorough in their reconnoitering of the world. And not to leave the Atlantic out, Islands like Saint Helena and the now Famous Falklands and South Georgia, where they also explored, Europeans flush with navigation technology and their new gunpowder weapons and big wooden boats, and heck, the Indian Ocean as well, going further and further afield in search of, you named it, Oil, in this case Whale Oil… Initially the Europeans went in search of Treasure and Spices, but that led to other civilizations, not as frequently but occasionally the uninhabited knobs of the world.
What the whalers would do is stockpile food and supplies on these islands.. release a few pigs and let them roam, so they could breed and eventually they would come back and shoot a few, and of course eventually a Norway Rat or two would scramble down an anchor rope and onto shore, goats would be added to the pigs, and perhaps a pair of fecund cats would be the company of some lonely attendant there to farm supplies for passing ships, he might grow a few trees for shade that might also be used for Ship repair if given time to mature… while a natural outgrowth of commerce, it all had a devastating effect on these isolated island ecosystems, these places usually only touched by what could fly, or swim, or float there with the currents, where evolution occurred in isolation and species adapted to their immediate surroundings since change came rarely enough..

Now perhaps the strong should be allowed to dominate the whole earth..man and a few tigers and rats and bears should roam everywhere, but that kind of takes the fun out of it, the kind of distinct ecological cultures that give the world some richness…so people started to take notice of these impacted ecosystems.. I am not sure who and where first, but somehow the Kiwi’s, the kings of practical intervention, decided to take this on in their own country, starting both at home and on some of their remote island territories. the New Zealand Department of Conservation, or DoC (pron: Doc) as it is known in N Zed, are kind of the SAS of Conservation. They are small, nimble, capable and relentless, while still being user friendly. They serve the role of like 20 different agencies in the US, BLM, NPS, USFWS to name a few, all under one roof, and they decided to take on some projects around their sumptuous little island country. These problems I am describing are most romantic on deserted uninhabited islands, and New Zealand has a few, but the whole country was kind of a lightly inhabited, if not deserted, then isolated Island (not to piss off any Maori, the aggression gene and all that.. they were the most advanced Stone Age Culture in the world by some measures, pretty cool to boot, but can be credited with the extinction of a flightless bird called the Moa   which was the top predator on the North and South Islands after 50 million years of blissful isolation until Polynesians showed up 1300 years ago, and they did have trade with other groups on the nearby island chains it is proven, as they were seafarers as well as warriors).

The Work credited with beginning this kind of Environmental restoration, necessary on likely hundreds of islands around the world, if not thousands, began on a small Island, Cuvier, barely a mile long, off the Corimandel Penninsula aside the Bay of Plenty, on the north Coast of the north Island of N Zed.. it has a lighthouse on it, and not much else, and it must have been crawling with invasives, as it’s remarkably beautiful looking, (I have been 20 miles south of it but never to it, it was beautiful where I was as well), but otherwise unremarkable, because I had never heard of it until now. Most Kiwis are originally Scottish, and they like things tidy, DoC employees no exception eh, and somehow this offended them, so work began in 1962 to clean up this mess. You need to understand that given the ecological history of New Zealand, Rats and even lots of species of Mice are invasive.. it’s a tall order to make things they way they should be, or were, to be scientific and not moral. At around the same time there was an effort to eradicate a rat species from Bermuda, and a few other things, but I am not sure how many projects functioned on this principal of full restoration if possible.

Cuvier Island near the NE of the North Island of NZ

An island set I had heard of, and the first to intrigue me before I learned of these efforts worldwide, including significant efforts on the Aleutians and Channel Islands of my own country of the United States for two, and loads of other places big and small, is a classic case that struck me as I read it not for being the first, but for being such a colossal effort for a result that many would consider inconsequential, which taught me how far DoC would go to restore nature and right wrongs, since these islands are so far from anyone that justifying this work in most democracies would be ludicrous. I am speaking of DoC’s work on the Campbell Islands.. never heard of them? You are not alone… they are a little group of islands 600 km south of Stewart Island and NZ proper, and further from the closest major population areas of Dunedin or Christchurch, down close to Antarctica, and the roaming areas of the Southern Right Whale. What had happened, as I alluded to at first, is that Whalers had dropped off domestic animals here, cows, chickens, and even a caretaker to raise them and provide when people showed up looking for supplies. Rats took hold as well, chasing off tons of bird species, many endemic, including what has been described as the worlds rarest Duck Species, The Cambell Island Teal. On the nearby Auckland Islands, it was pigs, mice and even one of the sub islands was crawlin’ with rabbits,  but never rats. There had even been a town there, or a settlement, Port Ross, for a few years, as well as a Maori population fleeing the colonizers, so the lack of rats was a surprise to many.
On Campbell, DoC, starting in the 70’s, had culled cows by 1984, sheep by 1992, and then the amazing feat of rats by 2003, and the results already show for Snipe and Teal and other shore and seabirds returns have been impressive. It’s like restoring a museum that no one will ever see, just because it should be done, polishing a fabrage egg and locking it in a closet in Northern Alberta. However there is a constituency that does appreciate it, even if they don’t vote: the ecosystems have rebounded and many of the species numbers are way up, mostly birds, and with them an increase in the healthiness of the whole ecosystem one might imagine. I remember watching footage of the helicopter hunts for the last feral pigs on Auckland, and it reminded me of something from Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom, man in remote lands, hunting to save, helicopters that looked out of an 80s thriller, steely eyed serious men intent of preserving instead of destroying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmnc9INxceM
http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/land-and-freshwater/offshore-islands/new-zealands-subantarctic-islands/auckland-islands/restoring-the-auckland-islands/
These places are UNESCO World Heritage Sites now:
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/877
A study on the success of 5 of the 90(!) islands they have restored, many quite small, but still worth it
http://www.doc.govt.nz/documents/conservation/land-and-freshwater/offshore-islands/island-conservation-effectiveness.pdf
They said that New Zealand has some 165 islands, but that the rest were not in need of intervention.
You can see here the projects that DoC has moved onto:
http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/restoration-projects/
And while I gush over All Black conservation ethics, it seems that even their private sector has gotten into the game, with an interesting approach to this invasives issue. To back up, as I explained, the impact of these invasives is that they either eat what  native species like to eat, therefore making their survival harder, or they sometimes eat the native animal species. Maybe both….Double Whammy. But there is another impact they have, which is that animals like rats will eat seeds off the ground or young shoots that might have either been ignored by the native animals of NZ, or not eaten up quite as efficiently, hence they can change the makeup of entire forests. If there is some plant that would normally be abundant, but can never make it past germination, whole generations and regeneration can be stunted, and if you imagine the competition for nutrients and light, the species that the invasives, like rats or mice, don’t eat tend to thrive, shifting the balance of the forest strongly.. in the American west it creates a shift towards shrubby thorny type things that cows ignore… for some Kiwi species, like, for example, the Kiwi it’s self, this creates a lot of pressure as they kind of grew up in a safe neighborhood for the millions of years they evolved, and then in the last 200 to 150 things changed dramatically ( I believe Captain Cook was the first European to visit New Zealand, although now that I think of it, it was a Dutch guy, Abel Tasman in 1642, hence the name, after the southwest Dutch Province of Zeeland..) since the growth of European settlement, although the first of what could be called invasives came with the first Polynesian settlers in I believe 1300 AC.they arrived with Pigs and chickens and who knows what else after long sea voyages…
So this brings me to a more mainland and private attempt, as if to prove that the whole country of New Zealand supports efforts like this. I was once driving on the south Island, the largest of the Islands, about 600 miles long, so hardly a place where you can just eliminate invasives in the controlled confines of these larger islands. I was driving in a very pretty area north of the college town of Dunedin, and I came across an odd fence with a fence that had only the smallest of openings.. big enough for flies and that’s about it… it seemed to encircle a few hundred acres even though ti was still being built, and I asked a local what it was for. He told me it was to protect some little lizard, with a funny combination of shagrin and respect… I was pretty impressed.. it seemed like a lot of work for a little lizard..
The Lizard he was talking about was the Otago Skink..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otago_skink
they have been so busy they haven’t even gotten to reintroducing it yet.. October of 2013 is the plan, but they have been busy indeed:
http://www.orokonui.org.nz/content/theorokonuistory.php
http://www.orokonui.org.nz/content/howitworks.php  Think of Stalag 17.. or M. Night Shamalan’s The Village for native Species… This whole thing was the pipe dream of  a  Kiwi Cartoonist and his buddies in the 80’s, named Burton Silver:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burton_Silver
http://visualhumor.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/burton-silver/
the idea had many forms and even died before coming back to life sometime in the 90’s, and sometime in 2005 or 2006 it appears real construction began.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orokonui_Ecosanctuary
http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/225287/dunedin-ecologist-joins-heady-group-loder-cup-winners
Accusations of Environmental Absolutism aside.. it’s hard to not be impressed by this… and it wasn’t exclusively a DoC or even government funded program, although they no doubt helped..
So it might be a bit Demoralizing that Ne Zealand has set the bar so high for the rest of us.. but remember, this blog is about hope, all good news is good news.
In the Age of Globalization, shipping containers, and flights from everywhere to anywhere, invasive are now a worldwide challenge.. the problems introduced by Whalers looking for a little reliable non seafood grub seem pretty small by comparison these days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
The Un has gotten in on the act:
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=585&ArticleID=6180&l=en
http://www.cbd.int/
yup.. there is an agency:
http://www.cbd.int/secretariat/
and meetings:
http://www.cbd.int/invasive/
and there are these Biodiversity Targets come up with in a convention in Japan:
http://www.cbd.int/sp/targets/
http://www.gov-online.go.jp/pdf/hlj/20101201/18-19.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_Indicators_Partnership
http://www.unep-wcmc.org/meeting-aichi-target-11_928.html
All kind of mind Numbing but necessary, but it does make you curious what goes on where the rubber hits the road, and since all politics is local, it’s gunna cause millions of little independent fights and efforts even though it’s nice to see some top down planning going on..
That said, I got a bit off topic from these exotic islands, these paradises lost and returned. Since I am an American, and like I wrote once in a piece about the Jordanian De Sal Canal, it’s easy to write about the US, since there is always so much coverage in English, I am going to write about these efforts there, most notably on the Islands of the Pacific, The Aleutians, Hawaiian Islands, and the Channel Islands of California, where this is happening, and there is even an organization that takes this on worldwide and has made inroads on Mexico’s pacific coast and Sea of Cortez islands that tend to be desert and therefore somewhat user friendly in the eradication category.
The Hawaiian Islands have a mixed bag of Success.. the ball hasn’t completely started rolling yet because of, you guessed it, people.. the worlds most persistent invasive:
Tell em Keanu!
In addition to many invasive plants (there is a wild Asian ginger that was introduced by a Resident Ranger in his garden that is now the bane of Volcano National Park) there is the Drama of the Pigs.. wild pigs that were  mostly or entirely introduced by Europeans despite rumors that they are descended from Polynesian Voyagers, but now there are efforts by hungers to protect them even thought hey tear up the Jungle there pretty severely.

The good news comes from the Aleutians and the Channel Islands.. again on the Mammal scale, with even an effort to eradicate Rat’s from Rat Island!
There are many invasives throughout the Aleutians, from Caribou and Elk to Rats and who knows what else,
http://alaskamaritime.fws.gov/whatwedo/bioprojects/restorebiodiversity/background.htm
but the emblematic species is the Arctic Fox. As many of you might know. Russia colonized Alaska after Vitus Bearing ‘discovered’ it on a Russian Imperial Expedition in about 1740, before the US bought it in 1867 to bail out a broke Tsar who had fears of the English seizing it for free. While converting the natives to Russian Orthodoxy, which still holds in many places, they got busy killing every Sea Otter they could as far south as California for the outlandish prices in the Chinese Market, while placing on every Island they could Arctic Fox, which didn’t roam natively south of likely the Yukon, but had a valuable white fur during winter.  455 Islands were populated in all from 1750 until the time the practice was stopped in the 1930’s, with it actually peaking in the territorial days at the turn of the last century even though the Russians did start the practice. Most of the ones dropped off in South East Alaska where taken care of by nature the way the Mafia takes care of squealers. However on the more treeless islands, the Aleutians and other islands of Western Alaska, they thrived.  These guys were not friendly to the bird population as you might imagine, which had other consequences:
http://currents.ucsc.edu/04-05/03-28/foxes.asp
http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF17/1750.html

Starting in 1949 eradiction efforts began.. with 21 islands intentionally cleaned off by the 1993, with them remaining on 46 as of that year.. does this mean the US was ahead of DoC? Things happen Quietly in Alaska, so I guess so… although they were using poisons like strichnyne until 1972 when such practices were banned, and now are stuck using regular old traps… DoC stil gets in trouble for poison, so it might be the way to go, but you gotto follow the rules.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA322590
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxsub-4N-vY
It might have been an autonomous effort in Alaska from ’49, common sense ahead of legislation, but eventually the effort had something to do with the Endangered Species Act, passed under the Great Society push and the Silent Spring movement of 1966. One of the first animals listed was this guy:
http://www.fws.gov/refuge/Humboldt_Bay/wildlife_and_habitat/AleutianCacklingGeese.html
As you can see.. it is never popular to kill cute critters like a Fox, but it had it’s pluses.. these Aleutian Geese rebounded from 700 individuals to 120,000 in some 45 years! Farmers where they winter went from never seeing them to considering them pests in that short amount of time!

As the above extensive report and history from 1993 demonstrates, they have had success on many of the islands, but I was once rumbling around Atka, like many of the Aleutians, it’s name starts with an A, and I was exploring big tidewater rock on the bearing side where I was camping that should have been teeming with sea life, but it was kind listless, and I came around a corner and was confronted from just about 10 feet by a mangy looking black pelted arctic fox who looked me straight in the eye and didn’t really back off.. it was kind of a tight spot we were in between two high spaces.. and we kind of stared at each other for a bit.. and I remember thinking that his pelt almost looked like he was molting… and I remember thinking he thinks I’m as out of place here as I think he is… he shrugged me off and walked right past me…
I recently Spoke to the Invasives Manager of the Preserve by email, and he said since 1993 there have been 26 more projects on individual islands, or closely grouped islands, and I am waiting to hear back from him on how many islands still have the fox that maybe shouldn’t.
In a funny way, we can shrug off these distant Islands, they mean nothing to us in the immediate sense, they aren’t down the street, and they might not harm the air quality much, but when it comes to complete stewardship, a full and almost ideal approach to our shared environment, these are the Ethics you want..
Efforts continue in the Aleutians, where they have taken a breather, no projects are planned now, but that is likely more a sign of the current economic woes than intent by the USFWS guys in Homer who look after this and quite a few other reserves..
And in the Channel Islands the effort goes on.. funny that the most graphic but thorough recounting I can quickly find comes from animal rights activists:
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/05/4/tsg.channelIslands4.05.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Islands_(California)
Rats were removed from Anacapa just 10 years ago, usually the last thing to go before you take on invasive plants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacapa_Island
On Santa Rosa, the Elk, the last and most symbolic of the invasive mammals, and source of the longest most dramatic three way fight between the NRA and hunters who wanted to Hunt it in perpetuity, the Animal rights activists who wanted it either left alone or live captured, and the park that just wanted it gone somehow, was finally extirpated just two years ago:
http://www.independent.com/news/2011/aug/17/santa-rosa-islands-final-hunts/

And this brings us back to the kiwi’s for an encore:
They have become the world experts, and now have companies that not only consult on these efforts but get the job done world wide, Kiwi Style:
http://nativerange.com/
http://nativerangecaptureservices.com/
And as California is becoming a new home for this in the US, this whole effort has it’s own non profit now:
http://www.islandconservation.org/index.php
I checked out their website a few years ago, and they were just focused on the West coast of the US and The Sea of Crortez and Islands off of Baja.. I can see now that their scope has widened substantially.. and why not, Island restoration is kind of an Obsessive Dream..