Political Challenges and Future Outlook

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Now presenting Love and Fury, New York's Fight Against AIDS, an exhibition about how graphic design shaped the city's grassroots response to the AIDS crisis Using works such as advertisements from public health campaigns, Iye popping benefit flyers and dynamic club handbills, Love and Fury shows how communities built survival systems from below often before the state would act On view until september sixth, learearn more at posterhouse. org slash studios Hi, I'm Jane Lyindnhol, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm filling in today for Flora and IRra Big cats used to roam across the entire United States You might know them as mountain lions, pumas, couuckars, or catamouts They have many different names, but they're actually all the same species Their current U.S. population is mostly confined to western states and a small population in Florida Though in recent years, they've been spotted east of the Mississippi River. Most mountain lions were gone from the Northeast by the eighteen hundreds, with the last verified accounts in the nineteen thirties. My next guest is a mountain lion conservationist hoping to reintroduce these wildcats back to their previous habitats in New England Should we? door Mark Elbroch is the director of the PumMa Program at Panthera, a big cat conservation and advocacy organization. Mark, thank you so much for joining me Yeah, my pleasure. Thankks for having me on the show. Let's just jump right in why Would people want to bring mountain lions back to the Northeast Oo. That's a great question. I think one is that U sort of reintroducing species that were prereviously partart of ecosystems in the East is quuite honestly, a core American value You know, it's been part of American culture At least our conservation culture for more than a hundred years. We have reintroduced hundreds of species. People don't even realize it Like that black bears, whiteetailed deer River oatters, beavers, all of these things were rare at one point in New England or absent in parts of New England. and were successfully brought back through reintroduction efforts and protections And so I think it's fair to say that you it is a core value of American people to say, we did something wrong And we want to right that wrong and bring back and rebuild ecosystems which we changed. Beyond wanting to maybe repair something that humans could say we were the ones who damaged Is our ecosystem missing anything without Mountain lions Yeah, so I mean, large carnivores contribute all sorts of things two ecosystems and one is that they Bolster the ecological health and resilience of an ecosystem, meaning that they are Bet armed with the sort of internal mechanisms needed to protect themselves after a fire, a wildlife disease outbreak. timber harvest and the ecosystems can recover from those events more quickly when they have systems that are more complex and large carnivores add to that complexity. And then the other is that they make animals afraid and As strange as that sounds, it's a really important thing. And so for instance, their primary prey, which in New England would be deer, would be pooping in different places, they'd be hiding in different places, and it really spreads nutrients across the landscape in different ways than in their absence. and those fear effects are, you know, really important for us as well You know, we just did a really cool study out where I live in Washington State, very much like New England and Western Washington, at least in terms of a rural landscape But we looked at the impact that the local mountain lions were having on Steer collisions with people and their cars. And we found that the areas where The mountain lines were close to the highways and they were scaring deer away from them They were reducing local Dear Deer collisions with cars by seventy six percent I mean, that's a huge number and it translates into millions of dollars of savings for local communities And that's the kind of thing that that fear you know, can create on a landscape I live in Vermont and there are many Vermonts who say mountain lions or as we call them, catamounts, never actually left And the people have been spotting them for the last one hundred and fifty years possible. I wish it were true You know, I lived in New England M of my life as well. And and in fact, while I was in New England, I think I investigated fifty three sightings you know, going around and to verify whether these were truly mountain lions or not And one of them ended up being a mountain lion But you know Even when they have been verified as mountain lion, those that have predominantly been documented have been from other places. We expect that they were you know exotic pets that were released into the wild Now All that said, occasionally A wild mountain lion does make it to New England And I think, know the most exciting example of that was in twenty eleven. when a mountain line that we know originated from the Black Hills of South Dakota made it all the way to the east coast. I mean, in a remarkable journey that was documented with not just photographic evidence of people who had cameras in their backyards But also genetic evidence that was gathered by different state wildlife agencies and then later compared with each other and goes, oh my goodness, it's the same one that died in Connecticut in twenty eleven. So it was an amazing story. and it just shows that it is possible. So Id like to say that to folks that it is possible that they really did see a mountainlion In Vermont, it's just unlikely. Yes, and no established breeding populations. There are no established breeding populations in anyw I wish that were true too. Well, let's talk about what it would take to bring back breeding populations in New England Do we have the right ecosystem now? or are there further steps that would need to be taken before mountain lions could successfully survive here Great question and an easy answer So I'll just start by saying the mountain lions are generalous, meaning that they inhabit every kind of forest and almost every kind of habitat available in North America And so is there habitat in New England Absolutely. And is there food from mountain lions? In New England, well, their most common prey in the West Dear Beavers porcupines and raccoons Other than Elk, we have all of those things in New England What about forest fragmentation? Not a huge deal in Vermont, but in some of the New England and northeastern states, a lot more highways that could cause problems for moving mountain lions Yeah, so highways are a big issue for mountain lions in the sense that generally mountain linions don't make home ranges that overlap a highway. So they don't split one side, you, spend half their time on one side half the time the other And so we generally see large highways that have heavy traffic loads They're not always a barrier to movement because young mountain lions, which we call dispersers or transients, the ones that are looking for a territory They will cross these highways, even with heavy traffic loads And that's what ensures the genetic health of all mountain lions scattered across an area with highways in it. because they'll go across the highway and carry with them genetic material into those mountain lions that live on the other side And so a landscape like New England No problem at all And you need very few crossings to really maintain genetic health. I mean that's One of the revelations in the last ten years in terms of mountain lions is that a single animal that crosses a highway into a new population is enough to really bolster the genetic health of that population. You know, Mark, perhaps an even bigger stumbling block is making sure that you have both political and public buy in for a project like this, especially when we're talking about an apex predator or an animal where there is some cultural fear around. in this case, Vermont has started to become sort of the epicenter of this reintroduction idea so far It was the first state to introduce a bill that would study the reintegration of mountain lions. That bill didn't move forward, but it did you know come up in the legislature. There's an environmental advocacy group called Mighty Earth that has started pushing this project. I see some of their road signs out in my neighborhoods, and they've even said that they'd like to have pause on the ground in four years But there is pushback already to the plan too. Vermont Fish and Wildlife has said it's too soon to be considering reintroduction. There's still a lot more research that needs to be done, they say. how much of a reintroduction plan is actually about pololitical and community education. Well, for this species, it's all about public outreach, education and political will the team that I work with, which we loosely call ourselves the cougar. reesearch collaborative has already done public surveys at the state level What's been very clear is that across the east that we've sampled, peopleeople are supportive of the reroduction of Mountain. People are supportive regardless of their political affiliation or how they identify as a hunter. or whether they call themselves a conservative. I mean, all of these things, even across age groups. So we feel like that part has been quite well addressed Now Could we broaden the net? Could we reach out to every different group of you know, that might be called a special interest group to check in with them if they would support such an initiative? Yes And that actually is generally what happens during a feasibility assessment And that's what Vermont proposed to do. So that's one part. Political will is the other thing you brought up. And in fact, that's probably you know, in terms of a reintroduction of this species the bigger issue and I think it's fair to say that at this point, we have yet to identify a champion and by that I mean a person or a state group of individuals that are either legislators, governors leadership in a state wildlife agency that are genuinely enthused about this idea and are ready to kind of carry it through the inevitable that will come up and And I say inevitable not because there isn't public support because state wildlife agencies have so much old inertia because they are still running themselves as they were designed to do over a hundred years ago and it's just not conducive to embracing and reintroducing large carnivores. But I do think it's important to emphasize that all of these state agencies are strapped for cash They all have the list of things they'd like to do. And they all have a budget that doesn't meet those desires. And so when an outside group comes in and says, Hey, we'd love you to do. reintroduction of Mountain lin, it isn't on their radar Of course, the response is like, my goodness We can't even keep up with our current priorities and If we were given money, would this be one of our top priorities Do you think it's actually going to happen? Are we going to see wild mountain lions in the Northeast in your lifetime I believe it's possible That's not very affirmative