Wildlife

Ancient Beasts of Australia

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 17:00:00 +0000

Ancient Beasts of Australia Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 10:00

Jim Scott

For Australia’s earliest human immigrants, who likely floated there from Indonesian islands on wooden rafts they lashed together more than 50,000 years ago, the wild menagerie of huge animals and birds prowling the landscape must have been astonishing.

Think rhinoceros-sized wombats, 1,000-pound kangaroos, 25-foot-long lizards, ferocious marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises, said professor Gifford Miller, a fit CU geoscientist who bicycles from home to a cluttered campus office that harbors the skulls of a walrus and a polar bear he found in the Arctic.

The extinct Australian animals, collectively known as megafauna, also included a 400-pound flightless bird that stood almost seven feet tall and laid cantaloupe-sized eggs.

But just a few thousand years after the arrival of humans — the blink of an eye in geologic time and, for that matter, the history of life — most of the wondrous beasts were gone forever. A scientific debate has raged for decades as to what, or who, did in Australia’s ancient megafauna. And Miller believes he now knows the answer: Homo sapiens.

“Shortly after human settlement in Australia, the geological record shows that most of the large animals disappeared,” he said. “Reconstructing what activities associated with human colonization might have contributed to this remains challenging, but a human cause of some sort is apparent.”

High Arctic to Desert Down Under

How did Miller, associate director of CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, who’s spent most of his career charting climate change in the High Arctic, wind up sifting through Australian sand for the bird eggshells that constitute key evidence?

Family destiny, perhaps.

His father, Robert Rush Miller, a Smithsonian fish biologist, was part of a 17-person team that made a historic nine-month trek through northeastern Australia in 1948, collecting plants, animals, art and archaeological material produced by Aboriginal peoples.

“I was only two years old, so I don’t have a recallable memory of that,” said Miller. “But there were knickknacks from Australia in our home, and I think it was locked in my brain as a young child that I was supposed to go there.”

Later, in the late 1980s Gifford Miller was working in northern Africa’s Sahara Desert — in a spot so dry it has never rained there in recorded history — trying to understand how the climate system produced a permanent lake where early humans hunted and feasted on a range of large animals. The team was investigating sites on the lake’s edge, putting together a chronology of human habitation. Miller was charged with dating ancient ostrich eggshells, remnants of ancient meals.

A colleague suggested Miller visit Australia’s interior to investigate a similar, abrupt change in climate that coincidentally could also be dated with the eggshells of a huge, extinct bird.

He went.

Initially Miller focused on the possible effects of systematic burning of the landscape by the earliest human colonizers. This could have sufficiently altered vegetation patterns to diminish the effectiveness of the summer monsoons that periodically drenched northern Australia, triggering increased aridity in the interior, he said.

Eventually, in 2016, Miller and colleagues reported the first direct evidence that early humans in Australia preyed on Australia’s megafauna — in that case, on the region’s own Big Bird, the almost seven-foot Genyornis newtoni.

The team dated Genyornis eggshell fragments using a technique called luminescence dating — assessing when quartz grains encasing eggshell fragments were last exposed to sunlight — as well as more traditional dating methods. Together they indicate Genyornis disappeared between 54,000 and 47,000 years ago.

Most telling were the burned Genyornis eggshell fragments.

By looking at amino acids in fragments burned at one end and not the other, the researchers concluded the heat gradient on a single fragment was as high as 1,000 degrees F — a clear indication they were partially burned by isolated embers, as in a campfire. Wildfires would have produced sustained, across-the-board heat on the shell fragments, Miller said.

Moreover, most of the hundreds of discovered Genyornis eggshell fragments were found in clusters.

“We believe the evidence is consistent with early humans harvesting Genyornis eggs, cooking them over fires, and then randomly discarding the eggshell fragments in the area,” Miller said.

Huge Vegetarians

Last year, he and colleagues at Australia’s Monash University reported a clever way to paint a portrait of the huge vegetarians that once roamed the landscape. They analyzed a sediment core extracted from the Southern Indian Ocean off the coast of southwestern Australia — which has layers much like an ice core — delving back 150,000 years beyond the last ice age to Earth’s last warm interglacial period.

The core contained chronological layers of pollen, dust and ash washed into the sea over time, indicating southwestern Australia had dense forests 45,000 years ago. This would have made the region a hotbed of biodiversity, and perhaps one of the last holdouts for a dwindling megafauna population. More important, Miller said, the core contained spores from the fungus Sporormiella, which snacked on the dung of plant-eating mammals.

“It’s a region with some of the earliest evidence of humans on the continent, and where we would expect a lot of animals to have lived,” he said. “But in a window of time lasting just a few thousand years, Sporormiella spores disappear from the record, telling us the megafauna population collapsed.”

Most telling were the burned eggshells.

Miller took a roundabout route to becoming one of ��ƷSM��ӰƬ ’s top tier scholars.

After a couple of fits and starts at Michigan colleges after high school, he joined VISTA, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. He was sent to Tuluksak, Alaska, a Yup’ik village of just a few hundred people, to help with community development.

“I still remember the zip code,” he said. “99679.”

He followed that with a brief career as a fur trapper, acquiring his own dogsled team. It took a full day to travel from Tuluksak to the trapping camp, then three days of tending trap lines and another day to get home.

“As much as I loved it, I knew it was something I was not going to do for the rest of my life,” he said. “That’s when I moved to Colorado.”

He got his academic mojo going at ��ƷSM��ӰƬ, earning bachelor’s and doctoral degrees, followed by a postdoc at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., and a year at the University of Bergen in Norway, which he calls his “finishing school.”

Over the decades, his research in the Arctic — where human-caused climate warming from increasing greenhouse gases is occurring faster than anywhere else on the planet — has included landmark studies. Two years ago he and his team determined the current level of warming on Baffin Island, west of Greenland, may be as high as it was more than 2 million years ago, when sea levels were several meters higher.

The globetrotting Miller — who recently began a project in Madagascar to study the demise of the 1,000-pound elephant bird, Aepyornis, also shortly after humans arrived — credits his students as an inspiration.

“I’ve been fortunate to have a cadre of motivated students over the years anxious to make their mark in the world of science,” he said. “They are always challenging me to explore new ways of doing things. Without them I would not be nearly as productive, or have nearly as much fun.”

Illustration: Designer: Peter Trusler; © Australian Postal Corporation 2008

What killed them off? A CU scientist with an arctic pedigree thinks he's found the answer in the hot Australian interior.

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Animal Control

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 18:14:15 +0000

Animal Control Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/01/2016 - 11:14

Christie Sounart

CU-Boulder attracts all kinds of visitors

When wild animals call at CU-Boulder, especially big ones, Edward von Bleichert (EnvCon’94) is among the first to notice.

As CU’s environmental operations manager, he’s in charge of monitoring about 1,200 acres of university property for noteworthy animal visitors and helping accommodate them or arranging for smooth exits.

In 2015, several large animals wandered onto campus, including, on separate occasions, black bears that climbed into trees — one just outside the engineering center. A picture of one of the bears, tranquilized and falling onto safety mats, caught the attention of CNN and the Huffington Post and briefly became an Internet sensation.

In August, a young female moose sauntered through the ponds of CU’s South Campus for 10 days before leaving on its own.

Over the years von Bleichert and his team have encountered elk, raccoons, mountain lions, snakes, bats, birds of prey, prairie dogs, foxes and beavers, among others. One time a marmot, a mammal that prefers elevations above 10,000 feet, appeared. Another time a giant snapping turtle blocked a bike path.

More typically, von Bleichert and his team spend their days relocating pesky raccoons and burrowing prairie dogs, or controlling pests — mosquitos, rodents, ants and stinging and biting insects such as wasps or horseflies.

Whenever human safety permits, von Bleichert does his best to make wildlife comfortable at CU.

“There is no reason a campus of this nature, with all its great trees, riparian areas and natural areas, shouldn’t be able to support healthy and diverse populations of wildlife,” he says. “It’s one of the things that makes this campus so special.”

Photo by Ed von Bleichert

CU-Boulder attracts all kinds of visitors

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Buffalo Rancher

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 16:45:00 +0000

Buffalo Rancher Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2015 - 10:45

Eric Gershon

Hunted nearly to extinction by the time the University of Colorado was founded, the American buffalo owes its rebound mainly to private ranchers. Larry Strear of Boulder County has been raising herds for nearly 40 years.

By the time Larry Strear (Art’69) was in his mid-20s, he knew a lot about collecting art and raising turkeys.

An aunt in Denver with art dealers for friends and a fondness for watercolors whet his aesthetic appetite. At ��ƷSM��ӰƬ he developed an interest in printmaking, eventually acquiring works by Picasso, Dali and Braque.

Turkeys Strear had always known: His family was an owner of Longmont Foods, a large Colorado turkey-growing operation.

Of bison he knew nothing, but that was about to change.

In 1975 Strear, then 28 and working for the family business, bought a 130-acre horse ranch about 10 miles north of Boulder, in Longmont. He wasn’t sure the turkey business was for him and he thought he would try growing hay and other crops. He named the property Wild Flower Farm.

Strear had no plans to raise animals but agreed to let a tenant graze cattle there. He looked after them in exchange for use of the tenant’s farm equipment, a period he calls “five of the hardest years I worked in my life.”

When the men went separate ways in 1979, the tenant partially settled affairs with livestock — four Angus cows and two bison, one male, one female. The bison were a surprise.

“This isn’t funny,” Strear thought.

But his curiosity and sense of adventure got the best of him. Strear kept the bison — or buffalo, as they’re interchangeably called in the United States — got help from a rancher and began growing a herd while still working with his family. In 1988 Strear left the turkey business to ranch buffalo fulltime. By now he’s been at it longer than anyone else in Boulder County.

“It’s been profitable in years, and devastating in years,” says Strear, who lives on the ranch with his wife, Suzanne Chatburn-Strear, in a home full of oversize art books and bison relics. From their bedroom window they can watch the buffalo grazing in the front pasture.

At 68, Strear says he has no reason to give up on bison, and no inclination: “I just bought some more.”

By national standards, Strear’s fluctuating herd of 40 or so buffalo is about average. The various herds of Ted Turner — the CNN founder and by far America’s biggest, most famous bison rancher — number about 57,000. Regardless of herd size, Strear, Turner and thousands of other buffalo ranchers around the United States can make a common claim: Without them, the iconic animal of the American West and of CU-Boulder would be little more than a curiosity to ogle in parks and zoos.

The modern bison emerged in North America between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, scientists say. Deep into the 19th century, buffalo on the Great Plains numbered in the tens of millions.

Larry Strear has been raising bison at his Longmont, Colorado, ranch for nearly 40 years.

For millennia the shaggy, broad-shouldered bovines had been hunted in the West by Native Americans without major effects on population. But 19th-century settlement by gun-toting Euro-Americans on horseback proved calamitous, a disaster that accelerated with the post-Civil War construction of the transcontinental railroad and growing habitat loss.

Eager to harvest buffalo hides, furs and meat — and happy to deprive Native Americans of the same — settlers and the U.S. military hunted buffalo near to oblivion.

“In the 1880s, there’s really just remnant populations,” says Thomas Andrews, an associate professor of history at CU-Boulder who has written about buffalo. The bison, he says, became “kind of a novelty.”

By 1900, there were about 1,000 left.

Mercifully, a conservation effort was getting underway, led by a handful of Western ranchers and Eastern powerbrokers. In 1902 the Army began protecting a wild herd in Yellowstone National Park, and in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt — honorary president of the recently formed American Bison Society — authorized creation of the National Bison Range in Montana. Small herds were started in Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, New York City and Washington, D.C.

Today, public herds of varying types and sizes exist in South Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and elsewhere. Private bison ranches operate in all 50 states. Indeed, the vast majority of buffalo — an estimated 220,000 in the U.S. and 180,000 in Canada, according to the National Bison Association — live on private ranches, where they’re raised for meat.

“That’s totally driving the whole thing,” says Strear, who sells his bison calves for breeding. “There’s not a market for them as pets.”

That the long-term survival of bison may depend on human consumers doesn’t bother John Graves (Bus’09), who recently became manager of the Ralphie Handlers, the 15-member student group that cares for CU’s live buffalo mascot and dashes her across the field during football games.

“I’ve heard many people say this many times: The best way to save a species that’s endangered is to eat them,” says Graves, 28, who also works on a South Boulder horse ranch and serves as president of the Rocky Mountain Buffalo Association. “Because the demand for bison is so high, it has saved the species. And people do a great job raising bison these days.”

CU students chose the buffalo as a mascot in 1934 after a national contest elicited more than 1,000 suggestions. Students rented a live buffalo at first, then a benefactor donated one in the early 1940s. The Ralphie Handler Program, begun informally in 1967, is now a varsity sport.

The North American buffalo population is estimated to be about 400,000, including 220,000 in the U.S. Bison ranches operation in all 50 states.

Competition to become a handler is fierce. As many as 70 students try out each year for a few open roster spots. The team trains 30 hours a week during the football season, including physical workouts and care for Ralphie.

Running with a buffalo, which unrestrained can reach speeds of 40 miles per hour, is nothing to take lightly.

“You don’t do it on horseback,” says Graves, who was a handler before he became coach. “It’s you and the animal.”

The current Ralphie, a 1,200-pound female called Ralphie V, and her predecessor were donated by Ted Turner, who has tried, unsuccessfully, to give a public herd to the city of Boulder. Ralphie V and her predecessor live on separate Adams County ranches, the precise locations of which are secret, a precaution against pranks by students at rival schools.

Strear, who recalls his CU experience fondly and whose daughter is a CU graduate student, personally disapproves of the mascot program. Because buffalo are social animals, he says, they should always be part of herds.

Graves himself advises people who acquire buffalo to get more than one. But he believes that Ralphie V, who lives alone on her ranch, gets the social interaction she needs from her handlers.

“We are her herd,” he says. “We see her every day, we get up close and personal. She knows who we are.”

He adds: “We treat her like a princess.”

Unquestionably, the buffalo is a powerful symbol for the CU community and a distinctive presence in collegiate athletics. Ralphie frequently makes news media lists of “best college mascots” and in 2013 was named “the greatest live mascot in college football” by Bleacher Report.

Strear’s list, if he made one, would look different. But he’s as enamored as anyone of the American buffalo. He admires its power and the remarkable landscape it represents. On a mid-summer day at Wild Flower Farm, his herd grazes mid-pasture before marching en mass to a lake, all in the shadow of the Front Range. A Swainson’s hawk glides overhead. A bull nuzzles a pregnant cow.

“She’s gonna calve,” says Strear. “Probably today.”

Photography by Morten Kolby

Hunted nearly to extinction by the time the University of Colorado was founded, the American buffalo owes its rebound mainly to private ranchers.

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Filmmaker Melinda MacInnis

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0000

Filmmaker Melinda MacInnis Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/01/2015 - 08:00

Jillian Arja

Saving the Rhinos

It was from a jeep on a 2008 game drive in Swaziland that Melinda MacInnis (MCreatWrit’97) saw her first wild rhinoceroses, a mother and calf.

“I got to really look into the eye of this mother,” says MacInnis, then a vacationing English teacher from Los Angeles. “I could see how truly beautiful they are and special in the world.”

It was a defining moment that changed her life. Appalled by the number of rhinos killed by poachers for the black market value of their horns, MacInnis decided to make a documentary, initially in her spare time, largely at her own expense and without any filmmaking experience. The Price, scheduled for release early next year, took her to 12 countries and earned her National Geographic 2014 Traveler of the Year honors.

“We call our film The Price not just because of the insane value put on rhino horns and ivory and pangolin [anteater] scales, but because the price of us not fixing these global problems is just as high,” says MacInnis.

Through its Traveler of the Year awards, National Geographic Traveler “celebrates individuals who travel with passion and purpose, have an exceptional story to tell, and represent a style of travel, motivation or method that can inform and inspire us all.”

“Melinda’s work to raise awareness of the existential threat to rhinos is tragically timely,” says George Stone, a National Geographic editor at large. “What she discovered changed her life, and her documentary has the potential to change how tons of other people think about conservation issues in general.”

Rhino horns are valued at $65,000 a kilogram on the black market, according to MacInnis. Largely due to poachers, the rhino population has shrunk to an estimated 25,000 from about 500,000 a century ago.

“I was so moved finding out that this really iconic creature was being slaughtered for such a tiny part of its body,” she says.

Poachers typically kill rhinos before taking their horns, but not always.

“It is unspeakable suffering as it bleeds to death without the front of its face,” says MacInnis. “It isn’t just unjust, it is unbelievably inhumane that this is happening.”

So she took action, recruiting cinematographer and fellow animal advocate John Mans (Film’89) and four other CU alumni as crew.

“The infrastructure and willingness to protect wildlife in Swaziland is strong, and hopefully with Melinda’s movie, it will be one of the rare stories that comes out of Africa with a happy ending,” says Mans. “I’m proud to have shed some light on their difficult task of saving Swazi wildlife.”

MacInnis hopes both to call attention to the rhino’s plight and to offer suggestions for how people can influence the way humans treat other animals.

“The rhino is a gatekeeper,” she says. “If we let the rhino disappear, what else are we going to let go? But if we come together internationally to save the rhino, then it’s a template for saving everything else.”

Photography by Angie Wilson

It was from a jeep on a 2008 game drive in Swaziland that Melinda MacInnis (MCreatWrit’97) saw her first wild rhinoceroses, a mother and calf.

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