9UNP0182SD_David_Drake_WordPress

- Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Madison Cooperative Extension. And on behalf of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, I'm very pleased to be able to introduce to you David Drake, who's an extension wildlife specialist and an assistant professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology here at UW-Madison. He completed his PhD in Forestry at North Carolina State University. He received a masters degree in Wildlife and Fishery Sciences from Texas A&M University. 

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Biology from Macalister College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Are you from Minnesota? 
(laughs)

And he has a sense of humor. David's research interests include wildlife management on private lands, wildlife damage management, suburban/urban wildlife, and wildlife policy. He is currently the chair of the Wildlife Society's Urban Wildlife Working Group. Please join me in welcoming David Drake to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. 
(applause)

- Thanks for inviting me this evening. It's fun to be here. And we are going to talk for the next, I don't know four or five hours about wildlife. 
(laughter)
 And specifically, we're going to talk about urban wildlife, so wildlife that we are trying to share space with. And they are trying to share space with us. Sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn't go so well. I guess before I get too far into this, is everybody okay with the lighting? Can you see the screen okay? 
(inaudible)

Okay, well I don't, well I do have control, but I've been threatened by the TV crew that if I touch the lighting, they're going to cut me off. So, then you're going to go to the Web cam and it's going to be black and you're not going to be able to see me. So, I don't know. I'll let you guys decide what you want to do on that. You can't see it at all? So I think, evidently there's either this level of lighting or black. And so, we'll see what's going to happen here. So anyway, we're going to talk about wildlife in an urban/suburban setting. And the title slide here, "It's a concrete jungle out there." Okay, all right. 

So kind of what's going to happen tonight, is I've got a Power Point presentation to just kind of lay the context a little bit for how some of the demographics of the human population in the United States, and specifically in Wisconsin has changed. And then how the wildlife has adapted to that. And some wildlife has won and done very, very well. And some wildlife has not done so well. We're going to talk a little bit about that. And then, I brought some specimens with me. And so I'll try to save some time to at least do a little bit of show and tell with some specimens I brought with me, as well. And most of the talk is going to focus on those species that have just thrived in what we call a human dominated landscape, or a landscape that's been changed with human development, either for residential, primarily for residential, but also for commercial purposes. But the one caveat to this is that bird that's up in the upper left hand side here. It's a peregrine falcon. 

And the peregrine falcon is a bit of an interesting story. And there are a lot of very positive examples of animals that have done well, and really have recovered from the brink of endangerment or extinction because of human development. And the peregrine falcon is one of those animals. The peregrine falcon, a couple of interesting things about that animal. It's the fastest animal on planet Earth. And it's been reported in what's called a stoop or a dive, to be flying at about 175 miles an hour. So, peregrine falcons, their main food source are other birds, such as pigeons or sparrows. Really, any other bird that is smaller than it. So if you can imagine being a bird flying along, you know, it's a nice blue sunny sky day. You're just flying along, minding your own business. 

And then all of a sudden, whack. You get hit at 175 miles an hour. And it's all over for you. But peregrine falcons, one of the reasons they've done so well in an urban setting is because in the natural world, they typically will nest on cliff faces and rocky outcrops, and things like that. And one of the reasons the peregrine falcons were so close to extinction is because they suffered from DDT, very similarly to osprey and bald eagles, and some other raptors like that. And for those of you, I'm sure many of you are aware of the DDT issue. But essentially DDT was an insecticide that was used back in the 1960s and '70s. And what happened is it caused what's called a bio-accumulation, the further up you are on the food chain, the more concentrated the DDT levels became in your body. And one of the resulting consequences, for birds especially, is that it thinned the egg shells. And so, when the female laid the eggs in the nest, as she sat on them, she would crush them, because the egg shells were so thin. 

So that really caused a precipitous decline in the populations of the birds, namely bald eagles and peregrine falcons are two of the primary species that people looked at. So the interesting thing is once they got rid of DDT, peregrine falcons started showing up in cities, because the skyscrapers, and the underpasses of highway bridges and things like that replicated the native surroundings of cliff faces and rocky outcrops. And so they had wonderful places to perch, and nest, and things of that nature. Then, if you've been in a city, you know that there are plenty of birds around, namely starlings, pigeons, house sparrows. So there's a lot of food. And peregrine falcons have just thrived in urban settings so much so that if you go to Milwaukee, for example, or Minneapolis, or other cities, New York City, that a lot of times, they'll have what's called hacking tower or a hack box on skyscrapers. That's where peregrine falcons raise their young and get them to fledge and become birds of their own. And a lot of these buildings have cameras inside the hack box. So if you're in the lobby of the building, you can go in and actually watch these peregrine falcon chicks grow and take off on their own. It's really a pretty neat example of how well human development can benefit wildlife species. 

It is not always like that. That's one of the rosier examples. But we're going to talk about a lot of examples, primarily focused, however on conflicts between wildlife species and humans in developed areas. So to give you a bit of context And just how drastically the demographics have changed, and kind of where people live have changed, if you back up to about 1900, that graph with the yellow on it, that indicates that about 1900, 85% to 90% of our population was rural based. Now as of the 2000, 80% to 87% of our population is what's called urban based. And urban based on the census bureau's definition is anything where you're within, I think, a half an hour drive of a population center of 50,000 people or more. So we have completely flip-flopped where we live, obviously, and there's a lot of very interesting history if you track kind of the changes with the industrial revolution and abandonment of farmland and movement to the cities and then back out to the suburb. That's a tremendously, I think, interesting story and then if you overlay that with the wildlife populations, that just enriches the story even more. But it's very interesting to note that we flip-flopped where we live and then the graph on the bottom is a projection of our human population growth in the United States. So just about a year and a half ago or so, we passed the 300 million person mark in the United States and I think the projected, if I can read this correctly, by 2050, we're going to be about 404 million, so we're going to almost increase by 25% more in next 50 years, or so. 

And by the year 2100, they're projecting 571 million people, so nearly doubled where we are today. That's remarkable if you think about it. If you think where we're at now, just wait. Wisconsin really mirrors the national trend, maybe not as dramatic as an example for New Jersey or some cities in the northeast would, but certainly, Wisconsin mirrors the national trend. As of the 2000 census, there are 5.3 million residents in the state of Wisconsin. Primarily, it's the lower third or lower half of the southern half, southern third of the state, is where most of the population is concentrated. And again, 68% reside in urban and suburban areas, so even though we are a rural state, as you move to the north, obviously, you get into rural country areas, and things like that. And even around Madison, you can find some very, we call it pasture land, and things of that nature. But we are considered a very urban/suburban state. And then as of 2000, 143,000 new homes have been built. 

However, that's slowed tremendously within the last year or two, with the housing crisis we're experiencing in the economy and such. And then just to give you an example of one type of habitat, and an example of how not every species of wildlife has won with this changing landscape, that as of 1970, roughly 1.2 million acres of farmland are developed annually. That's roughly the size of Delaware. Every year the size of Delaware goes from farmland to some kind of a human dominated landscape. So I'll let you sink that in. Delaware, I think, is the third smallest state in the union. So that's a lot of farmland to be turned over every single year and that's just farmland. We're not talking about shrub land or forest land, or anything like that, which is also being turned over. The loss of farmland equals the loss of habitat for sure, and the loss of farmland impacts specifically what we call early successional species, so those species that rely on grassland, prairie and annual crops, and things like that. So as you turn over grassland, and one of the issues right now I was interested in hearing Randy Johnson is coming to speak here. 

One of the issues that the wildlife community is extremely concerned about, with the rise of ethanol plants, and the issue for planting corn, there's a lot of grassland in what's called Conservation Reserve Program or CRP, where farmers are essentially paid through the Farm Bill to plant erodable land and marginal land into grass. And grass is beneficial for a lot of these grassland species, such as some of the song birds and things like that, that are struggling for survival right now. So what's happening, however, is the CRP contracts are coming out of contract. And instead of planting grass, they're now planting corn. We're seeing a big shift because of the ethanol issue impacting wildlife specifically, directly and immediately. So as you lose farmland, you're losing a lot of species, early successional species. So, grassland species such as sparrows, bobolinks, sandpipers, a lot of birds like that, that are just wonderful birds. But we're losing this what's called a guild of species, that are similar, in that they use the niche of early grassland habitat. The other thing that are getting impacted are those species that require large, contiguous, unbroken tracts of land. As you start to carve up the farmland, or carve up the countryside you start to fragment it. 

As you fragment it, you start breaking up the continuity and those species that are secretive, or need a large area to roam, such as timber wolves, bears, bob cat, things like that, that they are-- They do okay with people, but people don't do okay with them. And so where you start breaking that habitat up, then you start having problems with the negative interactions between wildlife and humans. And so there are some serious consequences to the loss of farmland or loss of habitats as we create the human dominated landscapes for residential purposes. In Wisconsin, and just to kind of give you a brief overview of the incredible diversity of wildlife we have in Wisconsin, which is rather remarkable because we're so far north, for one thing. A lot of states where, for example, the northern species, the states are the southern range of the northern species, or at the northern range of the southern species, where you're on the boundary, you have tremendous wildlife diversity. We're far north, so we don't have those southern species really pushing far up into Wisconsin. And also because of the harsh winters we have, and the sustained freezes we have, we don't have a tremendous amount of reptile or amphibian species compared to, for example, Florida, Texas, or something like that, where it's more subtropical, especially as you go far south in those states. So considering that, we still have very fortunate to have the incredible wildlife diversity we have, including over 400 species of birds, roughly 70 species of mammals, 30-some species of reptiles, and close to 20 species of amphibians. With that being said, we have our usual cast of characters here. We're going to focus primarily on mammals and birds, just as an example of those species that are absolutely thriving in what we call a human dominated landscape, or where that urban suburban and rural fringe all meet, where they come together. 

And these are the species we'll talk about it in just a few minutes. We'll talk about why these species are thriving. Just to give you an example of some species doing extremely well in the human dominated landscapes, including the black bear, which is in the upper left. I guess I will use the pointer. Let me, just for the people on the camera, I'll try not to put your eye out. The black bear here. The beaver does very well. The beaver is an interesting story. It's North America's largest rodent, so it's related to mice rats, and things like that. If you went back maybe 50 years ago or so, the beaver was very close to being extinct in many states in the eastern half of the United States, simply because they got trapped so well. 

And even earlier in the 20th century when pelt prices were high, beavers were a well sought after species. Even to go further back, at the settling of the United States, when the French Canadians were trapping out fur bears, and when the Europeans came here, if you were wealthy, you were considered to be what's called "beaver rich." You could afford to buy clothing made of beaver pelts, or most likely, you gained your wealth because of fur trapping, built primarily on beavers. And the fledgling country of America, one of their main exports back to the old country of Europe were beaver pelts, because they were so sought after. Beaver has played a very interesting role in American history here. Nowadays, beaver have done very, very well. And so well, that especially as you move down into the southeastern United States, there's a very aggressive, active trapping program to prevent flooding of roads, and flooding of valuable timberland, and things like that. The skunk is also-- This is a striped skunk. In Wisconsin, we have both striped skunks, and we were home at one time to spotted skunks, which are extremely rare. I'm not sure if even a spotted skunk exists in Wisconsin any longer. 

But striped skunk is a common animal throughout the state of Wisconsin, but especially in urban suburban areas. And an interesting fact about the skunks, is they are the number one carrier of rabies of any other wildlife species in Wisconsin. A lot of people think either the raccoon, fox or bats, but by far, striped skunks are the most common carrier of rabies. If you see a striped skunk, and it's coming at you, you have more than one reason to run in the opposite direction. Here's a groundhog here or what's called a whistle pig, or a woodchuck. That old thing, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Well, they don't chuck wood. They're strictly a vegetarian. These animals are dormant for the winter months, and then they come back up, you know, start getting active around the middle of April or so, and then stay active into the beginning of November. So they're interesting. 

We've seen a rise of those animals with the more development that's gone on. Let's go I guess down here, the deer. That doesn't need much explanation. Deer, people have called them in suburban areas, rats with antlers. They've called them other less appreciative type names, but deer have absolutely thrived in many areas, not only in Wisconsin, but especially throughout the eastern half of the United States, especially in suburban urban areas. Wildlife managers are struggling to control these populations, and are not able to control the populations to the point where we're seeing inflated deer densities well over 20 times what should be in the wild, so that's just remarkable. The mountain lion, cougar, or puma, depending on what region of the United States you're in, the mountain lion, the most interesting thing about that is we had a mountain lion here in the southern part of Wisconsin that moved through in February and March. And that was the one, I guess, over in Rock County. And then finally it got killed within Chicago city limits by the Chicago Police Department as it was in one of the nature preserves in the city limits of Chicago. And that animal was found out to have been part of the South Dakota population. 

It left South Dakota, and made its way through Wisconsin, and down into Illinois. That's a great example of an animal that has wide ranging home ranges and needs large, contiguous unbroken tracts. They do very well moving through corridor areas, and do exist quite well in urban suburban areas. As an example, out in Los Angeles, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, for example, they have large populations of mountain lions that exist in and around human beings, but they use those greenways or travel corridors, and they shift their activity to nocturnal activity, instead of daytime activity, so they can avoid other people. Unfortunately, as is the case occasionally and usually, you know, a couple of times a year, people do get killed by mountain lions. And the latest attack, luckily this gentleman did not die, but the latest attack was about a year ago, a gentleman and his wife were roughly 70 miles or so north of San Francisco, and he got attacked by a mountain lion. His wife fought the mountain lion off by just beating the living daylights out of the thing with a tree limb, essentially a big stick she found on the ground. And it left the husband alone, but he was in the hospital for about two weeks recuperating. But they can live in and around human beings. It was neat, however, after scaring the daylights out of you, it was very neat to have known that we had a mountain lion in Wisconsin. 

And that's a native species that I think the last time it was sighted in Wisconsin was 50 years ago, something like that. The coyote right here is essentially a wild dog. And they do extremely well in urban suburban areas. In Chicago, in New York City in Central Park they had a coyote. LA, Phoenix, other areas like that, they have got just large populations of coyotes that do well in urban suburban areas, because coyotes will eat your trash, your compost pile, eat your rodents, and things around your house. They'll eat your pet cat. They'll eat your pet dog. So they do well in urban, suburban settings. Here's our friend the raccoon, sticking his head out of somebody's chimney here. Raccoons also do very well in urban suburban settings, because there's a lot of artificial cavities, such as your chimney. 

I had a friend of mine who did a study in Hartford, Connecticut, and found that, he took a couple of neighborhoods in Hartford, Connecticut, and found 85% of the houses that did not have a chimney cap on the chimney, had a raccoon in them. So get a chimney cap. It's $20, and it might cost you $50 at the most to get it installed, unless you can do it yourself. But $20 will save you a hassle of raccoons in your chimney. All right, just for a couple of examples of avian species, we'll start with the eastern wild turkey right here. Wild turkeys, if you were a wildlife student, maybe 30 years ago, you would have been taught that wild turkeys need large tracts of unbroken, contiguous habitat, with a mix of kind of an open understory mixed hardwood, pine type forest with some open grassland. Turkeys don't need that. They do very, very well in urban suburban settings. And I was driving-- We used to live in Pennsylvania before we moved here. We had about an acre, and we were in kind of a neighborhood with one to three-acre lots. 

We had six turkeys in our backyard one day. And I used to work at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the most populated state in the union in terms of 1,300 people per square mile on average. That's a lot of people. I had a guy call me one day literally a stone's throw across the Hudson River from Manhattan. He said he had 17 turkeys in his yard one day, and he couldn't even let his grandkids out, because they kept chasing the grandkids back inside the house. Then just to bring it more locally home here, I was driving down Regent Street, over by the Co-op over there, just a little east of West High School. Two turkeys crossed the road and walked up somebody's concrete steps up to their front yard. So turkeys do extremely well. They don't need large tracts of unbroken habitat. And whether we, as a wildlife community, got it wrong or turkeys have adapted extremely well, which is most likely the case, they have adapted very, very well. 

Canada geese, not much needs to be said about them. It's been determined there are genetically separate populations of migratory Canada geese, versus resident Canada geese. And as Tom mentioned, I got my graduate degree south of the Mason Dixon Line, but it was in North Carolina where it was explained to me, being from Minnesota, the difference between a Yankee and the damn Yankee. They said a damn Yankee is one that never goes home. We have geese and we have damn geese The damn geese are the ones that never up north to nest up north. Turkey vultures here, they've increased in population in both urban suburban settings, but I think throughout, especially the eastern half of the United States, and we don't have black vultures here. But black vultures are also pushing further and further north in the United States. Black vultures are much more aggressive than turkey vultures. Primarily, they're scavengers, but black vultures, also, if they see a downed calf, they will kill the calf and eat it. They can be a predatory bird on occasion. 

But turkey vultures, one of the reasons I think they're doing so well is simply because we have so much road kill, and much more road kill than even think about 10, 20 years ago. There's a lot of food out there for them. And then obviously, with the urban suburban areas, you increase the radiant heating, and these animals glide on those warming air currents as they rise up off the earth. So as you increase the radiant heating, you're also increasing the thermals for them to glide on. I think there's a couple of reasons why they're increasing. Here's an example of ring billed gulls, but you you can pick any gulls you want. A lot of them do well, but especially ring billed gulls, because they're such a trash eating bird. They will eat a lot of things out of dumpsters. So obviously, there's a lot of trash around, and food sources, and things like that. And then crows, I don't have any evidence of this, but I think the crow population, especially in this area, but I think especially in the eastern half of the United States, has increased. 

I don't know what West Nile Virus has done to the population as a whole, because crows are one of the most susceptible species to the West Nile Virus. But crows have really increased quite a bit as well. And one other thing, let me just back up. I know this is a bad trait to do in a slide presentation, but let me back up quickly to the mammals. And I will make a prediction here, that I think within 20 years, we will have armadillos in Wisconsin. Now, you laugh. But I was down in Arkansas a couple of years ago, and I saw an armadillo in Arkansas, which is very far north. It's the nine banded armadillo. They're native to Mexico. They've been pushing north in through Texas and farther up north that way. 

And I don't know if any of you know Tim, but he's an outdoor writer for the Capital Times. One day, I mentioned this to Tim, and he put it in an article that, David Drake makes this prediction there's going to be armadillos in Wisconsin. And a week after he wrote that in an article, one of my graduate students was driving, and he saw a squished armadillo in central Wisconsin. I kid you not. How the heck it got there, I don't know, but we're seeing animals push further and further north in the range, simply because there's a lot of habitat available to them. And I think it's because of the human development that's going on. An example of that is possums. We are at the very north of possum range. Possums should not be up here, because they don't do well in winter. They don't have fur on either their ears or tail. 

They don't hibernate, but when it gets really cold, they hole up under your porch, or in a hollow log, or something, and ride out the cold until it warms up a little bit. But a lot of possums in Wisconsin, if they've been here for a while, they have frost bit ears, and the flesh has died and fallen off, so they don't even have ears sometimes. It's a black, jagged edge and who can love that, I don't know, but they find each other out there. But possums are an example of animals that, you know, are really extremely far north in their range. I think that armadillo will be here in the next couple of decades. All right. So urban suburban wildlife. And why are some species able to exist and thrive, such as those cast of characters we just looked at, when other species are not doing so well in urban suburban areas? The biggest thing is, are you adaptable to human dominated landscapes, and can you thrive, can you live in and around human beings? Can you live with the constant presence of human beings? 

There's a lot of animals that when they see a human, they run the other way. And it's a life trait to keep yourself alive. But in urban suburban areas, one of the things that we don't do is hunt. It's not legal and it's not safe because there's such a density of human population. I know there's a lot of people that I don't want firing a gun in urban suburban areas. What happens then, is animals lose their fear of humans. And as that happens, they get closer and closer to us, or they allow us to get closer and closer to them. And that's when trouble starts. So there are a lot of animals that are very adaptable to human beings. And deer, Canada geese, wild turkey, bear, possums, skunk, you name it, there's a bunch of them out there. 

You can take your pick. A lot of them are edge species. And if you think about-- Let's say, for example, we have a 10-acre square piece of undeveloped land, and you develop that, and you put on that land one-acre houses. So now instead of four edges to that, now theoretically you've created 40 edges. You've increased by 10 fold that amount of edge and fragmentation on the landscape. If you're an edge species, and these are animals that exist where two or more vegetation types come together. So for example, where a forest meets a grassland, or two or more age classes, it could be the same vegetation type. Let's say you have a 30-year-old pine forest, and a 10-year-old pine forest, that would create a vegetation edge. Species that need a variation or diversity in habitat types love edge, because that edge creates great habitat diversity. Think about the species thriving in urban suburban areas: deer, fox, coyote, skunk, possum, raccoon, squirrel, any of the bird species. 

They are habitat generalists. They use a variety of habitats, and they need a variety of habitats, so as you fragment and develop and create edges, you're creating habitat diversity. For those edge species, you could not do a better job of creating a habitat for them if you tried. The last one is just that they do well existing in fragmented habitats. So they can move across multiple habitats. If you go in a one mile straight direction, you might cross across pavement, county park, baseball diamond, high school playground area, residential area, all different types of habitat, and then you might get into a forest and preserve. But all of those habitat types you can exist in, because you do so well in a variety of habitats. Those are great commonalities among the species thriving in urban suburban areas. Then habitat is food, water, shelter and space. Those are the four components to habitat. 

And habitat, wild animals don't need our help to find habitat. There's a lot of natural habitat out there even in Madison. I think about Owen Park. It's a wonderful little area. Or, the UW Arboretum is a fantastic example of natural habitat, and animals do great out there. The Arboretum is rung by all of this artificial habitat that animals can also thrive in. You've got water out there. If you have a landscape pond in your yard, you're creating water. If you don't have a chimney cap on your chimney, you created shelter. You might be hanging bird feeders. 

You've put artificial food out. And then space, all of this space that you provided for them with your backyard, or adjoining travel corridor, green space, whatever it is, we've created so much artificial habitat that in addition to the natural habitat, it's allowed these populations to just explode. We are artificially holding increased densities of wildlife, much higher than what the natural habitat could hold. That's why in some areas, you can hold 20 times the amount of deer than you would in a natural habitat, because we've got all of this artificial habitat out there. Which gets us to what's called carrying capacity. The definition of carrying capacity, is on a defined area of defined habitat, the number of animals in a single species that can be sustained perpetually. So that's carrying capacity. Biological carrying capacity, if you look on the left-hand side, think of it as a river that's flowing-- This is an appropriate example right now, with all of the rain we've had. But a river is, you know, within its banks, it's within the biological carrying capacity. The river is in it's banks. 

That's as much water as that area can hold. If you start to exceed that, you get into what's called cultural carrying capacity. Cultural carrying capacity is an example of a flooded scene, as you see to the right, or anywhere you see in the southern part of the state right now. Cultural carrying capacity is defined as the number of animals the human population will tolerate in a single species, Typically, cultural carrying capacity can be much lower than the biological carrying capacity but you also have what's called a carrying index. For example, biological carrying capacity might be 15 deer per square mile. In an artificial setting we might have 200 deer per square mile. Cultural carrying capacity is much lower than that, obviously. My argument is biological carrying capacity should not even be talked about in an urban suburban area, because there's so much artificial habitat out there. We should only be focusing on the on the cultural carrying capacity. All right, a couple of other things about increasing wildlife populations is that, again, we've talked about this. 

We're creating tremendous amount of edge, tremendous amount of fragmentation. We've created abundant habitat with all of that. We've created both natural and artificial food, water, shelter and space. There's a lot of habitat for the animals to take advantage of. A lot of these animals are maximizing, or at least achieving their reproductive potential. For a lot of animals, reproduction is directly related to the nutritional state of the father, but especially the mother. If the mother is not nutritionally healthy enough to support herself, she can't support offspring, either carrying them to term, or raising them once they've hatched out or been born. But in those areas where you see 200 deer per square mile, for example, we see in those areas, large antlers or racks on deer. Well, deer don't have large antlers if they're not nutritionally healthy. If they've exceeded their density by 20 times and they still have large antler racks, you know there's enough food out there in the landscape for those deer. 

Or deer, it's not uncommon if the doe is nutritionally healthy, especially after her first year, to have fawns in pairs. Those areas, again, where you see 200 deer per square mile, we were seeing some does dropping three and occasionally four fawns in one birthing situation. If that's the case, you know that that doe is nutritionally healthy. There is more than enough food on the landscape to support her and those multiple fawns. That's a remarkable statistic to think about. Then you think about, if you're dropping three and four fawns, and four is not terribly common, three is pretty common, it doesn't take too long for the population to grow, especially if you pay attention to the third point, that you have no way to limit the population growth. Typically, especially for game animals, and game animals are those species where you can either set a hunting or trapping season on their head. For game animals, the most cost efficient way, typically, of controlling the population is to either hunt or trap them. But in urban suburban settings, you can't hunt and sometimes you can't trap, simply because it's not healthy, or so it's so controversial because our idea of communing with nature is no longer to go out and harvest an area. It's to go out and bird watch or do something non-consumptive. 

And the general attitude among the general population has shifted from looking at wildlife as a resource to use, to instead looking at wildlife as a resource to just watch, and not do anything with, which is fine. It's okay to think like that, but it makes it really hard to management wildlife populations when you can't do anything to limit their population, their growth. That's why we find ourselves in these situations, where we have uncontrolled population growth, where we can't do anything about it. So the other thing about human wildlife conflicts, is most of the conflicts are human centered. So it's either the species that are causing economic damage, or they're causing health related issues, such as rabid animals, animals with-- Avian influenza is a big issue now, West Nile Virus, chronic wasting disease, you name it. There's issues out there that people are concerned about. I would just point out there's a lot of natural resource damage going on that we don't focus on, or don't pay any attention to. It can go anywhere from geese overgrazing stream side banks, and all of a sudden you have no vegetations to hold the soil in place. Then when you have a rain event, it causes erosion, washes into the stream. And now you've created a situation in the stream, so those animals that require clear water and high dissolved oxygen levels, and things like that, fish or whatever, that those species are starting to get choked out. 

Or as the vegetation gets eaten off the stream bank, that vegetation acts as a filtration in urban suburban settings, where you have a lot of non-point source pollution running off the landscape into the water source, that vegetation acts as a sponge and stops that, or reduces it before it gets to the water. If that's no longer there, because it's been over-grazed by whatever animal, taken out, then all of a sudden you're increasing the pollutants to the water body. And now you're fertilizing the water, so you get a lot of vegetation growing up, and it chokes the aquatic life out that way, as well. There's a lot of issues going on that are not human centered, although we focus most of our attention on the human centered conflicts. And one of the reasons I mentioned that is so difficult to deal with this in urban suburban settings, is because a lot of issues are perceived issues. They may not be real issues. As an example, the black bear wandering in a backyard. If this was in my backyard, I would grab my daughters and wife and we would, from a safe distance, watch the bear. We'd talk to kids and use it as an educational opportunity. There are a lot of people, however, if they see black bear in their yard, say the thing is coming to eat me. 

It's an understandable attitude and reaction, but the bear is not going to hurt you. But that is a perception versus a real issue. There's a lot of people when they see wildlife, especially because, I think personally, that we are not connected to the outdoor world like we were generations ago, that people just don't get out into the outdoor world anymore. And they don't realize that the wildlife is as scared of you as you are of it. And if you give the animal a chance, it's going to run, faster than you can run, the opposite direction, So there's some issues there. The other thing is that a lot of the management decisions on how to manage wildlife populations in urban suburban settings, although it should be a biological or scientifically driven decision, it's much more a politically influenced decision. As an example, the people over there with the placards, where they're advocating for PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Again, wildlife is a public resource. Everybody has an opinion, and nobody's opinion should override anyone else's opinion, but when politics gets interjected, it makes it extremely hard to manage, in a cost efficient manner, wildlife populations. So what you're doing is instead of managing the wildlife, you're managing the human population, which is like herding cats. 

It just doesn't get done very well. So community involvement often is very necessary. You have to build it from the ground floor up, instead of the top floor down. The DNR can't come into a community and say, hey, you're going to do this, because the community will revolt. Instead, the community has to come to the decision themselves as a community wide decision, and then implement it throughout the community that way. And it's been done many times, but the point is, it takes a long time to get the community together and to get some kind of a decision decided upon, and it adds to the expense of the decision and the management action. So a lot of people don't have the patience, and a lot of communities don't have the resources to manage the wildlife properly to reduce the population to more of a manageable level. All right, and then politics and policies. So even though you're dealing with a biological problem, it is very much a policy solution, because politics gets involved in this, and really the politics is-- Politics is just choices. What choice do you want to make amongst the range of choices you have? 

But a lot of times, as you may or may not know, and maybe you don't share this opinion, but when politics gets involved, usually nothing good comes of it, so it gets very difficult. And a good example of this is just the CWD that the DNR is in right now. The DNR is trying to do the right thing. But the politicians up in the legislature say you should do this instead of this. And it makes it very muddy and very messy. I'm sorry? Oh, I'm sorry, the CWD. It's chronic wasting disease. I'm sorry. Thank you for pointing that out. 

It's chronic wasting disease. It's the disease that has struck the deer population here in the southern part of the state, although they're testing for it statewide. But it's similar to mad cow disease, so it's a protein that kind of eats away at the brain, and causes the animal to essentially just waste away. That's why it's chronic wasting disease. 
- Why do you say politics is muddying up the water? 
- Well, because politicians, the DNR is trying to make scientifically based research based decisions. And the politicians may not always see that that's the right decision to make, and instead are listening to constituents who, the decision the constituents might want, may be in complete opposition to what the DNR and sciences are saying to do. That's how it becomes a problem. 
- The DNR proposal, opposed by the community or the politicians? 
- Well, an example is some of the deer seasons. 

So if you're a deer hunter, the traditional deer season is the nine-day deer season, starting on the Saturday before Thanksgiving and ending the Sunday after Thanksgiving. That was always the traditional season. The DNR has been trying to extend and increase the number of days that you can hunt in certain zones, to try to increase the harvest levels to knock down the prevalence of chronic wasting disease. The politicians have not always agreed with that, and because a lot of times, the regulations have to be passed through the subcommittee at the state legislature, they may not always agree with those decisions. They might say, well, we don't want this hunting season, or we don't agree with the number of days you've got out there. We either want them added to, or shortened, or whatever the case might be. That would be an example of how that is. But it is a morass, unfortunately. So the other thing I'll just mention quickly as regulations and laws, and there are plenty of regulations and laws that you have to abide by in urban suburban settings, especially. But federal law, any animal that's migratory by nature, so the geese we mentioned, resident geese, even though they don't migrate, they're considered a migratory animal, because if they wanted to get off their lazy butt and migrate, they could. 

They have the capability. They just don't do it. They are considered a migratory animal, because they have the ability to fly across state boundaries. And any animal that's migratory by nature is a federal species, and you have to abide by the federal law. You also have to abide by state law, so any animals that are migratory, they also-- The states weigh in and have regulations about migratory animals. But any animal within the confines of the state, the state DNR has jurisdiction over that. Then there's local laws you have to abide by. In many municipalities, you cannot fire a firearm, or bow and arrow, again, for good reason. But you'd better be aware of that as you try to navigate all of these management decisions about how you're going to manage the populations in urban suburban settings. What happens is that you have to create all of these different tools, and put new tools in the tool box in order to manage urban suburban wildlife populations. 

Again, the local ordinances. One thing that's down there in the lower left, that's called a propane cannon. Essentially, it's a big noise making cannon hooked up to the propane tank. There's a diaphragm in the can. And so as the gas bleeds into the diaphragm, eventually it gets so full, it just explodes. As it explodes, it creates this big, loud bang. If you're in areas where Canada geese are, or pigeons, or something like that, this is a very effective tool because that loud noise scares them out of the area. But there's local ordinances, and for good reason, saying you cannot create a noise above a certain decibel, because I don't want a propane cannon going off next to my house at 3:00 in the morning. I'm sure none of you do, as well. So that's a good example of a local ordinance that, it's a very effective management tool in its own right, but you can't use it in certain settings, simply because it's just not an appropriate tool. 

So the other thing is that a lot of times you're conducting management in public view, so this is not like up in the country. For example, if you're in the national forest, and you're out deer hunting, you may not see anybody out there all day long. But if you're trying to manage the Canada goose population over here at Marshall Park, and people are putting their boats in day in and day out, and moms and dads bringing their kids to picnic and play at the beach over there, and people are fishing, and you're trying to blast geese with use a 20-gauge, not everybody is for that. You have to be careful about conducting these management operations in public view, and be aware that a lot of things, especially lethally oriented, are very controversial, and people are not always going to agree with that. And I guarantee you, you will hear about it, if you do something like that. So you have to be really, really careful that you do something that has general public acceptance, and that the public is going to be tolerant of. So let me go back to this really quick. A friend of mine runs an operation called White Buffalo out of Connecticut. And Tony is his name. Tony is making a very, very handsome living right now, going into communities to shoot deer in suburban areas where the deer population has gotten so large. 

And I met Tony when I worked at Rutgers University, because New Jersey is overrun with deer, as it is with people. Tony, for example, went into Princeton, New Jersey, where Princeton University is. And in three years, he shot 1,000 deer, at a cost to Princeton of roughly $1 million. So that's about $1,000 per deer. One of the reasons it's so expensive, is because he has to establish bait-- For one thing he has to get written permission from land owners for where he shoots. He establishes bait piles. He sits in tree stands or drives around in a truck. But that's a rifle he's got. At the end of the rifle it's a silencer. He has a night vision scope on the rifle. 

He shoots primarily at night. He uses bullets that if they don't hit the deer, the first hard thing they hit, they just break apart, so you don't have a bullet traveling through a high densely populated area. It's an extremely logistically difficult and expensive operation to do, but that's why it costs so much money. So a lot of these areas in urban suburban areas, where you're trying to manage populations, it costs a lot of money to do that. And a lot of townships either don't want to spend the money, or more commonly, don't have the money to spend. So it is extremely difficult. You can manage populations of wildlife in urban suburban settings, but it's going to cost a lot of money to do so, depending on the species. So you have all of these non-lethal management options right here. Essentially, non-lethal means obviously, the animal is not going to get killed, it's going to live to another day. That's a very big plus, in that generally these, as a group of practices are very publicly acceptable, even animal rights people are for most of these non-lethal practices, because the animal is not getting killed, so you can operate and use these in the most public of areas, because it's not terribly controversial. 

It's not harmful to the general public, where the management option is being employed. So that's a very positive plus benefit. The down side is that this is really a band-aid approach. You're not solving the problem, you're just moving the problem somewhere else most of the time. And most of the time, you're moving it to your neighbor's yard. And depending on whether you like your neighbor not, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. But you're just moving the animal somewhere else. You're not reducing the number of the population, and therefore reducing the magnitude of the problem. The other thing, as a general group of practices, non-lethal management practices, are typically more expensive to employ as a group, than are lethal management practices. So there's a couple of up sides, down sides to this group of practices. 

Lethal management, on the other hand, is not applicable everywhere. If the governor called one day and said, hey, we have a pigeon problem. The pigeons are crapping all over my statue, and I don't want my head full of white poop. Come do something. I couldn't shoot them. It's just not legal to do that. These practices are not applicable, universally, in all situations. They are very controversial, depending on where you're employing the practices. They're not safe all the time, and things like that. So that's a down side. 

The upside is that you, as a group of practices, compared to non-lethal, they typically are more cost effective. And you have the ability to eliminate the problem. So, for example, sometimes woodpeckers are banging on somebody's house. And sometimes they're banging there because they're trying-- If they're banging on your aluminum gutter, the male is banging in the spring. Banging on your aluminum gutter is like the male is up on the tallest flag pole with a bullhorn saying, hey, I'm horny. Where the heck are you? If you're a female, find me. Not everybody likes that, especially on a wood house. It's banging holes in your wood siding. There's a lot of things you can do non-lethally to stop the animal from doing that. 

If it doesn't work, you can get a permit to kill the animal. Typically once you kill that one animal, you've stopped the problem. That's an example of how lethal management can eliminate the problem. Or as in a larger setting, for example, let's say you've got a deer population just running across your town, and there's too many deer. As you start to reduce the deer population, you can start to slow or reduce the impacts and the negative effects of the deer, okay. You can reduce the deer populations, you can reduce landscape damage, and things like that. So there are some plus sides to lethal management, as well. Yes, ma'am? 
- I lived in Chicago. They're having a terrible problem in the northern suburbs. 

The kids did not want them shot. The parents got together and felt this was politics. And they had the deer taken up to northern Wisconsin. 
- Right. 
- How long does it take the deer to come back? 
(laughter)
 
- They probably don't come back down, but it's not cost effective. Nowadays, since chronic wasting disease, you cannot move deer across state lines, because they don't want-- They're trying to isolate the disease. They don't want it to be spread by movement of the deer, so you can't do that any longer. 

It's unlikely the deer would move back down in that area. What is more likely, is eventually the deer in the surrounding areas would fill that vacuum in. So that's more of the issue. It's just not a cost effective thing to do. 
- They move down for food. 
- Yes, but a lot of times, and I'm not saying that's what's happening with the person that did this in the northern suburbs of Chicago, but a lot of times, is somebody says, yeah, we'll take them to Wisconsin. Then they take them across the state line and kill them and eat them. I'm not saying that's what that person did, but I know of people who have done that before. So, you know, what you're told is not always true, either. Then the last thing I just want to touch on quickly, and then we'll get to show and tell, and then you can-- And you can walk out on me any time you want, if you're ready to go. 

You can walk out, please do. But I will do a little bit of show and tell quickly. I just want to talk quickly about some new management practices and a lot of these are directed primarily at deer, but somewhat at a resident Canada geese as well. And they really all focus on reproductive controls, or stopping reproduction. Sterilization works primarily for deer. Sterilization is being tried a couple of different ways, but one is field surgery, where you actually just would sterilize the animal through a surgical technique in the field. Other people are doing things like looking at chemotherapy treatments, for example, one of the side effects of some of the chemotherapy drugs is sterilization. You can inject deer, for example, with a chemotherapy agent and the side effect is that they're sterilized, so people are exploring that. With immuno-contraception, there are a number of options. You can try what's called like Norplant, a human birth control, where it's a long lasting, slow release birth control that you would actually implant under the skin. 

You can try that. PZP is a type of antibody that, essentially, what happens is it's an antibody that's injected into the animal, and it goes and attacks the eggs. It looks at the egg as an infective agent, and it surrounds it with a membrane so the sperm can't fertilize that egg. Another option along with sterilization and immuno-contraception is contra gestation. Essentially, what that is, it's an abortive agent that once the doe is pregnant, you would introduce this agent, and it causes an abortion of the fetus, which is not an ideal thing to do obviously, especially in urban suburban settings, for aborted fetuses to be dropped on people's front lawns, is not winning the public relations war anywhere. So all of those as a practice are being tried and they've been proven to be effective on individual deer, but the real problem is that it is so cost ineffective, because you have to treat each animal. It's very labor intensive, large handling time and very, very expensive and so far, nothing has been FDA approved. The Food and Drug Administration has to approve these agents before they're used on a wide scale, and none of these to my knowledge, have been approved yet by the FDA. Ideally you would like to do is develop something that you can administer in a bait pile full of corn, or it could be an extruded artificial product that deer would come eat, apples or whatever. You can bait the pile, and as the deer eat the bait, they ingest the agent, and they're treated in a mass scale, very cost effectively. 

But the hurdle, currently, is that there's a lot of other things that come to those bait piles, and you don't know how that's going to affect the non-target wildlife, including human kids, who might come and eat an apple. If you screw up their reproduction the rest of their life, you'll hear about that. The other issue is dosage issues. You might have, you know, a 120-pound deer, adult deer and a 30-pound fawn. The fawn might not have to ingest as much, because a lot of times, dosage is based on weight, as the buck would, for example. If the buck only eats for 10 seconds, and the fawn eats for 10 seconds, does the buck get enough agent to cause any effect? Then the whole other issue is even if you could treat on a wide scale basis cost effectively, that animal is still running around. So it's still getting in the way of vehicles, it's still eating the landscape plants, and still causing agricultural damage, and other things like that. Even if they can work this out, it is not a silver bullet that a lot of people were hoping for. The other thing with geese, that last point is, again, this is not cost effective, because you have such a large handling time and it's so labor intensive. 

But you can essentially, with Canada geese, they're what's called indeterminate nesters, so if the nest gets destroyed, they will get rebred by their life mate and just go and establish another nest. It could be right next to it, down the shore, whatever. So what you want to do instead is kill the embryo inside the egg, but leave the egg intact. It tricks the mom thinking, well, my nest is fine, I'll keep sitting here. By the time she realizes that nothing's hatched out, it's so late into the breeding season, that she doesn't re-breed. The young can't be raised in time to get out of here before winter comes. Shaking the eggs vigorously, kills the embryo and disrupts the membranes and the blood vessels. You can puncture them, as seen in the picture down there, or you can oil them. And by oiling, that oil clogs the microscopic pores in the egg shell, and essentially cuts the embryo off from the outside world, so there's no moisture or air exchange. One of the things people are experimenting with and they're looking at, is this agent that was used in commercial poultry operations that does not allow the yolk to form inside the egg. 

If the yolk can't form, you obviously don't have a viable embryo in the egg, so they're trying to figure out a way to introduce something in a bait pile, again, in a bait pile that geese can eat, and then they will lay the eggs but the embryo is not viable, and the mom will just continue to sit on them, but nothing hatches out, so you're not adding to the population. So there's a bunch of issues going on. This really is cutting edge science, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before they ever get to that point of doing something cost effectively on a large scale population. Are there any questions? Maybe I can take a couple of questions, while I get out some of the show and tell stuff. Yes, ma'am? 
- At one time, you were encouraged to kill male deer on the assumption, of course, that they couldn't impregnate the female. 
- Right. 
- Then it was discovered that the offspring, maybe the next season or something, the fawns were predominantly male. They produced more male fawns than females. 

Is that true? 
- I'm not exactly sure what the ratio of the fawns. A lot of times it's one-to-one. You might have, you know, one male to one female fawn. The bigger issue why people were encouraged, actually, it was illegal to shoot female deer for a long time in many states east of the Mississippi River, simply because the deer had been hunted near to extermination. Since the females are the ones who, you know, boost the population by adding offspring to the population, if you didn't shoot the female, then, you allow the female to drop the fawn and add to the population. That was the primary reason only the males were encouraged to be hunted and not the females. Hunting is a very interesting social phenomena, in the fact that typically, if your parents or grandparents didn't hunt, you don't hunt. And it's handed down by generation. A lot of people, grandparents and parents grew up under the law of, don't shoot female deer. 

For one thing, it was law. It was also as an ethical hunter you don't do that. Now that the populations have recovered so that the DNR wants you to shoot females. The DNR in our state, and all other states, want you to shoot the females. They've gone so far as to create incentives called "earn a buck" where you actually have to shoot a female before you shoot a buck. But it is so ingrained, especially in the older generations, that you simply don't shoot female deer, that they don't shoot female deer. On top of it, you have kind of the issue of the trophy hunters. The females don't grow the antlers, and a lot of people want to hang the big buck with the antlers on the wall. There's a lot of interesting social dynamics to that. Yes? 

- Talk about the problem of wolves now that they've returned. 
- Yep, and it may not be a problem, it may be, depending on your perspective. The Great Lakes wolf population was delisted, or taken off the United States endangered species list last March, because the wolf population in the Great Lakes region had recovered so well, simply because of the habitat that's available to them, and also because the states have done such a great job of managing populations, they were finally removed from the endangered species list. Now what's going to have to happen is that the DNR is that is struggling with, do we create a trapping and/or hunting season on wolves. Because the wolf population is going to get-- I mean, there are conflicts with the humans right now, in terms of the wolves are eating the livestock and pets, and, you know, hunting hounds, and things like that. So those are going to increase as more and more people move further north in Wisconsin and as the wolf population increases in size. Typically, what happens also, is that for a game species or a game population that what you want to do is skim that recruitment off. You want to hold the population steady, so you would allow a harvest level that would equal the recruitment rate from that previous year's population recruitment, so I think that's going to be the next big controversy, is the DNR is going to have to do something, allowing either a hunting and/or trapping season. It's going to be an interesting thing to watch. Yes, sir? 

- --ethanol and corn-- 
- I'm not going to touch that. I've got my own personal opinions, and I don't. Yeah, Tom? I'm sorry. The question was, raising corn for ethanol has been termed a crime against humanity. I don't know if I would go that far, and this is strictly my personal opinion, so the University of Wisconsin doesn't endorse this, nor does the Extension service, and things like that. Depending on what studies you look at, it certainly looks like there's a lot more input than there is output in terms of a gallon of ethanol. From my personal opinion and where I stand, that there's a lot more detriment to raising more corn for ethanol than if you just kept that corn you know, kept that land in wildlife habitat, and things like that. If you look at cellulosic ethanol or cellulosic type fuels or more biofuel, or cellulosic based, out of woody vegetation, that looks like it has more promise. 

If you look down in Venezuela, for example, they've for decades now, have had sugar cane fuel, because sugar cane has such a higher return, there's so much more alcohol tied up in the sugar than there is in corn, so that seems a little bit more efficient and effective than corn ethanol does, but that's, I guess, as far as I'll go with it. Yes? 
- Do you know what's happening with our honey bees and their demise? 
- Well, I don't. Do you know what's happening with the honey bees? I don't know for a fact, and I guess if you ever have Phil Pellitteri here, that would be a good question for him. Let me see if there's any more questions and otherwise, I'll just talk about some animals quickly. I don't know if you're going to be able to see this. I didn't realize that there would be so many people, and it would be like this. But this is just a sharp chinned hawk. 

It's a small type of raptor. They do really well in urban suburban settings, because they're another bird eating bird. They look at the bird feeders as a buffet line. Oh, yeah, the lights. So let's see, stage, okay, there we go. Cooper hawks also do very well in and around urban suburban settings, because they see bird feeders as a smorgasbord. That's one example there. Here is the scourge of the bird world, really of the natural world, the European starling. This is a non-native exotic species. They're not protected by law. 

You're encouraged to kill them when you see them any time of the year, because they compete with the native birds, and usually out-compete them. Interesting story about this, there's a gentleman back in the early 1900s, who came to America from England and he was a fanatical fan of Shakespeare's works. And he came to America with the idea of introducing to America a representative of every single bird species mentioned in the Shakespeare's works. So he got the starling and the English sparrow to America, and thankfully he died before he got further along. The starling and English sparrow both are non-native species, and both have done a tremendous job of out-competing the native species of birds. This is an example of a cedar waxwing. Just absolutely beautiful bird, a yellow tail. It looks like the ends of the wings have been dipped in red wax, that's why it's the cedar waxwing. It's amazing how we come up with the names. These are birds that a lot of times in the spring and fall you'll see them congregate in large numbers, especially in trees that have berries, like ash trees, for example, holly trees. 

And they are very common in urban suburban settings, because we plant so much native and non-native vegetation that are berry plants, so they do great in urban suburban settings. And a really interesting thing about these birds, is that they actually will cause themselves to get drunk. So in the spring, when those berries freeze at night, but then thaw during the day, so just about the time when it starts to tap into your trees for maple syrup, for example, the berries, they thaw in the day, freeze at night. As that goes through the freeze thaw, it ferments. As they eat the berries, they actually get drunk and you'll see them flying just kind of weaving their way down the road. 
(inaudible)
 Well, good point. Good point. And then the other bird that I brought just as an example, this is a tiny house finch. It's named house finch, because it's found a lot of times around houses. 

A really kind of cool thing about these birds, these used to be called Hollywood finches. They were brought in to the eastern part of the United States as part of the illegal pet trade. If you look at a bird book back in the 1920s or so, the range of this bird is simply down the west coast of the United States. And then if you look in the bird book, about 1940, 1950, or 1960, the range is along the west coast and east coast of the United States, but nothing in the middle of the United States, because the birds were imported to the west coast and sold in pet shops as Hollywood finches. As pet shops got raided, and for whatever reason you raid a pet shop I don't know, but the pet shop owners released the birds into the wild. Now if you look at a bird book, house finches are across the entire United States. They kind of filled the middle in from the edges. But that's kind of an interesting thing. They are very much associated in urban suburban settings. Tom? 

- Unlike botonists, bird people, what is the official common name for that? 
- House finch. 
(laughter)
 
- It got trumped? 
- Yep, nobody likes Hollywood. All right. I don't know how you're going to see this, but these are bats. Bat species. This is the big brown bat. 

This is the little brown bat. Again, it's amazing how we come up with these names. Very scientific. And this is the red bat. You want to guess why it's a red bat? Because it's red, okay. So we have eight species of bats in Wisconsin. One of them is the federally endangered Indiana bat, which nobody has seen for a long time. It's concentrated primarily to the extreme southern part of the state. Then we have three species that are resident species and five that are migratory. 

Big brown and little brown are two of the most common resident species, The brown bat is the one that's most commonly found in your attics, especially over winter, but bats do very well in urban suburban settings because we leave lights on at night. Those lights are insect attractors, and these are insectivores. Also, bats like to hole up behind your shutters, or in your attics, or if have cedar shingles on the side of the house, they'll get under the shingles. They do extremely well in and around urban settings. Anybody ever been to Austin, Texas? Have you ever been to the Sixth Street Bridge down there? You can just see hundreds of thousands of bats come out at night from underneath that bridge. And it is a sight to see, and it is a community event. People will come down with their lawn chairs and bottles of wine, and picnic dinners, and actually watch the bats come out from under the bridge. So here's the skunk. 

We talked about the striped skunk and the issue with the rabies. It is part of the weasel family. As such, as with all weasels, it has scent glands, but it has the most well developed scent glands of any member of the weasel family. And you know why, because it sprays very, very well. Skunks are neat little animals. They are omnivores. They eat a lot of different things. They'll eat plants, animals. In the spring especially, if you find little holes in your yard that are conical in shape, so it narrows as it goes deeper in the soil, that's by a skunk. The skunk takes it's little, tiny conical nose and digs into your yard, looking for grubs and other insects in the soil to eat. 

That's a very common thing in the spring to look for. Here's a groundhog. We saw a picture of this. When they get scared, they get very flat. 
(laughter)
 They are a hibernatory animal. You don't see them in the winter. They come back up. They're vegetarians. One of the reasons they've done so well in urban suburban settings, is because they obviously dig under the ground. 

And so in a lot of areas where you have houses, you've got back-fill material, and things, so it's easy to dig through. But also, we have a lot of low lying vegetation. They'll dig their burrow entrance and put it under the low lying vegetation that provides them some cover. They love to eat grass. And so we've got a lot of grass in urban suburban areas that they can eat. What's that? 
- Is there a market for fur? 
- No, not really. Not too much. You know, it's interesting. 

If you've ever seen one of these things hit on the road, and if the fur gets scraped off on the road, their skin is almost black, almost like they've been burned to a crisp. I've never skinned one of these animals, but it looks like if you remove the fur, that the skin is black and just-- It's a weird looking animal, period, but naked especially. Yes? 
- Did you say they were also called ground pigs? 
- Well, whistling pigs. They whistle. They'll stick their head up and they'll whistle. They're diurnal animals, so a lot of times if you see them, you'll see them during the day and they'll be out. They don't go much more than about 200 feet away in radius from one of the burrow openings. They can cause some problems from the digging. 

They'll just chomp your tomato plants right down to the ground. And not even thank you for it. So it's kind of a problem. A raccoon obviously. A real neat animal, very easily distinguished animal. Everybody knows what a raccoon looks like. Songs have been written about it in the past. These animals are very dexterous. They wash their food, a lot of times. They'll take their food and wash it before they eat it, if there's water nearby. 

If you've gotten newly laid sod, for example, they'll roll the sod up to make it look like it's just off the truck, and you haven't laid it yet. They'll roll it up with those opposable thumbs, as they look for grubs in your yard. And the other thing that I think is really cool about raccoons is that they can climb a tree equally well going down or up head first or tail first, because the rear feet can go almost 180 degrees, like that, and that helps them climb. They are excellent climbers. Yes? 
- A little bit about crows, their general habits, their intelligence level, and whether they pose a danger if you have lots of them in your backyard. 
- Crows are very, very smart birds. Everything is smart relatively. If you can keep yourself alive as an animal, I think you're pretty darn smart. But crows have been determined to be one of the smarter birds that we have in north America. 

The issue with crows is typically their habits. They will eat a lot of different things. Well, last year, we have a row of pines in our backyard, and we usually have mourning doves nesting back there. So last year my kids and I were back there looking for a mourning dove. Sure enough, we found a nest. The eggs are not hatched yet, so my daughters checked the nest every day. And they ran in one day and said, you know, the chicks have hatched out. A couple of days later they go back out there just in time to see a crow carrying one of the chicks off. So, they will eat a lot of different things, and they can be predatory, but they are also very opportunist feeders. Yeah? 

- Many years ago when I lived in the country I had a pet crow. And he was particularly fond of ice cream. 
- Oh, yeah. 
- And my red geraniums. He just did wonders for traveling salesmen. 
- I'll bet. The biggest problem with crows in urban suburban areas, is that they have communal roosts, as a group of birds. And as they do that, they're extremely loud. And then they're also extremely smelly, because they defecate everywhere, all over things. So it is a major problem if you have a communal crow roost in an urban setting. 

You can try to scare them or kill them off, but ultimately what happen is a lot of times, you have to cut the roost down to get them to move. 
- If my neighbor went on the east side, when the West Nile Virus showed up here, within a year or so we had had a large group of crows in the trees. Within about a year of the West Nile Virus showing up, it's like they disappeared. They were gone. 
- I'm not sure how much the West Nile Virus has affected the crow population, but at least to me, it looks like they've come back, because I see crows everywhere. And they are very common and very large in number. And again, that's just a gut instinct. I don't have any data to back that up. But they seem very, very plentiful all over the place. Yes, sir? 

- Can you explain the benefit of a bull snake on a farm in Wisconsin? 
- Sarcastically? Well, I think any snake in general is beneficial. I know a lot of people don't like snakes, but they are terribly beneficial, simply because there's a lot of animals that eat snakes, so they do provide a food source. But they eat their weight in pest animals, like field mice and moles-- not moles, but voles, mice, and other rodent species, and things like that. They can be extremely beneficial from that standpoint alone. Yeah. Yes, ma'am? 
- Foxes? 
- Foxes are, again, this winter, my wife looks out and we live in kind of a typical residential neighborhood. 

My wife looks outside the backyard and there's a fox just kind of sauntering through the backyard in the winter. So they are everywhere, and they're very common. Any mammal, theoretically, can carry rabies, so you should be careful about, you know, getting scratched or bit by any mammal, humans included. Fox are very common. Typically, what happens is that there's a pecking order, so if you have a large wolf population you typically don't have coyotes in the area, because wolves eat coyotes. If you have a large fox population, you typically don't have many coyotes, because coyotes eat fox. We have two different foxes. We have a red fox and gray fox. And you can guess what color each of those is. The red fox is typically much more of an edge species, they exist more in kind of an overgrown, brushy type area. 

The gray fox is more of a woodland type species. Red fox have done very well. Again, there's so much for them to eat. There's a lot of places they'll hole up, under your deck or alongside your foundation. I've even seen them in window wells, sunk-in window wells of people's houses, and things like that. They do very well in urban suburban settings. They are really neat animals. I don't know who doesn't like a fox, unless you're a rabbit maybe. They are neat. Let me talk about my last specimen here, and then maybe we'll answer questions for a few more minutes, and call it a night if that's okay with everybody. 

This is a Virginia possum. Again, we talked about the fact that I don't know if you can see on this one, but the ears on this one are black, and not in very good shape. And this naked tail, just being this far north, and having exposed skin is not a very good idea especially in the winter. But the tail obviously, they use it for climbing and wrapping it around. And the very interesting thing about possums is that this is the only representation of a marsupial in north America. Marsupial, obviously means it's related to the kangaroo, wallaby, and things like that, because it has a pouch. That pouch serves the purpose of raising the young, so the young, after the possum gets bred by the male, the little tiny embryos are only in her uterus for less than two weeks, and then they make their way out and crawl up her belly fur, and then spend upwards of two to three months in her pouch, just hanging out and growing and nursing. So she'll hang them in her pouch and as they get older, as she's walking around, you'll see they'll be on her back. Then eventually on their own, and things like that. These are really neat animals. 

They have 50 teeth, the most teeth of any wild mammal in Wisconsin. That's a trivial pursuit question right there, I gave you to fill in the last triangle. Then, the other thing about these animals is that they play dead, like people say play dead like a possum. And what happens with possums, is that they can be aggressive. They will defend themselves. They do it mostly by hissing at you, or they might charge you a little bit. If that doesn't work, what happens is their blood pressure gets so high, they essentially pass out, and that's why it's called playing dead, is that they scare themselves into an unconsciousness, really. So they're not as brave as they seem. It's a Virginia possum, or opossum, yeah. Has anybody ever had possum to eat? 

It's not the best thing in the world, I don't think. It's real oily. And I guess there's better ways to prepare it, but I'm not particularly fond of it. I would rather eat Alpo if I had to. Yes? 
- Is that the only marsupial in North America? 
- Yes. 
- Are there marsupials South America? 
- The possum is down there as well. I think that's the only representation of a marsupial in South America that I can think of offhand. 

- How about Australia? 
- Well, I don't know. I don't know, nor do I have the time to trace the evolutionary history of these animals. But as you know, animals have come across oceans onboard ships, or as pets, or something like that. I don't know how far back the evolution history of the animal traces, but at one time, you know before plate tectonics broke the continents apart, we were all one big pangea. I don't know if at that point through the land bridges that they got over here or not, or how that happened. I'm not aware of that. But they are a marsupial. I know that. Yes? 

- Are there more species of possum in the Midwest than the Virginia? 
- No. 
- That's the only one? 
- Yep. 
- In St. Louis, I thought the possums we saw were like all beige. I don't remember the dark. 
- It's not uncommon. When you think about an eastern gray tree squirrel, you can have a white, black, gray, or anything in between. You know, just think about us. 

All different skin colors we have for humans, but you have different, you know, mutations or different variations of skin color, same with peltage, as well. Tom? 
- My question, I grew up in Dixon, Illinois. My dad feeds fox squirrels down there. And up here, we have these little gray weasely things. What is the relative-- Are those populations stable? Are they different species? 
- They're two different species. I mean, ultimately I guess they probably could breed, but the gray tree squirrel population is, I don't know of anywhere where it's not doing well. And the fox squirrel population is doing quite well, as well. 

- Do they compete with each other? 
- No, not really. There's enough food out there, and enough, you know, cavities. And they build leaf nests. Squirrels don't always use cavities. They'll build leaf nests, as well, so there's usually enough habitat sharing or niche sharing there. 
- Versus-- 
- No. Flying squirrels are really neat animals. We have two species in Wisconsin, a southern flying squirrel, and it's found in Wisconsin. 

Or a northern flying squirrel. And the southern flying squirrel is typically smaller than the northern flying squirrel. Both are nocturnal. And my wife insists on dragging me out to the American Players Theater every dang summer. And I'm bored stiff out there, but the saving grace for me is that I can hear the whippoorwills out there calling. And one night I see these flying squirrels scurrying up and down the light masts. I spent the whole Shakespeare play, all eight hours of it, 
(light laughter)
 watching these flying squirrels going up and down the light masts and gliding off, and things like that, so flying squirrel is a misnomer. They're not truly flying mammals. 

The only true flying mammal is the bats. They have these skin attachments and they glide. They do a great job gliding. They have these rather wide flat tails. That tail is used, almost as a rudder to help them steer as they glide through the air. They are really neat animals. They're actually a lot more common than people think. You don't see them, because they're more nocturnally oriented than daytime oriented. 
- In Madison, 50 or so years ago, we had some friends who lived out where Allen Boulevard is now. And there was nothing else except woods around there. 

The woman had kind of trained these flying squirrels to come in at night. She would feed them, or in the evening. So we would go out there and she would come out and they would come swooping down from the trees. So I guess they're around. That's the only time I've ever seen them. 
- They're very common. If you go out at night, you know, and just pay attention a little bit, it might take a little bit of looking, but they're very common and they're around here, in pretty decent numbers. They're neat animals. They're real neat animals. 
- One question, on one of your slides, you showed, I'm guessing they were bachelor buttons, or something? 

It was a blue flower. 
- Oh, yep. 
- Are they an animal repellent? 
- No. What the heck was that? It wasn't a bachelor button. Did I have it in the non-lethal part? Okay. Are you sure it wasn't an aster? Did it look like an aster? 

I think it was an aster. The point was that with deer in particular is that there are lists out there of what's called deer resistant plant species. That was an example of one of them. The list typically, regardless of what state the list is generated from, they're all roughly the same of a group of plants, that deer seldom ever rarely eat these plants. And then at the other end of the spectrum, deer almost always eat these plants. Well, the point is that I can take you and show you places where they say deer seldom ever eat these plants, and they consistently clobber them, and other areas, where the deer always eat these plants, and they haven't touched them for years. That slide usually in other talks, is just a point of there are these lists out there. Don't put too much stock in them but as you're making planting choices and decisions, perhaps take one of those type lists to either a plant center and any kind of consultation with a garden center, make some choices. But the more important thing to do, I think, is to use that list as a bit of a reference, but more importantly, drive around your immediate area and see what's holding up well that year in your neighborhood, and plant that. But don't be surprised if what held up last year doesn't hold up well this year, because deer either may not have found it yet. 

They eat a little bit here and there, and they may not have found it yet. Or last year, maybe the growing conditions were such that there was enough wild food out there that they didn't have to eat your plants, or whatever the case is. But that was just an example of deer resistant, supposedly deer resistant plants. Thank you. 
(applause)