Fuzz, page 12
From what I have learned today, I can now identify deer and badger footprints. I could definitely track a cow. And I can tell coyote and fox from bobcat and cougar. Canid tracks are more elongate and may include claw marks, because unlike cats’ claws, dogs’ claws don’t retract. The tell for a cougar or bobcat track is a pair of prominent notches (“cleats,” in tracker lingo) at the rear of the large center pad. These are often visible even if it’s a partial track, which, in more gravelly sections of the road, it often is. We brake for cleats.
Dellinger slows to a stop. He tells me to stay on the ATV, which suggests he’s found mountain lion tracks and is worried I’ll hop off and step on them. He gets onto one knee and lowers his face to the roadway. A tangerine in a cargo pocket bulges like a tumor.
It is in fact a mountain lion. Dellinger lays a small ruler alongside. Sexing a cougar track is a simple matter of measurement. If it’s wider than 48 millimeters, it’s a tom. Less indicates a she. And how does one know a she track from the track of a juvenile male? By who else is around. If it’s a juvenile, the mother’s tracks should be somewhere nearby. This one is a tom.
Dellinger presses the side of his fist into the dirt beside the track for a comparison. “See how this”—the extremely fresh fist-print—“is a lot crisper?” Moist soil holds together better. Taken to the end point, it’s the difference between sand-castle sand and hourglass sand. In the heat of summer, by ten or eleven in the morning, the moisture from the previous night’s dew will have mostly dried, and tracks from the night before will have lost their sharpness. This is another reason to get out of bed at 3:30 a.m. As is this: the side-arm sun of early morning casts shadows behind the ridges of a track, outlining its contours. If we came back at noon, even Dellinger would miss this track.
Dellinger believes this print to be that of the male he collared near here the week before. The goal today is to find and collar the female who eluded Dellinger yesterday, so we climb back on the four-wheeler and continue to stare at dirt.
Dellinger points to the road ahead of us. “Watch what happens to his tracks as we come up on this curve. See how he’s saving steps? He’s cutting the corner.” If you can read sign, you can infer an animal’s intent from the lay of its tracks. If a mountain lion is chasing prey, its tracks are messy and scuffed, and some will overlap. If it’s in traveling mode, with a set destination in mind, the tracks are clean and widely spaced. The stride of this lion is shorter. “He’s just amblin’,” Dellinger says. Looking for someone to eat.
I will admit that, despite a statistically detailed knowledge of the extreme rarity of cougar attacks on humans, these tracks make me nervous—not now, on the back of the ATV, but a half hour later, when I leave the road and go off into the trees to pee. Del-linger never worries. As he put it, “We’re not on the menu.” Nor does he believe encounters with cougars are on the rise. “Californians are like, ‘Lions are everywhere now!’ ” What’s on the rise are home security cameras. Doorbell cameras are the mammograms of wildlife biology. Dellinger slows for a rut. “All it is, is a change in technology.” Someone posts a doorbell shot of a cougar. It’s reposted, goes viral. News crews show up. The whole neighborhood’s talking about it. One sighting turns into five.
Dellinger upshifts for a straight stretch. “They’ve always been there. We just never saw them.” He says he’d bet his paycheck that every day of the year, at least a dozen Californians come within pouncing distance of a mountain lion and never know it.
Almost 10:00 a.m. now. It’s warm enough to unzip my jacket despite a steady breeze. Even if we found fresh tracks, the scent would be too dissipated by heat and wind for a hound to track. (The houndsman is off on another logging road; he and Del-linger are in touch by cellphone.) As the sun heats the air, scent molecules become more energetic, bouncing off one another and spreading out, becoming a diffuse cloud of diluted smell. The wind further scatters the scent. Even under ideal smelling circumstances, there will be a point, many points, where a hound loses the scent. This is called, yes, “a lose.” To relocate the scent, good hounds will run a zigzag, sweeping wide left and right until they pick it up again. I tried this on a street near my office, after a young man passed by in a reek of Axe body spray. I let him turn the corner and disappear from view, then waited a few minutes. By zigzagging hound dog–style, I was able to track him to his destination, a cheesesteak place on the next block.
Dellinger is ready to pack it in. Tomorrow’s another day. Except that it isn’t. He neglected to mention that he has to drive to Redding for a “wolf meeting.” I picture large canids in business casual. Sensing my disappointment, Dellinger offers to demonstrate how he uses tree-climbing gear to reach a darted mountain lion to lower it down. Without the lion, this is only lightly interesting. He also offers to drive me out to a “community scrape” that he found yesterday. At places where males’ territories overlap, or where they make use of the same pass through the hills, say, lions will leave a calling card. Much as the dogs in my neighborhood spritz urine on the same sad shrub in our yard, cougars will kick back the “duff” with their rear paws, depositing scent onto fallen pine needles and other forest floor detritus. Dellinger looks for scrapes under large trees. The bigger the tree, the deeper the duff.
We arrive at the spot and look at some scrapes. While visually unspectacular, a scrape is interesting for what it reveals to those who know the code. When mountain lions scrape, they typically face the direction they’re traveling, which is helpful if you’re looking for them. And, as with tracks, it’s possible to tell how fresh the scrape is—here, by noting how many new needles have fallen on top. Dellinger is explaining how to “sex a scrape.” A female kicks back with her rear legs together, leaving two parallel gashes in the duff, whereas a male scrapes with one foot at a time, angling out to the side, “because of its anatomy.” By this he means “its balls.” Dellinger was recently chastised for incautious language in a press interview. He had, among other things, likened maneuvering a woozy, darted cougar out of a tree to “tryin’ to get your drunk friend into a taxi-cab and he’s got his hands on either side of the door, resistin’.”
I envy people able to read the natural world in this way. I move through the woods the way I flip through Chinese editions of my books, seeing shapes and patterns and having no clue what they might mean. Earlier, Dellinger showed me a line in the dirt from one side of the road to the other, like something made by a kid dragging a stick. It was in fact a “drag mark,” but no child passed through here. The line was made by the dangling hoof of a dead fawn being carried in a mountain lion’s jaws to a more secluded spot to be eaten. I of course missed the tracks on either side.
When I first met Dellinger, I told him that what I found interesting about the Mountain Lion Project is that it blends modern wildlife biology with its roots in natural history. The early naturalists spent weeks at a time out on the land, tracking and observing, deciphering behaviors, discovering new species. You could sense the excitement in the titles of their journal papers. “Anecdote of a Combat Betwixt Two Hares.” “A New Duiker from Zanzibar.” I’m sure the authors of “Conservation Phylogenetics of the Asian Box Turtles (Geoemdidae, Cuora): Mitochondrial Introgression, Numts, and Inferences from Multiple Nuclear Loci” felt some excitement, too, but they didn’t have those long, glorious stretches alone in the wild.
Dellinger knows the new stuff, but at heart he’s a happy throw-back. Standing over the skeleton of a deer earlier, Dellinger talked about how he’s noticed that mountain lions in less arid parts of the state will pull out a deer’s rumen and drag it away before feeding on the carcass. And lions in drier parts of the state don’t seem to do this. An ungulate’s rumen teems with bacteria that break down the plant matter it consumes; Dellinger’s theory is that the behavior slows the rot of the carcass, which might boost the animal’s odds of survival in humid climates where meat spoils more quickly.
Naturalists were the original biologists, and hunters and trappers were the original naturalists. No one knew more about a species—the wheres, whens, and whys of its movements through the land and the seasons, its relationships with prey and rivals and mates—than a person whose livelihood depended on that knowledge. The first natural history museums looked very much like the dioramas at a Cabela’s. As natural history formalized itself and science became a paying career, rivalries and resentments grew. In 1941, the aforementioned houndsman Jay Bruce wrote a letter to his Division of Fish and Game superior, requesting that he not share Bruce’s new report “Cougar in Relation to His Neighbors.” “The naturalists have already stolen too much of my discoveries and never give me credit for it,” the letter states. “Everthing they should have known, but didn’t, they have implied was their own material.”
Wildlife biology has always been a kind of snooping. Long before scientists were spying on animals with wildlife cameras or tailing them with radio collars, they were poking around in their excretions. As in human espionage,† it’s done because you can’t just ask. You can’t inquire of an animal what it eats or how healthy or stressed it is, but you can sometimes learn the answers from its scat.
“Droppings analysis” got rolling in the 1930s. The decade saw a steady progression of learned men prying into the toilet of common woodland creatures: Hamilton on the diet of big brown bats, Murie on coyotes, Dearborn on foxes, minks, and coyotes, Hamilton again on skunks, Errington on badgers and weasels. Before that, if you wanted to know what a species was eating, you opened a few hundred stomachs. You can imagine how amassing enough organs to draw valid conclusions would be an unappealing prospect for most biologists, and certainly all the animals. Albert Ken-rich Fisher’s 1900 “Summary of the Contents of 255 Stomachs of the Screech Owl” made me feel tired and sad, though also vaguely festive, owing to the author’s “Twelve Days of Christmas”–style presentation: “91 stomachs contained mice … 100 stomachs contained insects … 9 stomachs contained crawfish … 2 stomachs contained scorpions …” Droppings provided a kinder, less taxing alternative.
They still do. Dellinger’s master’s thesis is on the diets of gray wolves. “I spent a lot of time,” he recalled earlier, “walking around looking for poo.” (“Poo”! There’s the California Department of Fish and Wildlife talking again.) Old habits die hard. As we walked around a deer kill site, he bent to pick something up, saying, “Here’s some bobcat scat.” He held it out to me and then, quickly reassessing, let it drop.
Eventually someone hatched the idea of counting piles of scat to estimate species populations: shit as proxy for shitter. The technique became known as a pellet census: yet more biology-minded humans moving through the wilderness, staring at the ground. Provided your census takers can tell fresh feces from stale, and you know the average number of times a day the species in question defecates, it’s possible to work out how many individuals a fecal tally of a set area represents. Possible, but not easy, and probably not all that accurate.
First, your census takers must know their shit. Raccoon scat, for instance, is most reliably distinguished from opossum scat by scent, the latter possessing a foul smell. Ungulates pose a quandary in that they often travel in groups and “dung” while walking. Making it hard to know: Are you looking at the droppings of two individuals or—quoting scatologist Ernest Thompson Seton—one “peripatetic defecator”?
Nor is it a straightforward matter to make the call between fresh and old. No one knew this better than a rat searcher. These were men, “specially trained in the habits of the rat,”‡ who, among other tasks, boarded ships at England’s docks and counted up fresh pellets in order to estimate the vessel’s “rattiness.” Not as simple as it sounds. Fresh droppings in a hot engine room could be misleadingly shriveled and dry, and old droppings on a wet deck were misleadingly plump and fresh-looking. Mold was an unreliable indicator, as a 1930 study by Liverpool’s assistant port medical officer proved. On certain diets—sunflower seeds, for one, and bran—the pellets grew moldy within twenty-four hours, “whilst on other diets, excreta kept under exactly similar conditions [showed] no signs of mould for several days.” And depending on what sorts of edibles were in the cargo hold, it could also be tricky to tell a rat dropping from some other animal’s. The small, hard black turds of a rice-fed rat were easily mistaken for those of a mouse. Despite all these complexities, the rat searchers’ estimates, when checked against post-fumigation roundups, were impressively accurate, and prompted “a healthy rivalry among the men.”
Figuring the daily defecation rate for a species posed its own challenges. Some researchers tried fashioning a “fecal harness” and outfitting a number of representative animals. (The harness held in place the “fecal bag”—a sort of feed bag in reverse.) The results strayed in unanticipated ways. One researcher’s harness for shrub-grazing goats proved too restrictive; the creatures were unable to assume their preferred bipedal noshing stance, which allowed them to reach the higher leaves. A subsequent goat-diet researcher published plans for an improved harness that, despite its nineteen leather straps, allowed the goats to rear up on their hind legs. In a minor setback, several of the nonharnessed goats, being goats, ate the leather straps off their pals. Science is never simple.
An alternative would be to spend time spying on animals in the wild. Again, not as straightforward as you might think. “Dunging” frequency, wrote David Welch, in a 1982 study on the “dung-volume method of assessing occupance,” differs by time of day and by season. Rabbits in Wales dropped an average of 446 pellets a day in April, when food was plentiful, but only 376 a day in January. The rate also varies by what foods the animal is eating. I’m not just pulling this out of my fecal bag. The Liverpool study details the “enormously” varied fecal output of rats on different diets. A rat fed rice will pass an average of 21 pellets a day; a bran-fed rat averages 128 (“very large, buff-colored cylindrical”) pellets a day.
It was around this point that a JSTOR pop-up appeared on my laptop screen. “Want to connect with leading experts in pellets?” I kind of did. What would they be like? How many could there be? Was I one now?
The future of turd science is bright. Analyzing genetics from scat promises to be a faster, less costly version of capture-mark-recapture. Rather than counting recaptures of marked animals, one would count reappearances of genetic fingerprints in the collected scat. Dogs trained to whiff out mountain lion scat will soon be brought to these same areas Dellinger has been surveying. Their handlers will bag the scat found by the dogs and bring it back to the CDFW Wildlife Investigations Laboratory for genetic analyses. Scat can also deliver information about the health and genetic diversity of cougars in different regions.
If the genetics work turns up population data similar to what Dellinger is getting from his tracking and collaring work, it means scat-detection dogs and gene sequencing can be trusted to do the work on future surveys. If all goes as hoped, Justin Dellinger will be replaced by a heap of shit.
I think he’d miss being out here, though he says no. He says it’ll free him up to spend more time researching hazing techniques and other ways to keep mountain lions apart from humans. Because whenever the two cross paths, at least in California, controversy boils. As Dellinger puts it, “For some people, ten is too many. For some, ten thousand is not enough.” Interestingly, it is not commercial ranches requesting the majority of California’s mountain lion depredation (kill) permits. Between 70 and 90 percent are granted to backyard farmers—people with between two and ten animals. (The state has few large commercial ranches.) From a distance, the killing of a cougar is, for many in my state, an affront. Build a safe nighttime enclosure for your animals! Keep your pet inside at night! How is the life of a beagle or goat worth more than the life of a wild mountain lion? A bellows to the flames is the common impression, based on heavy media coverage of a pocket of cougars isolated by the Los Angeles freeway system, that the species is imperiled throughout the state. California’s cougars are neither endangered nor threatened. But they are big and they are beautiful, and those are the animals people fight for hardest. It’s the everlasting politics of charismatic megafauna.
And megaflora, even. The bigger the tree, the deeper the duff. Or something.
* The formula for calculating how much wood a woodchuck could chuck is 0 × (the name is an English corruption of a regional Algonquian word, wuchak).
† The late Sayre Stevens, head of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, had a trap placed in the plumbing beneath the toilet at Blair House, the guest accommodations for visitors of the president, while Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was in town. The captured stool was brought to physicians within the CIA’s medical intelligence program to see what information it might divulge. Specimens from Egyptian king Farouk and Indonesian president Sukarno (in this case urine from an airplane toilet) were likewise delivered for testing. Given that the tactic predates clinical DNA analysis, how much intelligence could a BM really provide? What could brown do for you? I posed the question to Jonathan D. Clemente, a practicing physician and contributor to the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, currently at work on a scholarly history of medical support for clandestine operations. Not much, is the answer. “They were looking for blood in the stool, maybe parasites. Whether they got any useful information, I kind of doubt it.” More fruitfully, Clemente said, CIA physicians have worked under assumed names at high-profile medical centers where foreign heads of state sometimes travel for care. Why bother with a turd when you have direct access to the man himself and his medical records? Only once, to Clemente’s knowledge, has critical information come out of the enemy’s toilet. He shared the story of a U.S. Military Liaison Mission that had been spying on a field camp of Russian soldiers. At one point the solders ran out of toilet paper and began using pages from their code pads. MLM operatives went through the soldiers’ trash and triumphantly delivered the browned pages to the National Security Agency.
