wildlife
Could You Transform Your Yard into a Flourishing Wildlife Haven?
Four years ago, Melody Murray started noticing these cute signs in her Portland, Oregon neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch. Posted in residents’ front yards, the signs read: “Certified Backyard Habitat” with a drawing of a black, red and white spotted towhee sitting on a leafy branch.
“I didn’t know what they were for,” says the Ohio native who moved to Oregon in 1994. Her curiosity piqued, she went online and quickly found out: The Backyard Habitat Certification began as a joint project of Columbia Land Trust and Portland Audubon (now called the Bird Alliance of Oregon) to encourage urban residents to garden without pesticides, plant native plants and remove invasive species. All of these practices support a flourishing community of native birds, insects and other wildlife.
Trillium in Melody Murray’s yard. Courtesy of Melody Murray
When Murray lucked into a one-acre property in the Cully neighborhood in 2021, she joined the Facebook group “Friends of Backyard Habitats,” where she lurked for a while until she felt ready to sign up. Because she and her partner had already cleared away invasive plants like ivy and vinca (periwinkles) — and planted an array of native trees, shrubs and plants — they got certified at the “Silver” level as soon as the Backyard Habitat technician could come for a site visit.
“It was super easy for me because I had already made an effort to remove the ‘bad guys,’” says Murray, who was already a skilled gardener. “There were other bad guys. But I had enough native stuff that it tipped the balance.”
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Since the Backyard Habitat program launched in 2009, 14,000 properties have enrolled in the Portland metro area. (It covers Clackamas, Clark, Multnomah and Washington counties.) The program began as a pilot project in the Southwest hills neighborhood as a way to get neighbors to keep their ivy and blackberry plants from crawling over fences. The habitat signs were a helpful incentive from the start, along with certification, resources and discounts. It worked so well, says Peterson, that the city of Portland wanted to take it city-wide. That’s when Portland Audubon came in as a partner.
After Melody Murray and her partner cleared away invasive plants and planted an array of native trees, shrubs and plants, they got certified at the “Silver” level. Credit: Backyard Habitat Certification Program
The program, which costs no more than $45 to join, is relatively straightforward. (There’s a sliding scale so that people who can’t afford $45 can pay less. There’s also an option to pay more than $45 to pay it forward.) Once a resident fills out an enrollment form and pays the fee, a habitat technician will come to their house for a site visit. They’ll look closely at the resident’s yards — contrary to the name, the certification covers not just a person’s backyard but front and side yards, as well — and give pro tips on creating habitat for wildlife, managing stormwater, decreasing pesticide use and removing nuisance weeds. They also recommend ways to increase the percentage of “naturescaped areas.” Naturescaping is a gardening practice which emulates nature, so the idea is to select plants that are native, in this case, to the Willamette Valley ecoregion. These plants have adapted to the local climate and are naturally resistant to pests and diseases. They also provide food and shelter to support the entire life cycles of pollinators and birds they have evolved with. As a bonus — and a win for lazy gardeners — they require less maintenance and help manage stormwater. The Backyard Habitat program also asks that each participant have at least three native canopy layers present. (Canopy layers are composed of tall shrubs, small shrubs, and groundcover.)
Getting rid of nuisance weeds is important because they smother and kill native plants, which local wildlife depend on. One of the most commonly found in gardens in the Portland area is ivy (all cultivars). Though it can look beautiful — who doesn’t like an ivy-draped railing? — it can damage trees and shrubs (which it can completely engulf, eventually killing them), increase erosion and degrade habitat. The one habitat they’re good for is rodents, which love to hide in the ivy. A good native alternative to ivy is oxalis (a.k.a. redwood sorrel), an edible perennial that flowers, or wild strawberry (though it requires full sun to fruit).
All these changes and additions can be intimidating at first. Patrice Ball first applied for certification in 2015. She had just been widowed and she wanted to honor her late husband, who had been a gardener. But after the site visit she felt overwhelmed by all the requirements. She didn’t tackle the invasive plants and eventually sold that house and moved to a smaller one that fit her needs better.
Patrice Ball was pleasantly surprised to learn that her non-native hibiscus tree was not a deal-breaker for certification. Courtesy of Patrice Ball
At the new property, she began gardening in earnest, with more attention to natives. “I thought, ‘Maybe someday I’ll apply for that,’” she says. One day, she was visiting a friend who had Backyard Habitat Certification and saw a banana tree in her yard. “I said, ‘Now wait a minute. That’s not native,’” she recalls. The friend informed her that certification doesn’t require you to have all native plants, just a certain percentage of your plantable yard. For Silver, that’s just five percent. (Gold is 15 percent and Platinum — much harder to reach — is 50 percent.) In 2022, when a technician came to do a site visit, Ball was pleasantly surprised to hear that she only had to do a few more things.
“When she left, I thought, OK, I have a shot at this!” That fall and the spring of 2023, Ball added the things the technician suggested. In the summer another technician came out to do the second inspection. “I was a little nervous,” Ball recalls. “I thought I’d get the lowest of the three rankings. At the end of the visit, he was like, ‘Congratulations: you got the Gold certification!’”
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Ball had lived in Belize and for nostalgia’s sake she had also planted a hibiscus tree (not native to the Pacific Northwest). Hers was in full bloom at the time of the second site visit, and the technician asked if she could pose in front of it for the official photo, which he’d then put up on the Backyard Habitat social media. “I said, ‘But it’s not native!’ And he said, ‘That’s OK!’” recalls Ball. “Mainly he was like, ‘You’ve done a really good job, you have a water feature, there’s no lights to confuse the birds at night, you have really happy birds.’”
A flicker nesting in Melody’s yard. Courtesy of Melody Murray
At the initial assessment, the technician provides a folder full of materials including a native plants brochure, a native plant tracking sheet and coupons for discounts at local nurseries. When they send their site report, the technician also includes a bunch of resources including a link to the Portland Plant List, which is a great way to find native plants and identify nuisance plants, and a link to the Friends of Backyard Habitats Facebook group.
It was a fun project for Murray, who may sign up for Backyard Habitat’s Open Garden tour (where others can tour your garden). “I have a ton of vine maple. I’ve got a couple if native roses. Every variety of Oregon grape you can imagine, Kinnikinnick, a lot of manzanita,” she says. “I’ve also got camas, penstemon, and Oregon white oak.” As if she couldn’t contain her excitement, Murray went on: “I’ve got huckleberry, native blueberries, native blackberries — not the Himalayan ones. Native rhododendrons, serviceberry. Cascara. A whole bunch of different kinds of ferns — every kind of fern you could imagine.”
Having a flourishing yard is just one reward. The other? “My birds and insects have really ticked upwards in a big way!”
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A Healthy Coral Reef Is a Symphony
This story is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
You might have heard that the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest collection of coral reefs, a natural wonder stretching over 1,400 miles off Australia’s Queensland coast, hosting 400 types of coral and thousands of fish species. Since 1981, it has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and most of its ecosystem is protected.
But you might not know that it is also the stage for daily underwater concerts. Take a dive or listen to marine biologist Steven Simpson’s recordings and you hear grunt fish grunt, shrimps snap, damselfish chirp, clownfish grumble, sperm whales click and humpback whales sing their soprano mating songs that are audible over tens of miles.
“When I tell them fish have ears, people look at me like I’m mad,” says University of Bristol professor Steve Simpson. He and his colleagues were initially ridiculed by their peers when they started eavesdropping on fish communication nearly 20 years ago, but their sound experiments have been recreated successfully so many times that they are established science now. Recent research has revealed that dolphins call each other by name, turtle embryos coordinate their birth with one another from inside their eggs, and a coral reef is also a symphony that attracts coral larvae. Much like doctors use stethoscopes to assess the healthy heartbeat of a patient, the interdisciplinary science of ecoacoustics, which investigates natural sounds and their relationship with the environment, has emerged as an effective solution not only for monitoring the health of marine ecosystems, but also for restoring them.
Fish and crustaceans use all their senses to find suitable habitat. Credit: Ryan McMinds Flickr
The world has lost half its coral reefs in the last 30 years, and researchers are racing against the clock to support these invaluable habitats in their battle against warming waters, pollution, overfishing and acidity. “Scientists predict that, if we continue along the current global warming trajectory, coral reefs will entirely disappear from the oceans within 30 years, threatening the livelihoods of the more than one billion people who depend on them for food, medicine, and coastal protection,“ the late University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker writes in her fascinating book The Sounds of Life. “The disappearance of corals is a death knell for many other species.”
As the coral reefs disappear, so too does their chorus. “When a reef diminishes, the diversity and complexity of the sound goes missing, too,” Simpson says. “It becomes an acoustic desert. You can really hear the difference between an overfished reef and a marine protected area. You can hear the biodiversity.”
Reasons to Be Cheerful · Coral Reefs
When Steven Simpson attended the UN climate conference COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, he and his team wanted to demonstrate to the attendees the difference in biodiversity between protected and unprotected marine areas. By coincidence, they happened upon a sound technician who had all the necessary gear because he had just live-streamed a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert from the Egyptian pyramids. “We dropped a hydrophone out on a buoy and beamed the sound back to the conference, where the director general of the United Nations and all the politicians and experts were able to listen to the life-streaming of coral reef sounds,” Simpson says. “It was an immersive, emotional experience. Sound moves us on a dance floor, in a movie, and to be listening to a live coral reef is something very powerful.”
It moves fish, too. Fish and crustaceans use all their senses to find suitable habitat, including audio. And just like a good soundtrack might attract humans to a movie or concert, the sounds of a vibrant reef attract fish and coral. When Simpson played the recording of healthy reef sounds over compromised reefs in Australia, he found that double as many fish settled into these reefs. Simpson compares his underwater DJ job “to a real estate agent who sings the praises of a new housing development long before it’s an exciting place to live.”
Credit: Steve Simpson
When a reef diminishes, Steve Simpson explains, it “becomes an acoustic desert,” as the reef pictured here did after bleaching.
For a study recently published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, researchers set up an underwater speaker broadcasting the bustling sounds of a thriving reef on a degraded reef off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. The experiment confirmed that the underwater concert attracts up to seven times more coral larvae and fish than a decimated reef without acoustic enrichment.
Coral larvae are often microscopically small and float in the ocean before they settle permanently on a reef. They don’t have brains or ears, but studies have discovered they are sound-sensitive, probably through their tiny hairs (epidermal cilia) that detect vibrations.
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Seventy years ago, legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau described the underwater world as “the silent world,” but we now know that is far from the truth. Not only is there sound down there, but that sound is complex, rich and varied over time. Simpson distinguishes between “the morning chorus when the daytime fish emerge and the dusk chorus when the nocturnal fish come out; you hear an increase in the breeding season and during the new moon when it’s darker. There is a temporal structure to the soundscape.”
Technology has accelerated both the number of recordings and the speed of their evaluation. Steve Simpson remembers “building a Walkman in a barrel with a synchronized swimming pool speaker that we hung over the reef with the car battery in the 1990s. We pretty much managed to miss all the output of the fish that year.” But technology improved after 2000. That’s when Simpson, his graduate student Tim Gordon and other pioneering marine biologists like Robert McCauley, a professor at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, found that fish, clams, lobsters, even corals and their microscopically small larvae all use sound to find their way to healthy habitat.
A pink anemonefish swimming in the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Donald Davesne / Flickr
“Animals are using a hierarchy of senses as they try to resolve complex challenges in their environment,” Simpson explains. “We realize that the fish at sea are doing much what we would do if we were moving to a new city: we’d perhaps get on the internet and do some research into different suburbs that we might want to live in. Fish might use sounds to find the coast or a healthy reef, then the smell of mangroves or seagrasses, and then once they get close, they use vision.”
Simpson compares it to trying to find a friend that you lost in a crowded music festival. “You might wander around the crowd for hours. But if you know they wear a yellow t-shirt and you lost them at the hot dog stand next to the jazz stage, you can listen for the jazz, then smell the hot dogs and then look for the yellow t-shirt. Except for fish, it’s life or death whether they make the right decision where to settle.” Fish, Simpson quips, are “much smarter than people at festivals.”
In the years 2015 and 2016, Simpson’s team was working in the pristine marine protected areas of the Northern Great Barrier Reef when a catastrophe hit. A heat wave bleached out the reefs so fast Netflix made a blockbuster documentary film about it, Chasing Coral.
“We watched the reef die in front of us,” Simpson remembers. “That was a real wake-up call that no matter how much effort we are putting into local marine protected areas, we have to also protect them against global impacts. We started using what we had learned to see if any of this could serve as tools to help reefs recover.”
Credit: SHEBA
Though coral larvae don’t have brains or ears, studies have shown that they are sound-sensitive, probably through tiny hairs that detect vibrations.
The Great Barrier Reef is a prominent example where scientists are able to monitor biodiversity through sound. “We are able to identify individual species that make sounds,” Simpson says. “We can hear who’s living on a reef and who is active.”
Playing healthy reef sounds helped attract fish and coral to repopulate the reefs. “We’re almost back singing at full volume with all the right characters in the orchestra,” Simpson says. “That then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of that restoration because that reef is calling out literally to the next generation of fish, crabs, corals, and larvae that are able to find their way onto that reef and replenish it.” Simpson adds that even in the bleached parts of the reef, some corals grew back.
Simpson has worked all over the planet, not only in Australia but also in the Caribbean, the Red Sea and Asia, including on the SHEBA Hope Reef in Indonesia, the largest coral reef restoration project in the world, which attempts to restore more than 185,000 square meters of reef by 2029. The scientists planted corals to spell their message, HOPE, in giant letters across the once-degraded habitat.
Despite the rapid reef loss around the world, Simpson calls himself “an ocean optimist.” “It’s the resilience of nature that gives me hope,” he says. He views the emerging science of ecoacoustics as a pathway to innovative solutions. To him, this is less a story about the loss of habitat than about “the value of acoustic enrichment.”
The SHEBA Hope Reef has been regrown to spell the word ‘HOPE’ to drive awareness. Credit: SHEBA
Working in tandem with other marine biologists who replenish coral through breeding and replanting them, scientists are attempting to determine which methods of conservation and restoration are the most effective. “We have the opportunity to quite rapidly rebuild small areas of reef,” Simpson says, “and offer acoustic enrichment to the areas that have been hit the worst.”
Wherever he dives, he realizes, “We are changing the soundtrack of the ocean through overfishing, climate change and poor environmental protection.” He has his work cut out for him: “It’s our gift to change the soundtrack of the ocean in this generation, but to change it for the better, not the worse.”
The new insights call for noise protection. “Noise pollution is also a problem when we run the experiments,” Simpson realized. “Which made us investigate, what’s the noise doing to the fish down there?”
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He found that motorboat noise causes certain fish not to feed their young as well and prevents larvae from developing, which has an obvious solution: “We can keep boats away from breeding grounds and nurseries. And new technology improves the sound outputs of boat engines — modern engines are far quieter.”
Simpson does not gloss over the fact that we’re facing a “bumpy” next few decades. “But the future is still totally in our hands,” he says, “and the direction of travel looks promising.”
At COP27 he was asked “whether this was all actually just a waste of time in the long term, delaying the inevitable.” He responded that five years ago, he might have feared that he and his colleagues were just prolonging the death of coral reefs. “But the global data indicates there is a better future ahead. You might say that coral reefs are the first ecosystems we could lose,” he admits. “But that then makes them the first ecosystems we could save, and if we can save coral reefs, we can save anything.”
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How Do You Say ‘Danger’ in Sperm Whale Clicks?
This is part one of a two-part series. Read part two here.
Sperm whales don’t sing melodious, moaning whale songs like their humpback cousins. The biggest predator on the planet communicates in clicks, called codas. Some compare the sounds to popping popcorn or frying bacon in a pan. For CUNY biologist David Gruber, it resembles “morse code or techno music.”
Gruber, the founding president of Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, often listens for hours in his New York office to the sperm whale chats his team has recorded in the Eastern Caribbean.
Project CETI records sperm whale codas around the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. Courtesy of Project CETI
CETI focuses on sperm whales for several reasons. One reason is that it can build on the audio recordings that whale biologist Shane Gero has already been collecting for 15 years with the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Gero was able to show that sperm whale families have different dialects, much like British and American English. “Another reason is that the sperm whale has been vilified as a killer, Moby Dick as a leviathan,” Gruber says. “Meanwhile it could be one of the most intelligent, sophisticated communicators on the planet.”
While the humpback whales sing their soprano songs primarily for mating, sperm whales are communicating to socialize and exchange information. CETI has already discovered that the communication patterns are complex. “Their codas are clicks, they are like ones and zeros, which is very good for cryptographers,” Gruber explains. “The combination of advanced machine learning and bioacoustics is slated to be the next microscope or telescope in terms of our ability to really listen more deeply and understand life at a new level.”
Reasons to Be Cheerful · Sperm Whales
CETI’s team operates a giant whale-recording platform from a 40-foot sailboat off the coast of Dominica, a volcanic island in the Caribbean with a stable sperm whale population. Both by tagging the whales and installing whale listening stations with microphones dangling deep down into the ocean on floating buoys, CETI is recording several terabytes of data every month. The scientists are creating a three-dimensional interactive map of the whales within a 20-kilometer radius, combining sounds with data such as the whales’ heart rates.
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A Tidal Wetland Restoration of Epic Proportions
Water may be life, but without salt, the human body cannot retain its benefits. And for thousands of years, a stretch of coastline south of San Francisco has been a vital source of salt.
The South Bay Salt Ponds, as they’re now known, were once thousands of acres of thriving tidal marsh, which formed a natural barrier against regional flooding and provided an important stopover site for migratory birds and habitat for estuary-dwelling flora and fauna. The Ohlone peoples historically harvested salt from the area’s natural deposits, a resource later exploited first by German immigrant John Johnson in the mid-1800s and then by salt-harvesting companies including Cargill, which still operates in the area.
Today, saltwater evaporation ponds sprawl across the area, forming a man-made waterscape that resembles an artist’s palette — courtesy of saline-loving microorganisms that give each pond its richly saturated hue.
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How Southern Africa’s Elephants Bounced Back
The sun is setting above the horizon in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, but it’s still 40°C (104°F). A large group of elephants has just arrived at a lagoon to refresh themselves and get their daily dose of water: Drink up 200 liters each, and they are good to go. They frolic a little in the water and then set off to search for leaves and grass in the parched savannah, only to be replaced by another herd with many young calves.
While most species’ populations are decreasing, elephants in southern Africa are doing well. A newly released study of 103 elephant populations from Tanzania southwards — the most comprehensive ever — finds that conservation has halted the decline of savannah elephants in southern Africa over the last 25 years. To be more precise, as of 2020, the elephant population had rebounded to the same number as in 1995: 290,000. The scientists found that large, well-protected areas connected to other protected areas are far better than isolated “fortress” parks at maintaining stable populations.
Even though these outer areas don’t have the same level of protection so animals face a higher risk of dying, they are vital corridors that allow the elephants to migrate back and forth when core areas are too crowded or when facing threats such as poaching or unsuitable environmental conditions.
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Could Wild Horses Help Fight Wildfires?
In 2014, William E. Simpson moved to a remote hillside near Yreka, California, close to the California-Oregon border. He was trying to get away from his previous buzzing internet business, seeking isolation in nature. It didn’t take him long to notice that he wasn’t alone: He was sharing the hills surrounding his humble cabin at the edge of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument with bobcats, coyotes, elk, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more than 120 wild horses. At first, the horses kept their distance, just like all the other wild animals.
But eventually, a skinny, pregnant white mare with a foal in tow approached him. Simpson had once studied veterinary medicine, and his training kicked in. “I thought she was probably suffering from parasite overload and fed her some oats with an anti-parasite I had on hand,” he recalls. A few days later, the mare brought her entire family. Over the years, the horses have come to him with injuries, such as cuts from the barbed wire abandoned farms had left behind or gashes from mountain lion attacks.
William E. Simpson has become closely acquainted with the horses that roam the land surrounding his cabin. Credit: Michelle Gough
“It’s all voluntary,” Simpson says. “They are wild. You can’t put a halter or anything over their head. They just come and present their injuries. Some let you do more than others.”
When the 38,000-acre Klamathon fire tore through the hillsides in 2018, he had an “aha” moment. He and his wife Laura defied evacuation orders and helped the firefighters navigate the remote dirt roads. They stayed to defend their small ranch, but also to watch the horses. “I wanted to see how the horses reacted to the fire,” Simpson says. “Would they panic? Run the opposite direction and get entangled? Nobody had ever really done a study about that.”
The horses remained calm and kept grazing. “They are used to fires,” Simpson realized. “They have been here for two million years.” He now attributes the fact that his cabin and the surrounding hills were largely spared by the fire to the horses. “Each wild horse consumes about 30 pounds of grass and brush a day,” Simpson has observed. “They reduce the wildfire fuel, keeping the wildfire risks at bay.”
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Counting Bugs to Save Birds
Wyoming’s professional pollinator whisperer didn’t always like bugs very much.
He’s a common sight these days among the scrubby plants retaking former oil and gas well pads. But until he was about 20 years old, Michael Curran figured — as most people did — that insects were pests. “You’d think of termites and bees,” he says. “A bee was something that stung you.”
Then, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Delaware, Curran took a class taught by a now-famous entomologist that would change the course of his life. He hadn’t intended to enroll. Everything else was full, and Behavioral Ecology of Insects ended up being the only option left that would fulfill a requirement for his biology degree.
Large sagebrush plants support diverse plant communities. Credit: Jennifer Strickland / US Fish and Wildlife Service
“I wasn’t happy about being in an insect class,” he says. “And then it turned out that it was one of the most interesting classes I ever took.” Thanks to that class, and to the years he then spent working with that professor, Curran came to see insects as the overlooked linchpin of the ecosystems he studied.
Even then, he didn’t plan on devoting much of his life to insects. His love of native plants was what led him to enroll in an ecological restoration program at the University of Wyoming in 2010. It was his knowledge of insects, however, that helped keep him there for a decade as he worked toward his PhD.
Soon after he began his graduate program, Curran found himself in the middle of an unfolding crisis. The sagebrush sea, a fragile ecosystem stretching from Arizona to Montana and from California to Colorado, was disappearing. And the greater sage grouse, a chicken-sized bird loosely resembling the turkey collages that young children make around Thanksgiving, was on the brink of being added to the endangered species list.
Greater sage grouse at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: Tom Koerner / USFWS
State officials and private energy companies were scrambling to find a way to reverse the species’ decline without the federal government having to intervene. Aided by researchers, they came up with a conservation strategy that hinged on designating core sage grouse habitat and limiting human activity there.
Curran was the one who realized how crucial insects would be in achieving it. A decade later, he’s still adding new pieces to the puzzle.
Wyoming is home to more than a third of the world’s surviving greater sage grouse. The imperiled sagebrush ecosystem — the only place where the species is found — stretches across most of the state. It has fared better in Wyoming than in most other places: Nationally, an estimated 2,000 square miles of the iconic landscape have succumbed each year of the past two decades to human incursions, invasive species and the ever-intensifying droughts and wildfires brought on by climate change.
But sage grouse populations tend to fluctuate with the health of the ecosystem as a whole, and even Wyoming has struggled to improve its sage grouse numbers.
Credit: Theo Stein / USFWS
Protecting healthy sagebrush benefits the greater sage grouse and hundreds of other species of wildlife.
Though the parched, windswept landscape is inhospitable to humans and most other species, it is rich in hydrocarbons and renewable resources, making it attractive to all kinds of energy development. Wyoming’s oil and gas companies are not only active there but also highly transient, continually drilling new wells and closing off old ones. As a result, for as long as they’re operating in areas inhabited by sage grouse, oil and gas companies’ decisions about land restoration will have a significant impact on the species.
Curran began his research in Wyoming in the early 2010s by creating a database of what, exactly, oil and gas companies were doing when it came time to reclaim their well pads. Though the industry was required to reseed disturbed areas using native plants, companies employed a patchwork of methods with wide-ranging outcomes.
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“I was tracking all the seed mixes and soil amendments, any sort of herbicide applications or fertilizers, or any sort of soil handling,” Curran says. “Anything that would be considered a reclamation practice.”
His goal, he says, was to gather enough data to “have the magic button to say, ‘This is how we do good reclamation in Wyoming.’” But the reality wasn’t that simple. Companies differed not only in the techniques they used, but in how they documented them, and the results were all over the map. Which meant a database alone wasn’t going to cut it.
Native sagebrush grows back over a Wyoming oil and gas site. Credit: Michael Curran
So Curran started trying to standardize the way companies collected and reported their data. “A couple of companies started adopting that methodology,” he says. “That became the first chapter of my dissertation.”
He soon learned, too, that there were people already having a lot of success reclaiming well pads in Wyoming. Their methods worked. But even though all of the state’s oil and gas companies were required to reclaim their wells when production ceased, few knew how to get it right.
When Curran — by this point nearing the end of his PhD — showed up to a western Wyoming gas field armed with two coolers, a sweep net and hundreds of Ziploc bags, the site’s operators didn’t know what to think. The company had given money to the university to support Curran’s research. It had expected something more sophisticated than plucking insects off plants and stuffing them into bags.
But Curran was onto something. The companies that achieved the most successful regrowth often planted native annual species instead of trying to immediately reestablish the sagebrush. That “assisted succession,” he says, helps to trap moisture and stabilize the soil, creating more favorable growing conditions for sagebrush.
By the end of his first day in the field, Curran had proved his hunch. Because of the time he’d spent studying insects as an undergraduate, Curran understood just how crucial insects were in terrestrial ecosystems — and he knew that insect abundance could serve as an indicator for how well those ecosystems were functioning.
The Rocky Mountain bee plant, a native annual flower, flourishes on a former oil and gas well pad in Wyoming. Credit: Michael Curran
“If we took humans off the Earth,” he says, “the Earth would go on and probably not really miss us. Where if you took all the insects away … the whole food web would collapse.”
Sure enough, the sites that had been restored effectively were able to support way larger insect populations than the undisturbed sagebrush nearby.
Curran published a pair of peer-reviewed studies in 2022 detailing some of his results. He’d found up to a dozen times more insects on well pads reclaimed with a native annual flower, the Rocky Mountain bee plant, and up to four times more insects on well pads reclaimed with native grasses compared with reference areas. He’d identified a wider variety of insects on reclaimed well pads than reference areas. And he’d observed that all of these trends persisted across the entire growing season.
It took Curran a while to convince companies of the value of his work. Eventually, though, they started to listen. Over the past couple of years, some have begun to approach him. One conversation at a conference in 2022 turned into a project funded jointly by a Wyoming oil and gas producer and a major pipeline company.
The companies asked him to identify the things that were working and troubleshoot what wasn’t. He measured insect abundance, evaluated how the companies handled their soil and created a data system where they could log everything in the future. The goal, Curran said, was to do “a holistic dive into their reclamation practices.” Based on the numbers he crunched this fall, they’re already getting a lot right.
Credit: Michael Curran
In his research, Curran has found up to a dozen times more insects on well pads reclaimed with the Rocky Mountain bee plant, a native annual plant.
So far, Curran has partnered mostly with oil and gas companies. But he hopes that his work will ultimately give rise to restoration practices that are more consistent — and more effective — at other types of industrial sites, in the aftermath of natural disasters and even in places where existing habitat is being improved.
Curran arrived in Wyoming at precisely the right moment, when the state had the desire to deepen its knowledge of sage grouse and the funds to make it happen, says Nyssa Whitford, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s sage grouse biologist.
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His work “is going to make sure that we’re not relearning reclamation every time we do it,” Whitford says. “We can … learn from what is working, and then keep replicating that, so we’re not reinventing the wheel each time we go out.”
Earlier this year, the Game and Fish Department gave Curran $20,000 to sift — with the help of an intern — through all the research done since 1930 on what sage grouse eat. (In the 20th century, unlike today, it was still legal to dissect the birds to study them.) Much of that work was never published, making it difficult for wildlife managers to reference.
Curran plans to use the grant to create a centralized source of information about the species’ diet. His hope is that it will enable restoration projects to incorporate plants that will attract the right insects, which will then attract sage grouse. If that happens, he says, it “will be a big leap in reclamation and habitat restoration efforts out in the Western states.” Because anywhere the conditions are right for sage grouse to thrive, there’s a good chance the rest of the ecosystem will be prospering, too.
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