Cuba to Yellowstone

by Bob Unnasch director of science

During the past several weeks I had the opportunity to take a break and travel some. At the end of May I traveled to the Archipiélago de los Jardines de la Reina, a cluster of islands off the southern coast of Cuba. Two weeks later I spent a few days in Yellowstone. 

While honestly, the main reason for my visit to the Caribbean was to catch large fish on flies, I was also excited to see the island’s biodiversity. Cuba is only 90 miles south of Florida and 140 miles east of the Yucatán. At times the Gulf of Mexico Loop Current sweeps past the Yucatán peninsula and turns due east brushing the northern coast of Cuba. Other times the current flows north through the Gulf of Mexico then south along the western coast of Florida before flowing east through the Straits of Florida. It seems like the ideal conveyor to carry critters to the island. I anticipated the fauna of Cuba to be an amazing collection of North and Central American critters. 

 

Going Fishing © Bob Unnasch

My trip to the Jardines involved flying into Havana and then driving ~300 miles to the small town of Júcaro. We then boarded a boat for a 60 mile trip to the islands. To my great disappointment I saw no mammals, nor any evidence of mammals. Similarly, I saw few bird species — even remarkably few individual birds. I was dumbfounded; my daydreams of a biologically diverse paradise, shattered. Maybe it was time to get my eyes checked.

Upon my return, I did a bit of research and discovered that it wasn’t my eyes. Cuba's native land mammals include two insectivores, one coney, and twelve rodents. Of these, five are extinct, including the coney, and five are critically endangered. By comparison, Yellowstone has 67 native mammals in the park, (Idaho has 107).

 

Cuban hutia © Bob Unnasch

Our visit to Yellowstone National Park was a typical driving tour over a few days with a couple of stops at the Conservancy’s Flat Ranch. We saw all the charismatic mega-fauna that make Yellowstone famous and lots of small and medium mammals. It was fun, as always, to see the abundance and diversity of the park, and to imagine what the Rocky Mountains were like a millennium ago.

During my drive home, I started to think about the contrast between Yellowstone and Cuba. What would Yellowstone, or Idaho, be like if we only had a handful of native mammals? It would certainly feel different... and empty. Conservation biologists have described many tropical forest parks as suffering from an “empty forest syndrome”. The forests still have their trees, but all the large mammals are gone; typically the result of market hunting.

 

Yellowstone bison © Alan W. Eckert

We are seeing dramatic changes in the Rocky Mountains. Warmer winters have released mountain pine beetles which are now decimating our forests. Our whitebark pines, which play a keystone role in these ecosystems is disappearing. Whitebark pine nuts are a crucial food resource for a diversity of animals, including the Clark’s nutcracker and grizzly bears. We don’t know what will happen when those pine nuts are no longer available. Climate change rather than market hunting may well be emptying our forests. While we cannot predict how the future will unfold, we can build on what we do know to hopefully minimize the impact of the changes we see coming.

Ecologists use the word niche as a catch-all term that means “all the biological, ecological, and physical constraints on a species’ range”. Physical constraints include climate, geology, soils, hydrology, etc.  In 2010, two TNC scientists, Mark Anderson and Charles Ferree proposed a unique strategy for biodiversity conservation in light of climate change. Rather than focus on the species, we should focus on maintaining those geophysical features that ultimately control species distributions. This idea has taken hold and the strategy is now called “Conserving Nature’s Stage”. Click here for more information.

 

Flat Ranch bluebird © Marilynne Manguba

TNC has embraced this idea and is now mapping the geophysical diversity (Nature’s Stage) across North America. We completed this assessment for the Pacific Northwest late last year, and are now identifying key areas for conservation. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation recently granted The Nature Conservancy $6,000,000 for land conservation work within these areas.  I’m hopeful that by conserving the diverse ecological stage we’ll be able to ensure that the actors will always find a home.

In Search of Marshmallows

By Susanna Danner, Director of Protection

When I went home to Massachusetts to visit my family this Christmas, I had an agenda besides my typical holiday pursuits of assembling jigsaw puzzles, eating ham, and wrapping presents. I wanted to see my very first snowy owl.

Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus). Photo ©Janet Haas

You may have heard about the snowy owl irruption of 2013. The word “irruption” shares the same Latin root as the word “eruption,” but it means to burst in, rather than to burst out (like lava.) These enormous arctic birds have been bursting into the northern United States this winter, including in our neighbor states of Montana and Washington. The “polar vortex” that froze the central and eastern U.S. in early January probably felt like old home week to the snowies visiting the States.  These birds have feathered feet and legs to protect them from the cold, and one thing that makes them easier to find than other owls is that they perch on low posts, fences or the ground. Where they come from, tall trees are less common, so these birds are comfortable perching low.

The reasons for this irruption, which is one of the largest on record, may have to do with climate change. Conditions in the Arctic are changing dramatically, and scientists speculate that changes in sea ice, small mammal population dynamics, or seasonal temperatures may be factors in this owl incursion.

Several snowy owls (Bubo scandiacus) had been observed at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge near my hometown, so my mom, my sister-in-law and I decided to put on our parkas and go birding. At the refuge entrance, we asked the ranger where we might have luck finding snowy owls. “Look for the cars,” he said. Apparently we weren’t the first bird tourists of the day.

We drove to the end of the refuge, past a few clutches of idling cars. All we could discern through our pocket binoculars were white refuge signs masquerading as white owls, and the previous evening’s snowfall made picking out white shapes on the icy salt marsh a challenge.

Sus and her mother owling. Photo courtesy Sus Danner.

We climbed an observation tower and saw a pair of mute swans winging their way just above the low tide, but no owls. Just when we were losing hope, a couple of local birders climbed up the tower stairs and renewed our resolve.

If you’ve ever birdwatched in winter, you know that while the weather conditions can be tough, the people are often a joy. There is a siege mentality to winter birders. The sentiment seems to be, “if you’re out here braving frostbite and hypothermia, you’re my friend.” The local birders seemed thrilled that we were out on the refuge, and gave us unexpected advice on how to find a snowy. “Look for a marshmallow,” they said.

I had read how large snowy owls are (two feet tall!) and so I had been looking for a big white Doric column among the salt marsh grasses. But the owls hunch up to conserve heat, and their proportions are marshmallow-like. Now that we knew what to look for, we found one right away. Sitting on a sand dune, just above the slate-colored Atlantic Ocean, we found a preening adult snowy owl. A giddy group of us formed, helping each other pick out the bird amongst the pale dunes.  Another benevolent local birder saw us peering through our binoculars and stopped to offer us a look through his spotting scope. In the scope, I could see the speckled black on the owl’s shoulders, and its blazing yellow eyes.

Huddled around the scope with a group of birders from all over the world, with a biting wind coming in off of the sea, my feet numb with cold, I couldn’t have been happier.