University Place

My name is Reesa Evans. I'll be moderating most of the ecology stream. So I wanna present John Olson, who's the furbearer specialist with the Wisconsin DNR. He's been involved in wildlife management for more than 43 years. Starting in '85, he was part of the wolf recovery team, which was successful, as many of you probably know. And then he was involved in the wolf science team until recently. And so he's also been involved in trapper education, humane trap research, not just in Wisconsin, but in other parts of the US and in other countries. And, if you don't know, the Wisconsin DNR does run a citizen science wolf tracking program and some other carnivores. So if you're interested in participating in something like that, you can go to the Wisconsin website and look, and there is training and so on for people who want to participate as citizen scientists. John. Thank you Reesa, good morning. As she mentioned, my name is John Olson, and I've been around since just about Biblical times, so I've got lots of stories. I'm kinda like a bad penny. I've worked in several different DNR offices and regions, but, in the last 23 years, I came home to where I really thought this is where I need to be and what I should do, which has been with furbearers for last over two decades. And tomorrow's April Fools' Day, and tomorrow's my last day of employment. So, thank you. (audience applauds) Okay, but this is a lakes conference. So we're gonna talk about furbearers. I'm going to intrigue you into thinking about all furbearers by starting with wetland furbearers. And we're gonna start in the water, and then we're you're gonna be so excited about these furbearers that you won't even know you've hit dry land until we're done. And I make this up as I go. But what is a furbearer? A furbearer is an animal that we basically have had some use over time. Utilitarian use. It also has hair a little bit different than us, and it's across its entire body. It has two types of hair. It has these really glossy, long guard hairs, and then, for any other descriptive term, we couldn't come up with something that's really creative, the fur underneath there is called underfur. It's under the guard hairs. And the underfur is extremely dense. And that dense fur helps these animals in thermoregulation, especially wetland animals. The wetland furbearers that are semiaquatics, they have much shorter hair. And that's because they're in and outta water all the time. They need to be able to keep that skin dry. And that thick underfur, if you were to blow on this, it would look like you took a curling iron to the underfur. It's a little wavy, and there's thousands of hairs per square inch. What this allows the animal to do then is keep their skin dry. Like if you or I were at a Christmas party, jump into a mud puddle with just our shorts on, we would freeze pretty quickly. Same would happen to a beaver in the wintertime. They have to keep their skin dry, so that underfur is very important, along with other adaptations they have with different glands and grooming techniques. We all know this animal, don't we? This is the animal that brought a lot of Europeans to this part of the world. It's the beaver. It's the only animal that we have that we call case opened, where people will process the skin as an open fur. And there's all kinds of historic reasons why and logic and common sense why they did that, but at any rate, this animal was present throughout all the Midwest and in the mountainous regions, in the South, It was a very cosmopolitan type of animal. But because of the tremendous demand for the fur, we basically extirpated beavers across most of its range. At one time, the late George Knutson, our very first naturalist in Wisconsin, he pulled out records that he found that W. E. Scott had mentioned that they could only ascertain there's about 50 beavers left in the entire state of Wisconsin. Things changed. We ended up with almost 250,000 by the early '80s and mid '80s, had a lot of problems with beavers. And we've developed all kinds of different strategies to manage them. We have been too successful. Beaver numbers have really come down now, and as a result of that, we've actually gone back to the drawing board, and we've rewritten a beaver management plan. And that beaver management plan took us four years to develop. It's on our website right now, and it was really quite a collaborative effort by lots and lots of folks called the Beaver Task Force. This was just by approved by the DNR board last October. But anyway, beavers are the only animal other than humans that will actually purposely alter their habitat to suit their needs. They'll go out there and impound water, backup water, raise water levels. It's both for protection and their lodges in the wintertime. And it's also for access to food. They create tremendous habitat for lots of other critters. Lots of even other furbearers, other amphibians, reptiles, raptors, a lot of animals. But they can also cause damage. And so managing beaver is kind of a balancing act of trying to come up with a reasonable level of beaver on their landscape. One of the animals that really enjoys and lives in beaver ponds a lot, kinda about the size of a rat, kinda smells a little bit musky, muskrat. Muskrats are very prolific in Wisconsin. We'll have at least two litters in the north. Sometimes, we've even recorded up to four litters of muskrats in the south. And their whole philosophy on life is put out lotsa young. And they're basically on their own in just a few days. And by putting out lots, a few will survive. They're present in all of our shallow wetlands, and they are kinda like the hot lunch program for lots of animals. They're really edible. Matter of fact, I just fed muskrat soup to wildlife biologists last week, at a fur school. It's really good, but a lot of predators use these animals. A lotta animals on this table will use muskrats. They're not the sharpest crayon in the box. So they are relatively easy to harvest if you're a human or to predate on if you're a predator. Very durable fur. Again, they have those longer guard hairs, and then, underneath, they have that really thick, dense underfur. And, when the fur market goes up and down, when mink prices go really high, people have a real interest in muskrat because they can shear these guard hairs off, and the underfur has this kind of bluish tint to it, it's called blue azure, and it's kinda like a, you hear of a poor man's lobster? It's a poor man's mink. It'll look like a mink fur when they take those off in the fur business. But, at any rate, it's a really important animal. It's a herbivore, as are beavers. They provide a lot of habitat for nesting birds as well. Where I actually harvest, my daughter and I trap the same marsh for thirty-some years now. We have trumpeter swans out there, we have water fowl, we have painted turtles that will use their huts in the spring and summer as well. Now this little tubular mustelid, this really pretty weasel here, he eats this guy. This is a predator, and this is one of its primary foods. This happens to be our mink. Again, semiaquatic, short hair, you can see the really glossy guard hairs there and then the underfur. This animal became a real important item in the fur trade. And I remember, when I was kid, in church, aways lookin' at the lady in front of me, who always had these mink shoals on, and the little black, beady eyes lookin' atcha. (audience laughs) Always made me a little nervous, but mink was quite popular and was used quite a bit by a lot of folks. As a result, the demand for these created more of an agricultural entity, where we actually allow, through permitting, ranching of mink. And, through genetics, they have changed the size and the color of mink tremendously. Wisconsin is one of the leading mink ranching states in the nation, yet it doesn't-- Norway, Finland, the Scandinavian countries are huge in the ranch business. We have a lot of rules and regulations, but at the same time, they are animals that are kept in cages. And they are not wild animals that were put there. They're all domesticated, bred in captivity for generations and generations. Beautiful animal, really a great predator, and oftentimes, you'll see this small white marking on the chest. Remember that when we come to another mustelid that looks just like it but has something else on here. And, maybe I didn't mention earlier that many of these animals here are game animals. And what we mean by that is they're furbearers that we actually have a consumptive use of. We can harvest them for the food or for the fur or even control them too, through such things as hunting or trapping. We have at least one animal on the table here that is a nongame furbearer, and we have another animal on the table here that is a state endangered mammal. And we'll get to that. Okay, three semiaquatics so far. Here's the last semiaquatic, otterly ridiculous. Long, tubular animal, a mustelid again, really beautiful animal, can cause some problems, especially if you're a trout owner, hatchery owner. Otters, at one time, were extirpated across most of the United States. We never lost our otters in Wisconsin. They receded northward, but we still maintained a remnant population of otters. But, back in the late '70s, early '80s, a gentleman by the name of Dave Hamilton out of Missouri, a furbearers specialist down there, heard of some Cajun folks, some folks down in Louisiana that were successfully able to trap otters, keep them alive, and put them in cages. And Dave was able to contact them, ask them how they were doing that, and said, "Would you be willing to help us restore "otters across Missouri," is what he was interested in. And the Cajun brothers said, "Yeah, we can do that." They used a small number 11, which is a long spring trap. It's a restraint trap. All footholds are restraint traps. Cause no injury to the animal. They caught, over a period of 22 years, they caught almost 2,000 otters, which are used for otter reintroduction in 18 different states. Missouri started it, though. Dave was the first person to do this. And he went to the public and asked 'em, "Hey, whaddaya think about bringin' otters back?" They went to the TV, newspapers, everywhere. Everyone was excited about it. Everyone was behind it. They built t-shirts and when they went to release the first otters, they had all kinds of yellow school buses in the background. Everybody was there. The TV, everyone was happy about it, just excited. Well, one thing they had not anticipated was landscape had changed in Missouri since otters had been there. 'Cause we showed up. And there were now 500,000 farm ponds in Missouri. Otters love farm ponds because what's in there, white bass or whatever, they have no escape cover. They're right there. It's like, a duck in a pond. And so they caused a lot of problems in Missouri. But they have broken all the records when it comes to our science, litter size, reproductive rates. They've just exploded, and they've moved out from Missouri and into other States. Up here, in order to harvest an otter, you have to apply for a permit, you have to get a permit, which happens about every other year, and then you're restricted to a certain area and a certain season. In Missouri, quite a few of the areas, there's no bag limit, and other areas, the bag limit is like 25. They have a really huge otter population, and they've moved out, we've stocked, reintroduced otters as far north and west as southeastern Alaska and as far east as up into New York and Connecticut. But mainly the whole Midwest and even the Western states all had otter reintroductions. This animal has the most dense hair, actually, it's a sea otter, but it's a cousin of it, has the most dense hair of any animal in the world. Up to 10,000 hairs per square inch. And the river otter is right behind that. When I retire, I'll sit down with a square inch and count and let you know (audience laughs) if it's 9,950 or what's there. But if you were ever to take a look at this animal, it's really extremely dense. Beautiful animal. Okay. Those are our semiaquatics. Have I set the hook? Let's move to the shoreline now. Oh, no, let's go to South America first. Let's talk about a little bit of a problem we had before we go to the shoreline. This animal was brought up into the Gulf of Mexico area. It somehow found its way up into the Chesapeake Bay. It's over in Puget Sound. It is an animal that doesn't build dams. It's a nutria. But it's like an aquatic lawn mower. It eats all the vegetation. And if you're ever able to go down into the areas in the saltwater marshes down by Louisiana, they actually have exclosures, like we have for deer up here, they have exclosures for nutria, to show people the dramatic impacts they're havin' on our wetlands. And within those exclosures, the vegetation will be 6, 8, 9 feet tall. And outside of it, it's about that tall. There're tremendously damaging, and they're affecting a lot of our native wetland, wildlife there as well. Not only have they been a problem for us, someone with some other thoughts introduced beaver to very southern South America. Well, beaver impound water. And they're having a terrible time down there because a lot of their really rare, large, old growth bottomland hardwoods are now being destroyed. And they have been trying to eradicate this northern furbearer, which belongs up here, for the last two decades, and they're having a real tough time of it. Some friends of mine'll be going down this fall to assist and train them in how to actually harvest beavers and keep their nutria. Okay. We don't have 'em in Wisconsin. They've come up the Mississippi River as far as Arkansas? I think they're actually hittin' the very southeast corner of Missouri right now. But they're not here, and we hope never to have 'em up here. Okay, let's go to the wetlands. -

Voiceover

What's it called? Nutria, it's a nutria. Okay, this guy is along the shore, Sometimes he's out in the water. He's all over the place. Rocky Raccoon. He's in and out of the water, feeding a lot on crayfish, all kinds of small mammals. He'll chew on a muskrat if he has a chance of it. Raccoons have spread, and one thing is, you know this word climate change? I think here's an animal that really gives us that clue. Raccoons are in southern Canada now, where the word raccoon is not in the native language. And the native language has been there for over 10,000 years. They've been moving northward, as other animals have. Some, we don't wanna have move north, but that's happening. Raccoons are the, I call 'em the aquatic perch. Or the terrestrial perch. If you wanna find any type of parasites or anything in your water bodies, you go to a perch. A raccoon, if there's a disease out there, he's got it. And we did do some testing back in the '90s and discovered that raccoons have raccoon roundworm all over the state. And raccoon roundworm is zoonotic. It can infect us. It has killed children. It's rare. The only two fatalities that we're aware of were in Chicago, and it's been about almost 20 years now. But all the feces have these little tiny microscopic eggs in 'em. And if you touch one of them with your finger, you're gonna get hundreds, if not thousands, of eggs in your fingerprints. And then you happen to touch yourself, and you can easily ingest 'em. They'll hatch in your gut. They'll migrate through the back of the eyeball to the brain, and then they cyst in the brain. So it's not pleasant. Adults, like trappers, quite a few of 'em have this, and, for adults, it doesn't cause mortality, but it can cause some memory loss and or your eyes to water if you're trying to concentrate on something. So, I've got a lot of roundworms. I have to 'cause my memory is going. But, with children, if they get massive, and what happened is two small children, age one and two, happened to see, crawling around, picked up what they thought was a Baby Ruth candy bar on the back lawn, and they ingested tens of thousands of eggs, and their brain basically became Swiss cheese. They weren't brain dead but-- Sad thing. The other thing is that raccoons, the fur value on them is extremely low right now. Very, very low. It's an international thing, has a lot to do with political issues in Ukraine and Russia and Greece, the Greek economy. So we're probably gonna see larger populations of raccoon 'cause folks aren't out there really harvesting them, and they can be more of a problem. We hate to see that. They're a very valuable, good animal, but when populations of anything get out of hand, then we look at 'em as being a pest or vermin, and they lose their value in our mind. So I'm hoping that doesn't happen in the near future. Okay. This one's here because the French Canadians, when they first saw this when they came to Chequamegon Bay, they went "Fichet! "Fichet! "Fichet!" Fish, lakes, water, okay? That connection? Fichet in French means polecat. In Europe, they have a real black polecat with no stripes and saw this mustelid hopping through the forest along the edge of the streams. So they thought it was a polecat. Well, it's a fisher. The Ojibwe term for this is bonecrusher. They're a very adaptable predator. They'll take on anything, even twice their size. They're tough little guys. Adult females can be as small as five pounds. Adult males can be as much as 18 pounds, which is rather large. Real long tail. Now again, now we're gettin' into the upland animals. Their hair is startin' to get longer. They're not in that water all the time. So they've got much longer hair, the guard hairs are more developed. Fisher were extirpated from Wisconsin. We brought them back in the late '50s. '57, '58, '59, we restored them in and around Rhinelander, Nicolet, and then over in the Chequamegon around Clam Lake. Great big success story. The expanded out to a point now that we have fishers statewide. My new assistant got her first fisher tag ever, and she trapped a fisher in Pine Island down by Madison. We see them south of Madison, southwest. Only place we have not seen fishers yet is in extreme southeastern Wisconsin. We have a regulated harvest on them since 1985. But we're really concerned about 'em right now. They're doing tremendous in central Wisconsin. Again, I mentioned they're expanding southward, but in the far north, somethin's happened. Fisher numbers have declined not only across northern Wisconsin, but they've declined in the UP of Michigan, northeastern Minnesota, over in New York, Vermont, Maine, all across that latitudinal area, relatively the same. They've really declined quite a bit. We're not sure why. But they're really a neat animal. They're native to Wisconsin, and they're back now. And we're gonna continue doing some research and some studies on them. We have done, we being researchers, professors, have done some really exciting stuff I'll get to when we get to another animal here. In trying to learn more about their habits and their movements, telemetry is really important. And this is an example of a radio collar that was used for fisher in past years. Okay, we haven't gotten very far on this table, have we? Have time, we'll go back to the beaver skull. And again, somewhere, we had herbivores. Now we're gettin' more into the omnivores and the carnivores. And as you get into the carnivores, you start seein' these larger canines in here. Teeth that will grab and hold onto their food, long enough that they can then make a meal out of it. But we're gonna try and jump into the cats right away. This happens to be a bobcat skull. And our bobcat right here. It is very common in Wisconsin. It is expanding as well. It is statewide. Our populations in north are extremely high. In 2000, 2001, they slowly started to come down right now. Bobcats actually, the unique, distinguishing characteristics, lotta people say, well they got shorter ear tufts, and they got shorter legs, and all these shorter things. The one thing that really seems to be characteristic is the tail. A bobcat's tail can be as long as eight inches, but it's normally about four inches long. The top is black. The bottom's white. That'll be on the exam at the end of the talk. Bobcats, black on top, white on bottom. That's the one thing that's quite characteristic of them. Oftentimes, you can't see their feet 'cause it's in the snow or it's in grass, but they have very small feet. They're feet aren't very large at all. They're a very hearty animal. Their type of, technique of harvesting prey is to sit and wait. Just sit and wait. They're able to learn where animals move, snowshoe hares or other animals. And they'll just wait. Where a fichet, a fisher, if you were to look at his bone marrow, it's red. It's gelatinous, it looks like he's starving to death all the time. He's constantly on the move, looking, looking, looking everywhere. "Can I find a porcupine? Can I get at that porcupine? "Can I bite it enough to make it a meal?" Where bobcats, if you open their bone marrow, it's just white, fatty, greasy, oily, really rich. Their technique is just sit and wait. Wait, don't spend all your energy out there looking around for food. Just wait, it'll come by. It's no reflection on intelligence. It's just a difference in technique. But mustelids oftentimes, the weasel family, they're oftentimes like that. They're very energetic and constantly moving. People call me a weasel... (audience laughs) for that reason. Then we have the animal that is close to us. I say the name of the animal relates to, it's linked to us from a country to the north. It's the lynx. Lynx again, now this is an example, it's probably a very good adult, very long legs, very large feet. The feet on a lynx are actually as large or larger than cougars'. Very large feet. The reason for that is they live north of our big lakes, where the snow is dry, and they need to be able to stay on top of that snow because their primary food is snowshoe hare. And if you ever tried to chase down a bunny rabbit, it's really difficult. And if you're in deep fluffy snow, it's impossible. These folks can do that. They are now federally threatened across 17 states on our northern latitudes. In Wisconsin, we have what has been termed as critical habitat, although that was a misnomer. We don't really have habitat for lynx, which is boreal forest. We have a little bit of what we call pseudo-boreal, up in Iron County and a little bit around Bayfield County. But we occasionally have had lynx in Wisconsin. And why would they be here if we've never had a breeding record of lynx? It's because of the cyclic nature of their food, snowshoe hares. And when food disappears, some of these animals will disperse long distance. And so about every nine to 10 years, we were seeing lynx showing up as road kills or whatnot. We haven't seen that now for some time, but about, I'm gonna say it's about eight to 10 years ago, we did pick up an animal, it was road killed over in the western part of the state. It looked like a lynx, it smelled like a lynx, I won't say it tasted like a lynx, but it wasn't. It have everything that lynx, but it wasn't. And it wasn't a bobcat. What was it? It was a bobalynx. It was a hybrid. We did DNA on it and found it was the very first and only recorded hybrid of the two cat species we had here in Wisconsin. That has been documented in northeastern Minnesota and out in Maine too. Now the one distinguishing characteristic, again, big feet, but you're not gonna see 'em. They're gonna be in the snow or grass. Long ear tufts, but that's a relative term. Some bobcats have long ear tufts. Unfortunately, a grade school class removed the tip of this tail. So use your imagination. There's a tail continues about another inch and a half it's all black, all the way around, like you dipped it in an inkwell. It's black on top, it's black on the bottom. Remember the bobcats? Black on top, white on the bottom? And the other thing about the bobcat, too is they have really distinguishing white windows in the back of their ears. Which, these ears are kind of shrunk down little bit. We get lots and lotsa trail camera observations of cougar, and there're other animals. 99.9% are other animals. Oftentimes, bobcats, 'cause it's a catlike animal, but you can see real quickly those white windows behind the ears, and sometimes you see that short tail. A lot of the difficulties where the animal's walking, and one of the hind legs looks just like a cougar tail until you look really close and you see that little short tail is up here. Okay, two cats. Moving right along, how much time do we have? -

Reesa

37 minutes. Oh, we might make it. I've never made it (audience laughs) in this time slot, but we might make it. This animal, never say never. Many years ago, we said, "Oh, we don't have these animals here." No one had these animals here. We do. Cougars. They're here. They're transient. If you see 'em one day, they're gone the next. If people have observations, multiple observations, same spot, year after year, it's most likely not a cougar. The cougars we're seein' now are dispersing out of the Black Hills of South Dakota. That population wasn't even there twenty-some years ago. I was turkey hunting out there when the first cougars started showin' up out there about 20 years ago. They've completely saturated the Black Hills, which is roughly about 300 to 340, 350 cougars. And after that, any young, especially male, any male young, they hafta leave. They're hot-wired for dispersal. They have to leave, or they're gonna die. Adult males will seek 'em out and kill 'em. Because the adult males are the breeders, and they do not want any competition. So these young males, they're dispersing, it's just, it's in their genes. It's how they live. And they disperse like a pinwheel. They're not just all coming east. They're going in all directions. But what we see and what we hear about are those that come into areas where there aren't cougars, like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Connecticut. So far, all of them have been males. And they're normally about 18 months old, plus or minus. They can be seven to eight feet long, from one end to the other. They oftentimes will weight well over 100 pounds. They're very large. There's been quite a dispersal from South Dakota, down the major river systems, which means they end up down in parts of Iowa and parts of Missouri. So they've had quite a few observations down there. Here in Wisconsin, we've probably had about, I'd say 12 to 15 total verified cougar observations in the last 10 years. One of them that came through here that we had several locations on from the Twin Cities is where it began, three or four of 'em through Wisconsin, up into the UP, then it disappeared. A year later, it was road killed in Connecticut. And it was by the DNA, by the genetics we were able to collect, it was determined to be the same animal. So anyway, they are here, but they are constantly on the move. They're looking for a mate. The food is everywhere, which is deer. We've got plentiful deer herds in Wisconsin. So food's not a problem. They're just looking for a breeding partner. If they don't find it, they just keep movin'. They're not gonna say, "Wow, gosh, there's a lotta deer. "I'm just gonna stay here." No. They need to continue to look to develop a breeding pair. So, here today, gone tomorrow. Okay. Now, we're coming into these animals that, gosh, this looks like an animal we just talked about earlier, doesn't it? Kinda looks like this animal right here, doesn't it? Very similar. This fella is out in the water, he's eatin' muskrats, he's in our cricks, he's in our rivers. This guy doesn't even like to get his feet wet. But lakes are very important to him, especially when it's cold and there's ice on those lakes that allows him to establish new home ranges. This happens to be our state endangered mammal. This just pines me to talk about it. The pine marten is the common name. American marten is it's real name. American marten have been brought back into Wisconsin. I was actually fortunate to be, my last year as a field biologist in that area, I was able to help our furbearer researchers actually release these in Clam Lake. We released in the late '80s and early '90s. We've since released them there multiple times to try and see if we can't get a population to expand. With fishers, it worked well. We put the martens in the same areas where we put the fishers. What we didn't realize at first was that, through research, we learned this, fishers eat these guys. And yet we have a completely closed trap-in on dry land in these areas. So we created fisher refuges where we put the marten. So it's like, whoops! Since then, we've changed a little bit where we allow cage traps and other tools, no footholds, where you can select for some animals like raccoons and fishers that will have no impact at all on martens whatsoever. Martens are subnivean, I like saying that word, subnivean. In the wintertime, they need deeps now, and they'll go under the snow. They go under the snow, both to get away from predators and to find food. Their primary food in most studies is red-backed voles. Other small mammals that have lots of fat on 'em. One thing that most animals don't eat, that they shy away from are shrews. Shrews have basically no net energy gain if you kill and eat one. They have kind of a bitter, poisonous saliva. That's one of the techniques they have to get their critters. So when animals bite into a shrew, they'll chew it once or twice, and they'll spit it out. Happened to watch a coyote track just last spring, when I was doing track surveys, do exactly that. Yet we've found at recently that that's 50% of their diet. They're eatin' shrews for food. Now we don't know if that means it's a starvation food, or they've adapted to be able to eat these bitter little things that have no food value in 'em. We also have recently discovered, and it's through really neat things called isotope analysis. If you were to take one of your hairs and pluck it out and talk, Phil Manlick in the lab in Madison to analyze it and tell me what I ate during the life of my hair. If he had the carbon nitrogen footprint for all the food you ate, he could tell you exactly what you ate and how much you did. That's what we've been doing with these animals, even with black bears. Collecting samples and then taking a look at what is it they're eating during the life cycle of that hair. And the hair lasts for about 180 days. They'll molt a couple times a year, shed. What we've learned is that, and generally, fishers and martens don't overlap when it comes to a prey base. It's obvious because martens don't want to be eating where fishers are eating because then they become et. What we've learned is that they're eating the same thing. Their foraging is overlapped on top each other. So that doesn't bode well for martens, and it's obvious that fishers are havin' a touch time of it too because if they're eatin' shrews for a big part of their diet, that can't be good either. We're not sure if that's what's going on. It it's our prey base, our small mammal population that's changing, not sure. There's all kinds of other things we're looking at out there too. But marten, on their chest, remember the mink? Either it's all dark and they have a little white patch. With a marten, they have this orange patch. And again, these patches can be really large or really small. Some people call it a urine stain, but it looks orange, where mink always have that white. The other thing is the fur itself, the mink fur is very short and actually denser. The marten fur is very, very soft, fluffy, and the guard hairs are longer. Again, thermoregulation 'cause it's out and about, not in water, hardly at all. And why are lakes with ice on 'em important to them? Well, we're not really sure how they got there. We do know that in 1953, the old Wisconsin Conservation Department stocked five marten on Stockton Island. And there's marten out there now. And that population's expanded to other islands. They're doing good on the islands, but did they travel out there by ice? Are these some of the marten that were released in Clam Lake? Scurried up to northern Bayfield, ran out to Stockton? And with collecting scats, professor out of Northland College been collecting scats on the island last summer, has discovered marten on at least five other islands. Including Outer Island, 18 miles out. Now the only way a marten can get from Stockton to Outer, he's not gonna swim, he scurried out there in the ice. So water bodies, when they're really hard, when they're firm, can be the corridors, the ice bridges, for some animals to find new habitat. And why they're doin' okay out there, we're not sure, but there's a lot of folks scrambling to try and figure that out. State endangered mammal. Okay. Let's get into the canids. The dog family. And we may have to move through this a little bit faster. This is a fox. The hair is kind of black and gray. So he's our gray fox. Gray fox have the ability to climb straight up vertically, up trees. We're not sure if they do that to escape from other predators, or they just like doing it, or they actually use that technique to gather food. But they can go right up trees. Oftentimes, they'll roost in a tree, they'll sit in a tree. But they're an animal that is, it's got very short legs, very nocturnal. They were more common in southern Wisconsin. Now they're common throughout the state. Very coarse hair. And he kinda falls in between all the other niches of the other canids. And the other canids oftentimes don't like each other. And they kinda chew on each other. The gray fox seems to be able to bypass or skip that pecking order that is going on out there with the other three canids we have. Which the one here that's got a very red fur is our red fox. Red fox do well, they were extremely prolific in southern Wisconsin, but as coyote populations began to expand into southern Wisconsin, I received lots of calls over, "Where's my red fox gone?" Now we've got these brush wolves out here, these coyotes. We don't like them near as much. We really liked our red fox. Red fox are very small, very adaptable. They oftentimes'll be spend time around homes if there's any habitat there, bird feeders. They seem to be an animal that's nonthreatening just 'cause of it's size. And they're rather attractive. They're real pretty animals. They don't do well if there's coyotes. Coyotes will push 'em out or chew on 'em quite a bit. But they do awesome if it's just wolves. A good example is Isle Royale. Isle Royale has had a population of wolves for a long time. It's kind of in trouble right now, but it's had wolves, and there's not a single coyote on that island. But red fox are so prolific that you can't take your tennis shoes off. They'll steal one from your campfire. But the coyote, very common in Wisconsin, now quite an issue, will really disperse or push out red fox. Wolves'll do the same with coyotes. But wolves and red fox can coexist quite a bit, and not sure why, but it could be that just the size of a red fox and the habitat it's in is so different than what wolves use. They don't see the red fox as a threat or a competitor, where coyotes oftentimes will looks very similar to wolves and will be oftentimes in the same areas. And even be following wolves around to try and get a free meal. Coyote numbers in southern Wisconsin have grown, and they have in almost all our urban areas. Coyotes have now spread through most of eastern United States. Coyotes never were a native animal east of the Mississippi River. We've had coyotes here for a long time, but they're mainly a Western species. One concern that we've noticed is that the coyote size in areas like, even Pennsylvania, New York, Maine, they're really large. They get up to 15 pounds heavier than our Midwestern coyotes. And our Midwestern coyotes are about 10 pounds heavier than our Western coyotes. But, with genetic work, we've been able to identify that there is quite a bit of eastern wolf in the coyotes in the far east. And so there's kinda like this hybrid canid that's out there right now. Very large coyote. Coyotes large enough that they can prey on and take deer effectively. Okay, so we started in our water, our wetlands, we moved up to the edge of them, we got into the cats and the canids. Oh my gosh, what's this animal? Oh, gosh, it's not a gray fox. It's not a red fox. It's a little too big for a coyote. And it's not a wolf. So what's this new animal we have in Wisconsin? It's a wolf-dog hybrid. And it's really a sad thing. And at the same time, it's kind of a neat story, but sad. People wanna be around wildlife. They wanna be around wildlife so much that people that live in large metropolitan areas, they wanna have somethin'. And you could legally possess, and you still can, any animal that has dog genetics in it but still be blended in with wolves. The wolf-dog hybrid industry is multimillions of dollars. People wanna have this big, beautiful animal that they can say, "I've got a wolf." Well, you can't possess a wolf, but you can possess, technically, legally, a wolf-dog hybrid. What happens to these beautiful animals when they grow up? They start chewing on the couch, they start urinatin' on furniture, they start bitin' the kids. They get to be, their wild genetics starts to come out. They don't wanna be confined in that small area. So what's happened, unfortunately, some people take the responsibility of having it put down. Other people do the Free Willy technique, and take it up nort', and up north is just basically a few miles away from where you're livin', and then they release these animals thinking that they'll do fine in the wild. Most of these wolf-dog hybrids that have been released end up in town. And they end up begging for food and scaring people quite a bit. This happened to be one of 'em. One that was in people's garage quite a bit. Federal agents take a look at the pictures and said, yes, that's a hybrid because all the characteristics they could see in the pictures, dispatch it. So we did that. It's a beautiful animal. Just sad to see it go that way, just being taken out because it's a pest, but at the same time, it's caught in two worlds. It's got dog in it, but it's really got wild in it too. We've now changed our laws in Wisconsin that they have to be neutered, neutered and chipped, if anyone has a wolf-dog hybrid. Many other states have even made 'em not legal to possess at all. Just look at that. See it was really a beautiful animal, but unfortunately, it's caused some problems. Then, of course, our state mammal, the badger. It's where our state, it's on or logo, it's even sittin' on Liberty, the statue on top of the Capitol. There's a badger on her head. You're ever walkin' by there, get your binocs out and look. I didn't believe it when someone told me, so I had to look closer. It's a badger sittin' on 'er head. We though badgers were all just grassland critters down in the southwest. Not true. They're in all of our counties statewide. I thought it was really perplexing back in the '80s, when Jeff Wilson, a wildlife technician, he and I released badgers in traps way up by the UP border in northern Iron County. But they're out there. We've recently had a, Dr. Emily Latch, out of University of Milwaukee, did a genetics study on badgers. And we were able to get her samples from badgers all across, well, from about Ohio west, all the way to the West Coast. Did a genetic study, and what she has found out that our badger population in Wisconsin is extremely diverse, very healthy, could easily support regulated harvest. Are we gonna harvest our badgers? It's a social thing. It's our state mammal. I don't think we will. I don't think anyone's even gonna recommend it right now. But, and she looked at badger genetics and health in our neighboring states, like Michigan and Minnesota, where they have harvests, and she said the genetic diversity we have in Wisconsin is just outstanding to a point that she actually suggests that we have, you could almost call it the Wisconsin subspecies of badger. But she found badgers in all counties, all 72 counties as well. They're out there. They're very low to the ground. They dig for ground squirrels, and they can dig as fast as a ground squirrel can scurry down its hole. Tremendous diggers, very fast. Okay, now, I gotta add, this is the Illinois state mammal. (audience laughs) The striped skunk, actually a very beautiful animal, but it has a couple problems. One of them, we know, Pepe, you know, the smell. And the other is they are fairly strong carries of rabies. So when you see skunks out in the daylight, that's something to be really careful and concerned about. This fur was extremely in high demand back in the early days in the fur trade. And many women in Europe had these beautiful black fur coats, 'cause they'll cut strips out of all furs to match 'em up exactly. Then in 1953 or '57, in the '50s, the Fair Trade in Lending Act was passed, where everything had to be sold for what it was. And no woman in Europe in her right mind would have a skunk fur coat, not knowing she already had one in the closet. Beautiful fur, but again, it is an animal we have to be cautious and careful bout because of a couple reasons. But they're very good in the environment. They eat a lot of carrion, things that could be sitting out there festering away and causing some disease problems for other animals, for our pets, even us. They do have a value out there. Then, of course, we have this little guy. No, this isn't a striped skunk that put his finger in an electrical socket. This happens to be a small spotted skunk. The last observations we have of spotted skunks in Wisconsin is almost 50 years ago. Spotted skunks have really declined across almost their entire range, to a point now that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is actually looking at and considering a petition to list the prairie spotted skunk as a federally endangered animal. We're not sure if there is such a thing as a prairie spotted skunk. But at one time, taxonomists had listed it as a separate species. So to try and find that out, there's twofold. One is that we're collecting a lot of tissue samples on spotted skunks wherever we can to see if we can find out there is a subspecies of prairie spotted skunk. But even if there isn't, spotted skunks are in jeopardy. They have just disappeared. When I first started as a furbearer biologist, I remember the biologists in Missouri, the gentleman I mentioned earlier about the otters, Missouri had harvest of up to 10,000 spotted skunks. Now it's down to six or eight. They've just disappeared. There's ideas as to why, but no one can really totally put their finger on it. But it's an animal that we're real concerned about. And, of course, our only marsupial in Wisconsin, the unofficial speed bump of all furbearers, (audience laughs) just doesn't seem to be able to make it across the road alive. Their litters, they have a marsupium, a small pouch in which the young, which are born extremely small. Average litter size is about 18. You could put all 18 into a tablespoon when they're first born. And they have a major migration to do. They have to crawl about an inch and a half to get up into that marsupium and then attach themselves to a teat. And that's where they sit for a couple months. That's almost like their umbilical cord. An adaptive technique for marsupials, but they are now present throughout Wisconsin, they used to be mainly in southern. They do not tolerate cold weather well 'cause they have a naked ears and tail, but they've been moving northward, either on their own or by our assistance. We did see them in Superior quite early on and wondered how'd they get here? Why they probably came on the grain trains. A lot of grain moving back and forth in box cars, but-- Opossums. And then, the one animal that we certainly have never had in Wisconsin, is the wolverine. We do have about 10 to 12 records of wolverine shipped out of rail stations in northern Wisconsin, long, long time ago. We're not sure if those wolverines were really wolverines, or if they were wolverines that were brought into Wisconsin and shipped out from there. But we've never had any documented breeding of wolverines in Wisconsin ever. They're an animal that's in the Rocky Mountains, and they're up into Canada, and they're also in Alaska. A very beautiful animal. I could talk a lot about it, but I just won't. Just it's a neat, neat critter. Okay, well I'm looking for this animal. What would you call it if it's white and it's wintertime? -

Voiceover

An ermine. Ermine, very good. And which we have three subspecies of... (John sighs) Of weasels. (John sighs in relief) (audience laughs) We have the least, the short, and the long. The short tail and long tail. The short tail is our most common weasel we have in Wisconsin. He's present throughout the state. Long tails are far more rare in the north, a little more common in the south, but still not that common at all. The weasel, obviously, changes its color coat from brown in the summer to white in the winter. Why would a weasel, if it turns white, for adaptive protective considerations, so it's not sticking out in the snow and brown, why would his tail still be black? See the tip of his tail? It's still black. Why'd they stop there? I don't know. No idea. But I've asked a lot of people that. And 'cause weasels are down in the mouse tunnels, who cares what color the tip of your tail is 'cause all you're gonna see is this biting part coming atcha. Another theory that people have is that, 'cause in the wintertime, if you really watch close, you see the snow bank movin'. What is that? It's weasel just running around scurryin' out there. And some of their predators, like raptors, they can see that. They see that movement right now, and they'll focus on that black tip, and they'll go for that black tip. So, if they get that black tip, what do they have? Nothin' but air 'cause the weasel's gone. There's nothin' there to grab onto. So that's another theory, another adaptation that they have. All white, black tip, maybe it's to escape predators, maybe it's just a fluke. But I think it probably had a reason for being there. The Sioux Indians, the tribal chiefs really sought these out. This was a symbol of power. They would have this on their large headdresses. They would trade lots of valuable things to get ermine. The Queen of England, her regalia, her big, fancy ballroom dresses are adorned with ermine because it's a symbol of power for that country. Really interesting small animal. As I mentioned, we have three species. Do we know much about 'em? Not really. And a lot of these animals, we have different types of way to try and monitor and measure them, to figure out what's out there. Some of 'em we only have track surveys. Example with beaver, we have probably the most accurate wildlife survey that we know of in Wisconsin is our beaver helicopter survey. We go up in helicopters every three years and random plots of four to six square miles, all across northern Wisconsin, north of Highway 64. We go those same four to six square miles every three years, and they're doing this since 1992. And in a helicopter, you can slow the machine down, you can really see what's down there. We've tested it against fixed wing and found out that fixed wing only sees about 50% of what's out there, where with helicopters, you're seeing probably about 90%. You're gonna miss a few bank beaver here and there, a few bachelor beaver. But that's one way that we're able to really monitor beaver because, in our Beaver Management Plan, we might be looking at some changes in seasons, but they are a rodent, and we have to be careful about making any extreme changes one way or the other 'cause populations can really bounce back if harvest is reduced quite a bit. So we're lookin' at that right now. A lot of these other animals, where there's real high interest the populations are limited, like bobcats. We require every person who gets a bobcat permit to take a survey. All the animals have to be registered, and all the animals have to have what we call a CITES tag. And a CITES tag is a tag that relates to the Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species, like this river otter. River otter and bobcats are not endangered, but there's lookalikes out there. And that's why they're in Appendix II of CITES, because there's a sea otter that is in peril, and the fur can look like that. So we have to determine legal acquisition before anyone can even take an otter. And if they do, they have to bring it in to a conservation officer. He has to determine that it was taken legally and it's with the skin out, so they can see if it was shot or speared or run over. Bobcats the same way. It's a CITES animal, and we have mandatory carcass collections every year. And we'll probably continue that forever. Otters only every three years. The reason for it is that, we've learned that bobcat reproductive rates change dramatically from year to year, probably based on food availability. Long-term averages that adult bobcats will be-- pregnancy rate is about 70%, but some years, it can drop as low as 40%. And with our yearlings, their average is 40% being pregnant, but some years, it can drop to zero. So that has quite an impact upon how the population can change from year to year. With both otters and fishers, the reproductive rates, we collect carcasses from fishers as well. This stays pretty constant. They have a pretty adaptive way to be able to find food, whatever's out there, and do well, except for our northern fishers right now. So we only collect carcasses from them every year. The other animal that is on the table that really, we don't call it a furbearer, we don't call it a big game either, we just call it what it is, a wolf, we collect their carcasses every year as well, if there's a harvest. And we determine the same things. Age, reproductive rate, litter size. And how do we determine age? What we do is we'll take a lower canine. This one's canines are missing, but it'd be canine like this, from the lower jaw, and we send those in to a lab that, with a very complex machine, cut little thin slices like you're slicing sausage, at minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, in a little container, they'll put that little slice onto a slide, and then we're able to read the growth rings, just like trees. We all have this annual cement in there that we put down. So if you get older like me, and you start forgetting your age, and you have no way to tell it, just pull a tooth, send it to Matson's lab, out in Montana, and they can tell you how old you are. So we get the age of the animal that way, so we can get an idea of the age structure of the population. We can add that to the reproductive rate, how many females are pregnant, and then we figure out, by looking at the uterine horn, the number of placental scars. And then we can figure out the litter size, the maximum litter size. With all that, and then our winter surveys and our registration surveys and everything else, we can kinda put it all together into something called a population model, and that gives us guidance, and when we try and make recommendations on harvest. A harvest for these really critically watched animals is decided every year. We change the quotas every year based on what we've learned from the previous year, previous year. So in Wisconsin, we have quite an involvement of citizens. People are really involved in the furbearer program in many ways, including sitting on our furbearer committees and helping us make these recommendations and if any rule changes are needed, things like that. Furbearers in Wisconsin are doing really well. We're concerned about some, always will be. And hopefully, we'll be able to continue to watch and monitor them in the future. We've got a really good team, and with your help, we'll do better. Thank you. (audience applauds)