yeah it’s more like my hair you look you
know people pay to have wind blow swings
hi I’m amber ghoshal here with Arthur
Middleton he’s an animal ecologist and a
NatGeo Explorer we are in very windy
West Yellowstone at under canvas it is
it’s pretty windy out here it is windy
but it’s not as windy as it usually is
yeah no kidding it seems like this picks
up throughout the day
Arthur is an amazing guy with an
incredible story he is like I said an
explorer for NatGeo society and can you
tell us a little bit about what you
study at UC Berkeley yeah so I’m a
professor at UC Berkeley I am an
ecologist I work mostly on large mammals
and a lot of my work is in the Greater
Yellowstone Ecosystem and so it’s it’s
trying to understand why these big
mammals like the hoofed mammals the
young Gillard’s and the carnivores the
big tooth mammals are important in
ecosystems and how they’re wide-ranging
movements end up getting them into
conflict and then how can we help reduce
some of those conflicts with people over
time yeah so in case you guys don’t know
the animals of course do not know make
up national parks they kind of go into
the Greater Yellowstone area and they
need to be able to migrate in order to
reproduce right right right so so these
animals have evolved this behavior
migration which we define as occupying
two entirely distinct parts of the
landscape at different times of the year
in this landscape they’re in one area
and the winter one another area in the
summer and those might be ten miles or
175 miles apart there’s a range of
migration distances what they’re doing
is they’re following the flesh of green
grass up into the high mountains and
onto the plateaus in summer
that grass stays green all summer even
into the fall when it turns brown down
low and it’s better food for these
animals so elk mule deer pronghorn
antelope moose bison ooh am I forgetting
bighorn sheep those are the six
migratory hoofed mammals or ungulates we
call them in the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem they’re going up to get that
green grass that’s how they build fat
they use that fat to nurse their
offspring through the summer to be able
to conceive again for the next year and
then they bring the rest of that fat
with them down to the winter ranges
where it helps them survive through the
long cold winter and they’re mainly
going down to those winter ranges to get
away from deep snow up at the higher
elevations so they’re they’re using
those big migrations to optimize their
reproduction and survival across the
landscape and you’re right they don’t
understand the boundaries and we’ve made
a lot of boundaries on the landscape and
changed the landscape so it kind of
sounds like these angle ads are kind of
like bears and that they’re built for
the winter right no hibernate but
they’re they’re building up that’s a
great point amber so hibernation and
migration are you know to speak a bit
crudely about it there there are two
strategies to deal with the same
seasonality in this landscape summer is
awesome
winners sucks unless you’re a skier or
whatever yeah or in your wolf actually
four wolves when it’s great because
that’s when everybody else is vulnerable
and so they take advantage of that but
the point is all these animals are
deploying some strategy for the
ungulates it’s often migration to deal
with the seasonality of resources and
risks across a huge landscape
now guys we are taking your questions in
the comments of these videos both on
Facebook and YouTube wherever you’re
watching um one of the questions we just
had come in is are there any species of
unlit that migrate that are also
invasive to Yellowstone that’s a good
question
I was thinking as I said the
white-tailed deer the white-tailed deer
is present in this landscape and really
low numbers they’re not necessarily
evasive but as the West has been settled
they benefit from they’ve come in
greater numbers from the Midwest and
other areas they benefit from irrigation
and cultivation and so that’s kind of
boosted their numbers in the West so
that would be the closest so you know a
lot of our viewers at home a lot of you
guys are sitting on your couch and you
know suburban America you’re not out
here in all of this vast nature why
should these people care about these
nuts at all they should care about these
ungulates I’m gonna give you two main
reasons if they want to if they have
experience Yellowstone or they want to
experience Yellowstone in the future
when you see one of these animals an elk
I’m going to use the example of an
outstanding the middle of York there is
a very good chance that animal for the
other half of the year when it’s not on
display for the park visitor is on say a
private ranch
60 miles outside away far outside the
park or is is managed by a state
wildlife agency that has to do a lot of
work to manage that population and so on
and so it’s really important for people
to understand and support
the kinds of activities outside the park
that will keep those wildlife healthy
and abundant and you know if they want
to experience Yellowstone as we know it
it’s not a box and the animals depend on
a much larger area the second thing I
would say that’s the story of parks
around the world
no park almost no park is big enough to
sustain entirely the wildlife that we
associate with it even Serengeti
National Park
you know the wildebeest which are like
the Hulk you know the counterpart to the
elk and the deer and the prawn right
here they move far outside that huge
part one of the world’s biggest the 19
million acre Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge one of the biggest protected
areas in the world
the porcupine caribou herd is outside of
that protected area for part of the year
it’s it’s crucial for people to
understand if they want parks to produce
the natural wonders you know the
wildlife that dazzle them then they need
to be a part of thinking about that
transman
jury dimension and how to get a lot of
stakeholders across many jurisdictions
you know into that story and
contributing to conservation into the
future of those populations yeah so you
mentioned that for part of the year a
lot of these animals are outside of the
protected areas so what do people do or
should they be doing outside you know do
they get trapped in fences or anything
like that that’s a really good question
when people ask me why are the
migrations so important you know one of
the things I sometimes say is like you
do a thought experiment Yellowstone
National Park if it’s boundary had a
fence that these animals couldn’t pass
through and they were trapped inside
there populations would crash the
carnivores and scavengers that feed on
them with those populations with after a
few years begin to crash we’re never
gonna put a fence or a wall around
Yellowstone but what we are doing is in
little ways all over the place over time
clogging up these migration routes
nibbling away at the winter ranges that
are out there
people love Yellowstone they want to buy
a second home next to Yellowstone well
often often without necessarily you know
understanding it
if those developments aren’t well
planned they’re snarfing up a little bit
more of that critical wildlife habitat
that’s important to the park so it’s
it’s residential development in some of
the outlying valleys some much much more
extreme than others it’s offensive
because just old fencing from
sheep ranching you know up to a hundred
years ago fifty years ago that’s maybe
not even active anymore but those fences
haven’t been taken down they create
blockages to migrations they caused
animals to get hung up or to waste
energy looking for you know new routes
roads with with a lot of highway traffic
and and collisions that kill animals
that danger drivers as well
sometimes it’s energy development there
are ways to do these developments
responsibly in there are ways to do them
less responsibly and and and and that
can really matter to these populations a
really intensive development residential
or energy development we know can can
erode the productivity the survival of
some of these populations so it’s it’s
kind of a you know a little bit of all
those things and one of the scariest
things about migrations is it’s not
often that we lose them suddenly all
together in a dramatic fashion that’s
noticeable it seems like it’s this kind
of death by a thousand cuts yeah and so
what we need is for you know we need to
think about how and where we’re doing
different types of development we need
to think about making fences wildlife
friendly or removing the ones we don’t
need anymore
we need to think about protecting you
know habitats in some cases when they’re
really really important
we need overpasses and underpasses on
highways that allows safe passage land
bridges right like that yeah call them
whatever you they can be really
important for these wildlife to move and
for human safety and so you know what’s
happened is we’ve got this revolution in
colouring we’re starting to see the
migrations because of all this GPS data
and hopefully that leads to
revolution and how we’re doing
conservation to essentially design a
landscape that’s going to keep these
animals moving freely so that we can
keep Yellowstone and similar landscapes
healthy so one question we did have from
another viewer is which of these
ungulates if any are endangered or are
they close to becoming endangered it’s a
great question and I get asked it a lot
with these ungulates really I mean none
of them are formally endangered as in
listed you know the Endangered Species
Act and few in this landscape are you
know even sort of loosely what we would
call endangered what’s endangered and
it’s a little of a conceptual leap for
people because we so often think about
rarity and endangerment
what’s endangered around the world is
migration Wow so that behavior so there
are lots of open world but not all of
them still retain their intact
migrations there are lots of mule deer
in the world but a lot of them are
losing that ability to migrate so what’s
confusing understandably is it’s not
always that we’re losing the the species
it’s that we’re losing their ability to
engage in a behavior that makes them
thrive and abundant and the reason
that’s important is because when they
can’t migrate anymore they will occur at
lower numbers or they will have to
depend on irrigated agriculture they’ll
be eating peoples crops things like that
and when they’re occurring at lower
numbers because they can’t migrate you
can feed fewer carnivores like grizzly
bears and wolves you can feed fewer
scavengers like Golden Eagles and foxes
and coyotes and Ravens you can allow
less hunting which is economically
important in many areas so is that
behavior that behavior
of migration that we’re trying to
conserve as much as possible because it
provides us such a diversity of sort of
goods and services if you will and so
that’s a really important thing for
people to understand if by the time
we’re talking about these species being
endangered we will have lost all the
migrations and this beautiful
traditional important behavior of these
populations yeah so it’s kind of
important to act before it’s too late as
what it sounds like I know you mentioned
a couple of birds just now we have some
like pretty interesting things behind us
we’ve been having or at least we have
been having some swans some geese is
there anything very interesting about
their migrations as well yeah there are
so I mean I actually have a friend I
took into the field once name’s James
prosaic as an artist and I I was with
James over to another catastrophe to
explore talking Joe and I are kind of
getting out on the on Gillett Sepang
horn that oak James said hey guys that
that little red bird in the tree up
there next to our five in our camp one
morning drinking coffee said that’s a
Western Tanager
and it came here from probably Mexico or
Costa Rica and we all kind of you know
it and that’s so we talked about the
ungulates they they migrated impressive
distances up to 175 miles actually
there’s a mule deer collared by my
friends in the Wyoming migration
initiative where you can go to learn a
lot more about the migrations that is in
near West Yellowstone this summer and
she’s
more than 200 miles from near Rock
Springs Wyoming down by i-80
that’s the 200 miles that way Wow so
that’s how far she’s Travis now but you
go to the birds and we get into thousand
mile migrations and the Transcontinental
migration so there’s a thing that the
trumpeter swan behind us those ones come
down much further north for the summer
there’s we’ve been hearing some sandhill
cranes there’s a pair of sandhill cranes
not too far away from us they spend the
winter down in well over in Nebraska
down into Texas and parts of the south
west and it’s kind of southern Midwest
so yeah I mean they’re Harlequin ducks
and Yellowstone they go to Vancouver you
know so this gets back to that thing
about why should people care if you want
to see the richness of life that we
expect in Yellowstone and enjoy and in
other parks we have to take care of the
rest of the planet because because these
animals are coming from the rest of the
planet yeah one other question we got
from a viewer on YouTube is as climate
change at all affecting these migrations
that’s a really good question
it’s it’s this short answer is it it
seems the answer is yes but the real
question is how well can they kind of
adapt to those changes so to be more
specific we are seeing some changes in
the timing of migration when these
animals depart and arrive on their
summer ranges and winter ranges we have
seen in one elk study I was involved in
what we what seemed to be some effects
of of the most severe drought the
hottest summer temperatures in
if not thousands of years depending on
kind of which climate records you look
at that affected their pregnancy rates
of those animals so we’re seeing some of
that it’s it’s it’s you know the it’s
all it’s sometimes it’s hard to
determine whether if we’re having this
really severe drought well this is a
drought prone landscape but it seems
like droughts are more frequent and more
severe so that does seem like a an
effective climate change I think the big
one of the big questions going forward
is how well can these animals adjust and
migration is a very flexible behavior so
they might be able to adjust their
timing to still be able to take
advantage of the food and take advantage
of the shelter at slightly different
times of the year and my lab at UC
Berkeley is working actively with some
colleagues on I’m trying to figure some
of that out in fact we’ve got aggregated
but with partners around the system the
state agencies the federal agencies
other universities a big kind of big
data set on these migrations to be able
to ask some of those questions I think
pretty powerfully and so ask me this
again in six months or a year or two
years and out I’ll have an even better
answer I’m gonna hold you to that okay
sometimes these issues can seem so big
so out of our reach what are a couple
things that people can do at home to
kind of help not only just the animals
here that are migrating but just animals
throughout the world aren’t migrating
I’m gonna get a little philosophical
alright get philosophical let’s do it
get a little esoteric here I do have a
Doctor of Philosophy let’s break it out
aloud to do that one of the things that
scares me the most right now is how
polarized and fractured people are in
our country and
in the world and and I’m going to tell
you why from a standpoint of wildlife
and you look at migrations these animals
depend when you follow a migration
corridor that’s a hundred miles long
they depend on 20 30 40 50 private
landowners they depend on multiple state
and federal agencies they depend on
public lands private lands they depend
on a lot of people’s decisions who are
working under overlapping but not always
totally aligned missions and
perspectives people have to work
together and people who are listening I
know it’s hard but people who are
listening when you’re thinking about
conservation I know there’s a lot of
passion and a lot of controversy and a
lot of reasons to be alarmed but we need
people to encourage collaboration we
need people to understand other people’s
perspectives and be able to work across
the fence lines so to speak and and
that’s one of the things that’s so great
about studying the migrations is nothing
illustrates it more clearly and we could
be talking about you know grizzly bears
or wolves or any of these animals that
move big distances we need people
working together but not pushing each
other further into you know other ends
of the world there’s there’s a huge need
in conservation for collaboration to
partnership we don’t always have to
agree we’re not always going to but how
can we just put some extra effort into
it because if we don’t do that along
some of these migration corridors we
will slowly lose them because we won’t
be working together to identify
solutions find common ground and
and mend those fences you know those
differences there are also specific
things I mean think about fences and
roadways and habitat conservation and
sensible development not we’re never
going to develop anything but just we
need to use landscapes like this wisely
and carefully and work in sort of common
cause to do that great well thank you so
much Arthur where can people go to find
out more about what you’re working on
people can go to my labs website at the
University of california-berkeley the
Middleton lab were in the department of
environmental science policy and
management I work at the Buffalo Bill
Center of the West and Cody Wyoming in
the summer that’s my sort of summer lab
so to speak they can come see us at the
Buffalo Bill Center in Cody or finally
I’ll say the Wyoming migration
initiative I’m affiliated with stone and
Laramie Wyoming they got an amazing
website Facebook pages and research
coming out all the time
for example that doe mule deer who’s up
here spending the summer here you can
see updated maps of her movements and
sort of follow along and root and root
for her and other migrating animals so
go to Wyoming migration initiatives
website and social media amazing and
then NatGeo society our friends over
there also have a great initiative that
is all about kind of like helping out
the species here in Yellowstone it’s
called beyond Yellowstone definitely go
check that out we’ll put a link to it in
the comments down below they’re really
great and of course be sure to tune in
for Yellowstone live starting this
Sunday at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo and Nat Geo
Wild Arthur you’re going to be in a
little bit – yeah I guess if I if I
sound get an
you are great you are great yeah go
watch it I’m gonna I’m gonna watch it
too amazing thank you so much guys thanks for watching everyone bye
know people pay to have wind blow swings
hi I’m amber ghoshal here with Arthur
Middleton he’s an animal ecologist and a
NatGeo Explorer we are in very windy
West Yellowstone at under canvas it is
it’s pretty windy out here it is windy
but it’s not as windy as it usually is
yeah no kidding it seems like this picks
up throughout the day
Arthur is an amazing guy with an
incredible story he is like I said an
explorer for NatGeo society and can you
tell us a little bit about what you
study at UC Berkeley yeah so I’m a
professor at UC Berkeley I am an
ecologist I work mostly on large mammals
and a lot of my work is in the Greater
Yellowstone Ecosystem and so it’s it’s
trying to understand why these big
mammals like the hoofed mammals the
young Gillard’s and the carnivores the
big tooth mammals are important in
ecosystems and how they’re wide-ranging
movements end up getting them into
conflict and then how can we help reduce
some of those conflicts with people over
time yeah so in case you guys don’t know
the animals of course do not know make
up national parks they kind of go into
the Greater Yellowstone area and they
need to be able to migrate in order to
reproduce right right right so so these
animals have evolved this behavior
migration which we define as occupying
two entirely distinct parts of the
landscape at different times of the year
in this landscape they’re in one area
and the winter one another area in the
summer and those might be ten miles or
175 miles apart there’s a range of
migration distances what they’re doing
is they’re following the flesh of green
grass up into the high mountains and
onto the plateaus in summer
that grass stays green all summer even
into the fall when it turns brown down
low and it’s better food for these
animals so elk mule deer pronghorn
antelope moose bison ooh am I forgetting
bighorn sheep those are the six
migratory hoofed mammals or ungulates we
call them in the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem they’re going up to get that
green grass that’s how they build fat
they use that fat to nurse their
offspring through the summer to be able
to conceive again for the next year and
then they bring the rest of that fat
with them down to the winter ranges
where it helps them survive through the
long cold winter and they’re mainly
going down to those winter ranges to get
away from deep snow up at the higher
elevations so they’re they’re using
those big migrations to optimize their
reproduction and survival across the
landscape and you’re right they don’t
understand the boundaries and we’ve made
a lot of boundaries on the landscape and
changed the landscape so it kind of
sounds like these angle ads are kind of
like bears and that they’re built for
the winter right no hibernate but
they’re they’re building up that’s a
great point amber so hibernation and
migration are you know to speak a bit
crudely about it there there are two
strategies to deal with the same
seasonality in this landscape summer is
awesome
winners sucks unless you’re a skier or
whatever yeah or in your wolf actually
four wolves when it’s great because
that’s when everybody else is vulnerable
and so they take advantage of that but
the point is all these animals are
deploying some strategy for the
ungulates it’s often migration to deal
with the seasonality of resources and
risks across a huge landscape
now guys we are taking your questions in
the comments of these videos both on
Facebook and YouTube wherever you’re
watching um one of the questions we just
had come in is are there any species of
unlit that migrate that are also
invasive to Yellowstone that’s a good
question
I was thinking as I said the
white-tailed deer the white-tailed deer
is present in this landscape and really
low numbers they’re not necessarily
evasive but as the West has been settled
they benefit from they’ve come in
greater numbers from the Midwest and
other areas they benefit from irrigation
and cultivation and so that’s kind of
boosted their numbers in the West so
that would be the closest so you know a
lot of our viewers at home a lot of you
guys are sitting on your couch and you
know suburban America you’re not out
here in all of this vast nature why
should these people care about these
nuts at all they should care about these
ungulates I’m gonna give you two main
reasons if they want to if they have
experience Yellowstone or they want to
experience Yellowstone in the future
when you see one of these animals an elk
I’m going to use the example of an
outstanding the middle of York there is
a very good chance that animal for the
other half of the year when it’s not on
display for the park visitor is on say a
private ranch
60 miles outside away far outside the
park or is is managed by a state
wildlife agency that has to do a lot of
work to manage that population and so on
and so it’s really important for people
to understand and support
the kinds of activities outside the park
that will keep those wildlife healthy
and abundant and you know if they want
to experience Yellowstone as we know it
it’s not a box and the animals depend on
a much larger area the second thing I
would say that’s the story of parks
around the world
no park almost no park is big enough to
sustain entirely the wildlife that we
associate with it even Serengeti
National Park
you know the wildebeest which are like
the Hulk you know the counterpart to the
elk and the deer and the prawn right
here they move far outside that huge
part one of the world’s biggest the 19
million acre Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge one of the biggest protected
areas in the world
the porcupine caribou herd is outside of
that protected area for part of the year
it’s it’s crucial for people to
understand if they want parks to produce
the natural wonders you know the
wildlife that dazzle them then they need
to be a part of thinking about that
transman
jury dimension and how to get a lot of
stakeholders across many jurisdictions
you know into that story and
contributing to conservation into the
future of those populations yeah so you
mentioned that for part of the year a
lot of these animals are outside of the
protected areas so what do people do or
should they be doing outside you know do
they get trapped in fences or anything
like that that’s a really good question
when people ask me why are the
migrations so important you know one of
the things I sometimes say is like you
do a thought experiment Yellowstone
National Park if it’s boundary had a
fence that these animals couldn’t pass
through and they were trapped inside
there populations would crash the
carnivores and scavengers that feed on
them with those populations with after a
few years begin to crash we’re never
gonna put a fence or a wall around
Yellowstone but what we are doing is in
little ways all over the place over time
clogging up these migration routes
nibbling away at the winter ranges that
are out there
people love Yellowstone they want to buy
a second home next to Yellowstone well
often often without necessarily you know
understanding it
if those developments aren’t well
planned they’re snarfing up a little bit
more of that critical wildlife habitat
that’s important to the park so it’s
it’s residential development in some of
the outlying valleys some much much more
extreme than others it’s offensive
because just old fencing from
sheep ranching you know up to a hundred
years ago fifty years ago that’s maybe
not even active anymore but those fences
haven’t been taken down they create
blockages to migrations they caused
animals to get hung up or to waste
energy looking for you know new routes
roads with with a lot of highway traffic
and and collisions that kill animals
that danger drivers as well
sometimes it’s energy development there
are ways to do these developments
responsibly in there are ways to do them
less responsibly and and and and that
can really matter to these populations a
really intensive development residential
or energy development we know can can
erode the productivity the survival of
some of these populations so it’s it’s
kind of a you know a little bit of all
those things and one of the scariest
things about migrations is it’s not
often that we lose them suddenly all
together in a dramatic fashion that’s
noticeable it seems like it’s this kind
of death by a thousand cuts yeah and so
what we need is for you know we need to
think about how and where we’re doing
different types of development we need
to think about making fences wildlife
friendly or removing the ones we don’t
need anymore
we need to think about protecting you
know habitats in some cases when they’re
really really important
we need overpasses and underpasses on
highways that allows safe passage land
bridges right like that yeah call them
whatever you they can be really
important for these wildlife to move and
for human safety and so you know what’s
happened is we’ve got this revolution in
colouring we’re starting to see the
migrations because of all this GPS data
and hopefully that leads to
revolution and how we’re doing
conservation to essentially design a
landscape that’s going to keep these
animals moving freely so that we can
keep Yellowstone and similar landscapes
healthy so one question we did have from
another viewer is which of these
ungulates if any are endangered or are
they close to becoming endangered it’s a
great question and I get asked it a lot
with these ungulates really I mean none
of them are formally endangered as in
listed you know the Endangered Species
Act and few in this landscape are you
know even sort of loosely what we would
call endangered what’s endangered and
it’s a little of a conceptual leap for
people because we so often think about
rarity and endangerment
what’s endangered around the world is
migration Wow so that behavior so there
are lots of open world but not all of
them still retain their intact
migrations there are lots of mule deer
in the world but a lot of them are
losing that ability to migrate so what’s
confusing understandably is it’s not
always that we’re losing the the species
it’s that we’re losing their ability to
engage in a behavior that makes them
thrive and abundant and the reason
that’s important is because when they
can’t migrate anymore they will occur at
lower numbers or they will have to
depend on irrigated agriculture they’ll
be eating peoples crops things like that
and when they’re occurring at lower
numbers because they can’t migrate you
can feed fewer carnivores like grizzly
bears and wolves you can feed fewer
scavengers like Golden Eagles and foxes
and coyotes and Ravens you can allow
less hunting which is economically
important in many areas so is that
behavior that behavior
of migration that we’re trying to
conserve as much as possible because it
provides us such a diversity of sort of
goods and services if you will and so
that’s a really important thing for
people to understand if by the time
we’re talking about these species being
endangered we will have lost all the
migrations and this beautiful
traditional important behavior of these
populations yeah so it’s kind of
important to act before it’s too late as
what it sounds like I know you mentioned
a couple of birds just now we have some
like pretty interesting things behind us
we’ve been having or at least we have
been having some swans some geese is
there anything very interesting about
their migrations as well yeah there are
so I mean I actually have a friend I
took into the field once name’s James
prosaic as an artist and I I was with
James over to another catastrophe to
explore talking Joe and I are kind of
getting out on the on Gillett Sepang
horn that oak James said hey guys that
that little red bird in the tree up
there next to our five in our camp one
morning drinking coffee said that’s a
Western Tanager
and it came here from probably Mexico or
Costa Rica and we all kind of you know
it and that’s so we talked about the
ungulates they they migrated impressive
distances up to 175 miles actually
there’s a mule deer collared by my
friends in the Wyoming migration
initiative where you can go to learn a
lot more about the migrations that is in
near West Yellowstone this summer and
she’s
more than 200 miles from near Rock
Springs Wyoming down by i-80
that’s the 200 miles that way Wow so
that’s how far she’s Travis now but you
go to the birds and we get into thousand
mile migrations and the Transcontinental
migration so there’s a thing that the
trumpeter swan behind us those ones come
down much further north for the summer
there’s we’ve been hearing some sandhill
cranes there’s a pair of sandhill cranes
not too far away from us they spend the
winter down in well over in Nebraska
down into Texas and parts of the south
west and it’s kind of southern Midwest
so yeah I mean they’re Harlequin ducks
and Yellowstone they go to Vancouver you
know so this gets back to that thing
about why should people care if you want
to see the richness of life that we
expect in Yellowstone and enjoy and in
other parks we have to take care of the
rest of the planet because because these
animals are coming from the rest of the
planet yeah one other question we got
from a viewer on YouTube is as climate
change at all affecting these migrations
that’s a really good question
it’s it’s this short answer is it it
seems the answer is yes but the real
question is how well can they kind of
adapt to those changes so to be more
specific we are seeing some changes in
the timing of migration when these
animals depart and arrive on their
summer ranges and winter ranges we have
seen in one elk study I was involved in
what we what seemed to be some effects
of of the most severe drought the
hottest summer temperatures in
if not thousands of years depending on
kind of which climate records you look
at that affected their pregnancy rates
of those animals so we’re seeing some of
that it’s it’s it’s you know the it’s
all it’s sometimes it’s hard to
determine whether if we’re having this
really severe drought well this is a
drought prone landscape but it seems
like droughts are more frequent and more
severe so that does seem like a an
effective climate change I think the big
one of the big questions going forward
is how well can these animals adjust and
migration is a very flexible behavior so
they might be able to adjust their
timing to still be able to take
advantage of the food and take advantage
of the shelter at slightly different
times of the year and my lab at UC
Berkeley is working actively with some
colleagues on I’m trying to figure some
of that out in fact we’ve got aggregated
but with partners around the system the
state agencies the federal agencies
other universities a big kind of big
data set on these migrations to be able
to ask some of those questions I think
pretty powerfully and so ask me this
again in six months or a year or two
years and out I’ll have an even better
answer I’m gonna hold you to that okay
sometimes these issues can seem so big
so out of our reach what are a couple
things that people can do at home to
kind of help not only just the animals
here that are migrating but just animals
throughout the world aren’t migrating
I’m gonna get a little philosophical
alright get philosophical let’s do it
get a little esoteric here I do have a
Doctor of Philosophy let’s break it out
aloud to do that one of the things that
scares me the most right now is how
polarized and fractured people are in
our country and
in the world and and I’m going to tell
you why from a standpoint of wildlife
and you look at migrations these animals
depend when you follow a migration
corridor that’s a hundred miles long
they depend on 20 30 40 50 private
landowners they depend on multiple state
and federal agencies they depend on
public lands private lands they depend
on a lot of people’s decisions who are
working under overlapping but not always
totally aligned missions and
perspectives people have to work
together and people who are listening I
know it’s hard but people who are
listening when you’re thinking about
conservation I know there’s a lot of
passion and a lot of controversy and a
lot of reasons to be alarmed but we need
people to encourage collaboration we
need people to understand other people’s
perspectives and be able to work across
the fence lines so to speak and and
that’s one of the things that’s so great
about studying the migrations is nothing
illustrates it more clearly and we could
be talking about you know grizzly bears
or wolves or any of these animals that
move big distances we need people
working together but not pushing each
other further into you know other ends
of the world there’s there’s a huge need
in conservation for collaboration to
partnership we don’t always have to
agree we’re not always going to but how
can we just put some extra effort into
it because if we don’t do that along
some of these migration corridors we
will slowly lose them because we won’t
be working together to identify
solutions find common ground and
and mend those fences you know those
differences there are also specific
things I mean think about fences and
roadways and habitat conservation and
sensible development not we’re never
going to develop anything but just we
need to use landscapes like this wisely
and carefully and work in sort of common
cause to do that great well thank you so
much Arthur where can people go to find
out more about what you’re working on
people can go to my labs website at the
University of california-berkeley the
Middleton lab were in the department of
environmental science policy and
management I work at the Buffalo Bill
Center of the West and Cody Wyoming in
the summer that’s my sort of summer lab
so to speak they can come see us at the
Buffalo Bill Center in Cody or finally
I’ll say the Wyoming migration
initiative I’m affiliated with stone and
Laramie Wyoming they got an amazing
website Facebook pages and research
coming out all the time
for example that doe mule deer who’s up
here spending the summer here you can
see updated maps of her movements and
sort of follow along and root and root
for her and other migrating animals so
go to Wyoming migration initiatives
website and social media amazing and
then NatGeo society our friends over
there also have a great initiative that
is all about kind of like helping out
the species here in Yellowstone it’s
called beyond Yellowstone definitely go
check that out we’ll put a link to it in
the comments down below they’re really
great and of course be sure to tune in
for Yellowstone live starting this
Sunday at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo and Nat Geo
Wild Arthur you’re going to be in a
little bit – yeah I guess if I if I
sound get an
you are great you are great yeah go
watch it I’m gonna I’m gonna watch it
too amazing thank you so much guys thanks for watching everyone bye
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