Moose in the City

There was an article in the NY Times today about a study being conducted in the Yellowstone NP and Grand Teton NP areas on how local moose are moving closer to the road to calve. Joel Berger, the study's author, thinks that moose are choosing to calve near the roads because grizzlies, recently making a population comeback in the area, are less likely to approach highways due to their association with cars and people. Also, wolves were recently reintroduced to that area, and so the moose have been adapting to increased predation. Yellowstone moose are compared to Alaskan moose, which are much more bear savvy.

I find this interesting for several reasons. First, it corresponds to the increased presence of moose here in Anchorage during winter. During the summer, most of the local moose population are up in the Chugach. Come winter, they move down into the city. So while moose still have to watch out for cars (a major threat) they don't have to contend with bears and wolves as they would up in the Chugach.

The second part of this that I find really interesting is the discussion towards the bottom of the interview. In my study of public land law in law school, one large topic was how to deal with the increased movement of people into the areas around parks and national forests. As people move further out into the urban/wildlands interface it increases stress on the environment (development and transportation) as well as brings increased risks. The main issue in California is fire suppression. It is a huge burden on the federal and state governments to protect people who build in areas that have a naturally high fire danger. We all end up subsidizing building in those areas through our tax dollars that pay for fire suppression. Another risk of building out there is discussed in this article: wildlife interactions. That's not a problem in California, because we've killed all the big predators there, but in Wyoming (and here in AK) where they have grizzlies and wolves, it's another story. Here is an excerpt:

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Q. How has the greater Yellowstone ecosystem changed in the 13 years you’ve been working there?


A. In terms of the wildlife, the big difference is predators. Before the wolves and bears came back, moose populations had climbed inexorably high. The moose battered down the cottonwoods, willows, aspens — and we lost a lot of migratory songbirds because we had these extraordinarily large moose populations. It’s been a real positive thing to see how predators checked some of that. The other change is more people. People are putting up vacation houses in these areas nearby, but they are sometimes antagonistic to the animals whose habitats they are moving in to. We used to live near Jackson Hole, and some of our neighbors would get really upset because the moose were eating their horticultural plants. Others would be terrified that wolves or coyotes might attack their pets.


Q. Can you blame them?


A. Listen, if you’re going to live in the wilderness, you’ll have wolves and bears and cougars. We have to find a way to tolerate them and live alongside them. If we’re going to ask Africans to tolerate elephants and ask Panamanians to bear the burden of jaguars, then we Americans ought to be able to tolerate our own wildlife. It’s not like we’re growing any new wild places.

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These risks from living closer to open lands are not going to go away and are part of a larger debate that needs to be had. It gets brought up in the West every time there is a large fire in an urban area, such as the fires last fall in Southern California. In my view, it is much more expensive, both economically and environmentally, to live in wild areas. Economically, people don't have pay the full costs of living in their location. The cost of fire suppression is astronomical, but that cost is not paid by those that live in the danger area. Instead, because of the huge amount of federally owned land, those fires are put out using public funds. So there must be some way, either property taxes or insurance premiums, to make people who choose to live out in the woods internalize those costs.

Environmentally speaking, diffused living is actually less healthy than concentrated development. There have been numerous recent articles about how smart, dense development is one of our best defenses against global warming because of reduced transportation costs and decreased footprint. The spread of people out into the wildlands only exacerbates pollution and increases human/wildlife contact. And we all know which side wins in that battle (ask the grizzlies that used to be extant in California).

Find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/science/12conv.html?ref=science