A corollary to Phillips’s question—what is the consequence of losing a species—is this: What is the consequence of intervening to save a species?
In this middle of nowhere, standing in the city center of a prairie dog town, and with the footprints of Turner visible in the soil next to the other animal tracks, one has to wonder: How did Turner get here?
How did a boy, emotionally estranged from his parents, raised in a strict prep school, forced to leave college prematurely, having embraced free-market capitalism to make billions in advertising and media, becoming creatively adept at thriving in the city, a pathological wanderer, preternaturally wary of trusting in intimacy—how did a person like this find his way to this intellectual terrain?
When the question is posed directly to Turner, he says, “This is where I always wanted to be. I just didn’t know it.”
“It’s difficult to predict where fate leads a person,” Phillips says, describing the day when he first presented Turner the idea of creating an entity to push recovery of imperiled species.
Turner was intrigued after Phillips prepared a white paper showing how Turner’s portfolio of lands could accomplish what government typically doesn’t. “Ted,” Phillips said, “you could give voice to imperiled species that have no voice and establish a badly needed example of the importance of private land based on two simple but critical notions: restoration is an alternative to extinction and coexistence with the federal Endangered Species Act.”
Once Turner agreed to back it financially and emotionally, he convinced Phillips to leave his government service job. Phillips proposed that they call it “The Noah Project.” It was a name that Turner rejected because he did not want it to have overt religious connotations.
“Ted was adamant. He said he had nothing against the Bible. He believed, and rightly so, that caring about the plight of endangered species should appeal to anyone,” Phillips says.
Together with Turner, Jane Fonda, and Beau, they settled on the “Turner Endangered Species Fund” and hit the ground running. Turner was excited about the prospect of having wolves on the Flying D and Phillips told him the only way they would get there is if they happened to wander there out of Yellowstone, which he said was likely.
The blueprint for TESF in the late 1990s was ambitious, and given that Turner was planning to generously underwrite it to the tune of millions of dollars annually, not unrealistic. From sea level in South Carolina to the nearly fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in the Sangre de Cristos on the border of Colorado and New Mexico, from Bozeman to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, Turner issued a simple mandate: “Identify species that need a helping hand and be that hand.”
Phillips established contacts with his friends in the Fish and Wildlife Service to make Turner’s ranches possibly available for restoration of California condors. Down at Avalon Plantation, they planned to use part of a picturesque wetland that resembles a French landscape painting as a rookery for endangered wood storks.
Phillips knew that for endangered species, by definition time is of the essence. Between 1998 and 2002 as the Fund grew by leaps and bounds, the vision of private land as beachheads of security for countless imperiled species came into inspiring focus.
But then the AOL Time Warner deal happened, and when it turned into a fiasco by August 2002, Turner had to scrap his plans. Phillips released 40 percent of his staff, talented scientists who had become important friends, and for over a year he and Turner considered daily how the Fund could emerge from the crisis in a manner that honored the spirit and intent of its founding.
Consider: the $10 million that Turner lost every day over two years would have paid for a lot of things. Just a day’s worth of losses might have funded a proposed decade-long plan to restore California condors to New Mexico. With the Turner Foundation poised to channel huge sums of money to TESF, the tentacles of recovery could have reached the Kamchatka Peninsula—the geyser-filled area known as “the Yellowstone of Russia”—where efforts were under way to safeguard some of the last wild salmon runs in the world, to the jungles of Rwanda in a big way where wild gorillas are hanging on by a thread, to saving the American chestnut tree, stopping the loss of amphibians, and pollinators.
The aftermath of the AOL Time Warner stock collapse was a time of personal and professional soul searching for Phillips and Beau Turner. They began exploring how the availability of Turner’s land—more than his money—could make a difference in conservation.
After the AOL Time Warner crisis passed, and Turner cut his ties with the conglomerate (stabilizing his net worth at just shy of $2 billion), Phillips, Beau Turner and Turner Foundation president Mike Finley established an aggressive agenda, albeit retooled. “We came out of the AOL mess with a sharpened focus. We decided to leverage Ted’s investment to achieving not only the best outcomes we could, for the amounts of money involved, but Ted made it clear he wanted to lead by example,” Phillips says. “Of course, the geographical spread of his lands and his ethic are assets worth more than any amount of money.”
Long before TESF was even established, the first two imperiled species that Turner lent a helping hand to were loggerhead sea turtles nesting on the shore at St. Phillips Island and a group of indigo snakes and rare squirrels that were released there back in the 1980s. Those efforts coincided with him putting two of the first major conservation easements in the country on the island and nearby Hope Plantation.
Along with indigo snakes and squirrels, plus prairie dogs, ferrets, and swift foxes, the Turner Endangered Species Fund is involved, across the country, with pioneering private restoration of red-cockaded woodpeckers, desert bighorn sheep, gray and Mexican wolves, westslope cutthroat and Rio Grande trout, Aplomado falcons, Chiricahua leopard frogs, longleaf pine, willow riparian ecosystems, bolson tortoises, and hundreds of other mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians—as well as thousands of species of plants, insects, and native microorganisms—that find shelter on Turner properties. He also has welcomed grizzlies to his land in Montana and supported research on Tasmanian devils in Australia, an effort to restore European wisent (bison) in Poland and Russia, and guanacos in Argentina.
In 1987, ecologist William Newmark published a paper in Nature that took wildlife managers of public nature preserves by storm. He noted that even in the cases of big national parks like Yellowstone, development pressures from the outside were converting them into ever-shrinking islands; current conservation strategies were insufficient. And in a follow-up paper in Conservation Biology, he noted that twenty-nine mammal populations had vanished from western national parks.
Newmark is revered as a thinker. He was asked to take a look at the last twenty years and conjecture on where Turner fits into the big picture. “Private landowners can play a very important role in landscape-wide conservation strategies.”
Turner’s lands function as fountainheads of life, and prairie dogs provide the most vivid demonstration of Turner’s contributions to restoration ecology. In less than fifteen years, Turner went from having around twenty thousand prairie dogs on less than one thousand acres—inherited when he bought his properties—to more than a quarter of a million spread across ten thousand acres. The notable population growth was the result of a well-considered restoration effort that involved translocating nearly fifteen thousand prairie dogs to unoccupied habitat. In typical Turner fashion, the project is the largest restoration effort ever conceived for the species.
“It wasn’t long after Dad moved full steam ahead with bison that he realized from reading natural history studies that prairie dogs needed to be factored into the management equation. In many places they go together,” Beau Turner says one evening on a porch in South Dakota. “Those little animals found a soft spot in Dad’s heart and when he gets settled on a cause, he refuses to give up.”
For Turner, it is personal: “I know what it means to be an underdog. I
know how difficult it can be when the status quo isn’t ready to accept the ideas you espouse. Until you are vindicated, it can be a lonely struggle. Prairie dogs are the ultimate underdogs. We as a species have treated them horrendously, as worthless pests, and we almost wiped them out, just as we almost exterminated bison. They are pretty amazing and important creatures, but it is the prairie where they live that has paid a huge price.”
Heroic intentions aside, Ted Turner will be the first to acknowledge that life is full of surprises. Nature is full of contradictions that test human patience and mental aptitude. Certainly, there’s something about prairie dogs that defies pat generalities.
The flats of Vermejo Park Ranch in New Mexico can be breezy and hot. It’s one of the places where Turner intends to proceed with expediting both wind and solar energy development. His largest solar array has hundreds of thousands of panels. In recent years, as the wind blasts through, the ranch has also produced something else: Huge dust storms have caused townsfolk living nearby in tiny Maxwell to complain. The airborne dirt has been catapulted off the surface of bare ground within Vermejo’s expanding prairie dog colony. Turner’s general manager of western properties, Russell Miller, talks about the discussions held over the mandate of the Turner Endangered Species Fund and the for-profit motivations of Turner Enterprises.
The conundrum presented by the prairie dogs, whose numbers have had a deleterious impact on vegetative ground cover, presents real world problems known to other western ranchers. Turner, Miller says, roots himself on the progressive side of reality and sees the problem not as a setback but as a learning opportunity, and one that will play out over years and seasons.
“In many ways,” Miller says, “the challenges at Vermejo represent a perfect storm.” Previous unintentional overgrazing at the ranch by previous cattle operators and then with Turner’s bison, combined with years of drought and the desire by the Turner organization to expand prairie dog numbers, have created immediate ecological problems that must be addressed.
Mark Kossler, Vermejo’s manager and a truly progressive thinker about the science of sustainable rangeland in the West, notes that on pasture where prairie dogs have proliferated, the amount of cool season grassland has declined from 10 percent to 1 percent. That’s a huge decrease.
It has necessitated that those pastures be given a rest. Bison have been pulled from the premises and moved to other parts of the ranch. “It’s kind of interesting and ironic, isn’t it, that here you have two keystone species that evolved together on the plains—bison and prairie dogs—and in order to have one, we have to temporarily remove the other,” he says.
Of course, historically bison would have simply migrated to more accommodating range. But the West of the twenty-first century is defined by land ownership patterns and social sensibilities that call for proactive management schemes by livestock operations like Vermejo’s.
When precipitation returns and those grasslands show recovery, bison most likely will return to the portion of the ranch reserved for prairie dog recovery, but for now they are temporarily exiled. And, in the meantime, Turner approved something that cut against his desires.
Dustin Long, the on-the-ground biologist at Vermejo working with prairie dogs and helping to set the stage for establishing a wild population of black-footed ferrets, has strategically employed nonlethal methods—and lethal only as a last resort—to continue the spread of a colony that covers nearly eight thousand acres.
Rangeland systems are dynamic, and in order for humans to reside on them, hard choices have to be made. For Miller, it comes down to the tenets that guided him nearly a quarter century ago when Turner tasked him to find properties that would be suitable for holding bison: Land. Soil. Grass. Water. Where one becomes lacking, it affects the others. The dilemma at Vermejo, however, is a microcosm within the macro picture of the West, particularly a West that, according to the best scientific models, is likely to soon be distressed by altered precipitation patterns and potentially rising temperatures due to climate change.
The interior of the West, from the middle part of this century forward (if not sooner), is projected to encounter less precipitation, less snowpack in the mountains, likely spottier rainfall and hotter average temperatures. The higher the average temperature, the more precipitation that is required to stave off desiccation in the landscape. The more that landscapes broil, the less cold season grass, and the less grass the more barren soil and dust storms. Where prairie dogs and bison fit into the altered future is still unknown. Generally speaking, the bigger the landscapes that species have access to, the easier it is for them to survive. Of course, the still-unanswered question is whether agrarians on private land will ever be willing to share their pasture with prairie dogs.
On the other hand, there are many scientists who believe that, given their resiliency on the plains, bison will provide far more advantages than cattle. Turner figures that the more bison that are out there, the more likely that the people raising them will be forward thinking, which means greater tolerance for prairie dogs and, in turn, better conditions for other forms of prairie wildlife. “Ted finds these kinds of discussions to be enormously stimulating and fascinating,” Phillips says.
When Turner acquired Vermejo in the 1990s, about seventy-five hundred prairie dogs occupied about five hundred acres. Today, more than one hundred twenty thousand prairie dogs occupy over eight thousand acres. And yet, Vermejo lags behind Bad River and the Z-Bar Ranch in Kansas in the number of prairie dogs it supports.
Conservationists have cheered Turner’s prairie dog program and the benefits it has brought to wildlife, including providing some of the best habitat in the West for black-footed ferret reintroduction. But range specialists affiliated with the livestock industry have joined neighboring ranchers in condemning prairie dogs.
“Prairie dogs challenge conventional wisdom that native species always live in balance with their habitats,” said the late Joe Truett, a respected ecologist who had been TESF’s senior expert on the ground in the southern Rockies before he died in 2011. “Over time, they may actually abuse rangeland by measures that, for many decades, have been embraced by conservationists. In particular, they reduce the condition of the range and in so doing, often dramatically lower its ability to sustain even prairie dogs or any other grazers. Unawareness of this leads to nonsensical statements by some conservationists such as ‘We need more prairie dogs and fewer cattle because cattle overgraze the land.’”
Turner is a booster of prairie dogs, Truett says, but his advocacy doesn’t override his better judgment. In fact, Truett says that all land managers, be they private or public, must prescribe what they want the range conditions to be. It’s not a question of whether humans should intervene and tinker.
At Bad River Ranch, Honness, Phillips, Truett, and Beau Turner were presented with a conundrum as they attempted to restore swift foxes live-captured in Wyoming and Colorado and transplanted in holding facilities prior to release. Swift foxes represent little threat to humans or livelihoods, a point made as TESF worked to obtain cooperative agreements with dozens of different federal and state agencies and private landowners.
“Swift foxes don’t eat livestock, they don’t show up around henhouses on farms, they don’t take down game animals, and they are definitely not a safety risk to people,” Phillips says. “They eat mice and voles and prairie dogs, and they should be regarded as friends to ranchers who want a natural form of rodent control.”
They also have two formidable predators: coyotes and, to a lesser extent, golden eagles. After acclimating to their new surroundings, transplanted foxes were released from protective enclosures positioned astride of prairie dog colonies. Slowly, they started establishing dens, and eventually a few mated pairs produced litters of kits. However, coyotes preyed upon foxes with abandon. Their survival rate also was affected by another variable: the height of grass. The taller the brome, t
he less of a clear sightline they had for spotting coyotes and evading them.
So Honness and Phillips had an idea: Enlist bison to mow down the grass and eliminate the knee-to-waist-high patches that gave coyotes places to lie in ambush. The experiment, which involved killing coyotes to reduce their density in swift fox reintroduction areas and moving bison through those same areas to graze intensively and keep the grass short, started paying dividends.
When the swift fox experiment began, Phillips said, “We had to knock the hell out of the coyotes at the beginning. Coyotes have tremendous reproductive potential, however and the amount of resources required to keep their numbers subdued is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.”
Further, because Bad River offers highly adaptive coyotes ideal habitat, it was clear that coyote control would have to be perpetual. The decision was made to halt coyote control and leave foxes to make it on their own. It was a valuable lesson learned.
Historically, the prairie was a dynamic system with ebbs and flows of wildlife distribution that followed the hooves of bison and the expansions and subtractions in the size and number of prairie dog colonies, he explains. “Without large numbers of nomadic bison, we’ve lost an important element. You can try to replicate it with bison on a big ranch, and you could emulate the grazing patterns of bison if you were a cattle rancher, but it requires vigilance. And more than that, if you are a cattle rancher it demands that you re-examine some of the things you are doing, including the killing of prairie dogs. A lot of stockgrowers out there aren’t averse to having swift foxes, but they’re worried that prairie dogs will cost them money.”
In the end, given a cost-benefit analysis, coyotes may ultimately win. Of course, if there were wolves at Bad River, there would be fewer coyotes and more swift foxes, but it would not please surrounding ranchers. To make it clear, Turner has no intention of advocating that wolves be restored to South Dakota. Although if wild lobos from the northern Rockies found their way on their own to Bad River or Vermejo Park Ranch in Colorado, he would welcome them.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 31