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Hi, everyone.
Welcome back to the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Conservation
Connect.
My name is Chelsea McKinney, your host
as we explore various conservation
careers, new species, and different types of technology
that conservation professionals use to observe wildlife.
Today we're coming to you from Blackwater National Wildlife
Refuge in Cambridge, Maryland, on Maryland's eastern shore.
Here, where tidal wetlands meet the waters of Chesapeake Bay,
wildlife is abundant.
Shore birds, marsh birds, and crabs are all plentiful.
Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge
is just one of more than 560 National Wildlife
refuges across the country.
These special protected places are home to osprey, eagles,
water fowl, and one endangered species
in particular, the Delmarva fox squirrel,
which we'll learn about today.
These guys are not your typical squirrel.
They're bigger in size and behave differently
than squirrels you might see in your backyard.
Today, I'm with Dr. Carol Bocetti,
a professor at California University of Pennsylvania,
and Dr. Cherry Keller from Chesapeake Bay field office
with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Dr. Bocetti has been working with the Delmarva fox
squirrel recovery efforts for 18 years.
That's probably longer than most of you
have been alive, which means she knows a lot about this species.
Dr. Keller is a Delmarva fox squirrel recovery
lead for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
She's working with Dr. Bocetti and with Dr. Meredith Bartron
to develop a genetics tests to identify individual squirrels
just from their hair alone.
It's so nice to meet you both.
Nice to meet you, too.
Nice to be here.
Dr. Bocetti, may I start with you?
Can I ask you to tell us a little bit about the Delmarva
fox squirrel and what makes it so unique?
Yeah.
It's very unique because for one thing,
it only lives on the Delmarva Peninsula.
It likes these wet, very mature forests.
And that's the last thing that's unique about this species,
is that it is really committed to these mature forests
where you can see very far in the understory.
That's what they prefer.
Dr. Keller, can you talk to us about how
it became an endangered species?
Yeah.
Originally this squirrel was everywhere
on the Delmarva Peninsula.
The reasons we think it declined in distribution
were there was losses of forest as forest
was being cleared to agriculture.
And there was a predominant focus
on raising trees for paper, which is small timber.
And so trees never got to be the big mature forest
that you see here.
The other part is there was some over-hunting in the early parts
where people were squirrel hunting for subsistence
for dinner.
In the 1940s and '50s, some of the early records
said the Delmarva really filled a skillet.
And that was one of the reasons when you're
choosing between a gray squirrel or a Delmarva for dinner,
I'm afraid you might pick the Delmarva.
But hunting has been control now and hunting is better
regulated now.
So it's in better shape now, for sure.
When it was listed, the first thing
that recovery team folks did is-- working with their state
partners-- is take squirrels from a place like Dorchester,
where they're very abundant, and start new populations
on the landscape in other areas of their historic range.
And that was done 16 times.
And 11 of those are still successful today.
And that's actually a very good success rate
for an endangered species.
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Now as a biologist, it's really important we
know what the populations are doing.
What kind of technologies are you using as a biologist
to keep track of how many Delmarva fox squirrels there
are in certain given areas?
Yeah.
We do a lot with technology, actually.
So we use live traps and we go out
and capture them and we put marks on them and release them
in the same place.
And then we look to see when we come out again how
many of those that we marked did we capture again.
And we can estimate population size
through an analysis called mark recapture analysis.
And I'll show you the PIT tag that we use.
If you can see, it's only about the size of a grain of rice.
Wow.
And PIT stands for passive integrated transponder.
And it's so tiny because it doesn't
have to have an energy source.
And so we need a reader, a transponder reader,
which is the energy source.
And it sends a signal and bounces back off of this,
and this sends it a bar code.
And that bar code identifies the individual.
And it's the same technology that you see in the grocery
store, actually, when you scan an item across then
you hear that beep.
Yep.
That's telling the register charge them
for this particular item.
Well, we do the same thing.
We put the reader over it.
It says beep.
And it tells us an individual code
that says this is this particular squirrel.
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So we just caught a squirrel.
We checked to scan it to see if it had a PIT tag.
It did not.
So they're injecting a PIT tag in right now.
We've scanned it here.
So this is a PIT tag scanner that
reads a special ID number that allows
us to identify that individual squirrel.
So we are now working with some hair snags
where we can pull hair-- the tail hair, the long tail
hair from a squirrel-- and in the follicle
is enough genetics, enough DNA, to actually allow
us to identify the individual.
And our hope is that we'll be able to then
tell individual animals and really
be getting a sense of how many individual animals are
in the woods as well as their presence.
What is it that we can do, what our viewers can do,
to help protect wildlife?
Well, I think the Delmarva fox squirrel
is a good example of taking an interest in a species
and just paying close attention and observing.
Maybe your viewers can find their own species
that they're passionate about and bring the next species
closer to coming off the endangered species list.
Absolutely.
Well, you guys have already sold me.
I'm already attached to Delmarva fox squirrels, too.
Thank you.
It'll never go away.
Oh, good.
Thank you both so very much for being with us today.
You're very welcome.
Sure.
It's good to be here.
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How awesome is the technology that
allows us to study wildlife?
Scanners, PIT tags, and genetics using animal hair
are all important ways biologists study wildlife.
It's amazing when we can combine our passion using the latest
technology and our love of wildlife
to help protect these fascinating creatures.
We'll see you next time on the US Fish and Wildlife Service's
Conservation Connect.
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