I visited Yellowstone NP in 2011 after I left the RSPB and headed off on a mind-cleansing road trip across the USA where I did a lot of thinking. But it wasn’t just thinking, it was an opportunity to see a lot of fabulous landscapes, meet some great people and see nature that I had never seen before (see also here, here, here, here).
This week there have been three evening TV programmes about Yellowstone presented by Kate Humble (who seemed very enthusiastic about a particular male bison). I thought they were really good although Kate’s co-presenter Patrick Aryee didn’t add much to the programme. There were, though, some really good US cameramen and scientists involved in the series which was a cut above average nature programmes and explored some interesting areas which included climate change.
Towards the very end, Kate said ‘We’ve also seen a bigger picture unfold as scientists try to predict what the future for Yellowstone will look like as climate shifts‘ and the three programmes all had shown evidence of a rapidly-changing climate and suggested lots of impacts on Yellowstone’s wildlife, but this message was rather watered down with her last words of ‘but if there is one thing that all of Yellowstone’s animals share it’s their incredible ability to adapt to extreme change, and this will give them the best possible chance to survive whatever the future brings.‘. Yeh right, tell that to the Pikas!
It was a shame that after three pretty good, science-based programmes such a soft, limp ending had to be inserted.
Because I was sensitised to mentions of Yellowstone thanks to these programmes, I was interested to see this issue of brucellosis in Bison. The Bison got the disease from cattle originally but now they are culled routinely if they stray out of the National Park because of risks to cattle. Bison from Yellowatone would be good candidates for reintroduction stock for other areas of the USA if disease-free. What appears to be needed in order for Yellowstone Bison to be used to repopulate other suitable prairie lands in the USA is a quarantine facility to ensure that Bison destined for reintroduction projects are disease-free. WWF-USA say that the National Park Service is dragging its heels on this.
I would love to go to Yellowstone, but I’ve written so many angry tweets about US citizens (lack) intelligence, their racism, their appalling attitude to wild animals and the horrors of the Trump election, that I fear they wouldn’t let Mr into the country.
Kate’s piece at the end of the programme provoked a rant from me, I’m afraid. I delivered an alternative ending to my long-suffering other half. I do hope Martin Hughes-Games didn’t go into meltdown.
I feel quietly confidant that, in the end, even the Pika will manage to pull through. It is a relative of the rabbit and El Ahrairah will look after them. /Watership Down moment.
But yes, I agree with every word written. At least all but the worst climate change skeptics in America have changed their tune on Climate Change from their previous stance of it isn’t happening to their new stance of okay it is happening but it is just natural/Jesus-led climate change and not human led. It is progress, they are only forty years behind now instead of one hundred and forty. Whether we’ll get them up to speed in time to do something, I don’t know though.
I’ve noticed that a few mainstream press articles last year have been in the tone of man made climate change is happening and why didn’t scientists and ecologists warn everyone, of course the reply is they did, so the great mass of the apathetic middle-middle class is waking up to an issue and giving their usual response of shirking all responsibility for inaction and blaming activists and experts for not shouting hard enough. That is generally step one to getting something done though.
‘Jesus-led climate change’.
That’s a new one.
Blimey, does that mean The Second Coming is due quite soon?
What’s up with my name? Is that some sort of divine intervention?
Many of the American religious church going folks, the “common clay of the New West” if you get my drift, believe that climate change can only happen if Jesus lets it happen. That is why they resisted the evidence for so long, but now they’ve accepted the evidence that the climate is changing they are declaring it is because Jesus is preparing the Earth for his second coming. Since there is no talking them out of the Jesus controls everything personally mindset, the trick is that now we’ve got them accepting climate change to get them to maybe think that Jesus is just testing their ability to put everything back and live more sustainably.
Really good point Random – why didn’t they warn us ? Well, in his 1969 Reith lectures Frank Fraser-Darling said ‘there is a much greater change to which we are contributing, this time in the planetary atmosphere.’ He was referring to man-made global warming. Not 40 years ago, 58 years ago and in a very public, not a corner of science, setting.
‘…their incredible ability to adapt to extreme change’
Yes a rather simplistic conclusion – these animals can withstand extreme cold in winter and high temperatures in summer so how can climate change possibly harm them? Well, the programmes gave plenty of clues – long-tailed weasels whose change of pelage colour is triggered by day-length could find themselves uncomfortably exposed to predators by an early snow melt, grizzlies woken early from hibernation by unseasonable warm weather and then struggling to find food, great grey owls unable to catch rodents beneath an unbreakable hard crust on the snow surface, caused by partial melting on warm days followed by nightly re-freezing… All of those are things which presumably have always happened from time to time as winters vary in how long and hard they are but they could become seriously problematic if they start to happen more frequently.
Of course the Yellowstone Caldera could blow in which case these problems would cease to be of much concern…
For a Beeb production I thought this was surprisingly honest about the impacts of land use change. Surprising that precious water is allowed to be used for irrigation for the support of cattle grazing in Yellowstone, given its fragile hydrology.
As for the Pikas – pity they can’t tell us how they managed to survive the 1930s. But they can’t and they did, so we might instead refer to Jim Steele’s “Landscapes and Cycles” (2013) ch.10 pp.141-154 or Smith and Nagy (2015) https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article/96/2/394/902669/Population-resilience-in-an-American-pika-Ochotona for enlightenment.