Goats, Rams and Conflict at Earth’s Edge, with Joel Berger

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with wildlife conservation biologist Dr. Joel Berger about the challenges of conservation in a changing world, as well as conflict between mountain goats and bighorn sheep over mineral resources uncovered by a changing climate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Like co host Joe, is
still out on parental leave, so today I'd like to
present a brand new interview episode. Today's guest is Dr

(00:26):
Joel Berger. He's a senior scientist for the Wildlife Conservation
Society as well as a professor at Colorado State University.
He has decades of experience exploring biological diversity around the
world and his author of several books, including Extreme Conservation,
Life at the Edges of the World from Most recently,

(00:46):
he was an author on the paper Species Conflict at
Earth's Edges Contests, Climate and Coveted Resources, published last month
in the journal Frontiers and Ecology and Evolution. So we'll
be discussing that's study its findings, as well as some
broader issues in bio diversity and conservation. So without further ado,

(01:07):
let's jump right in. Hi, Joel, Welcome to the show.
Rob great to be here, Thanks for inviting me in.
You bet so. For listeners who are not familiar with
you or your work, how did you initially become interested
in conservation biology and where has your work taken you
over the decades. So I grew up in l A.

(01:27):
And that would not be Louisiana, was the l A
on the west coast, and a lot of people, a
lot of chaos, and I found some respite out in
the deserts, in the mountains hundred miles two hundred miles out.
So gradually, growing up, I spent more time away from people, um,
and that always felt somewhat invigorating. UM. And since then

(01:51):
I've spent um what I like to call different edges
of the planet. And so that would be the highest
latitudes where and hit sea up in the Arctic, the
lowest of latitudes, which is down in the Patagonia ice
fields where we drop almost to the well basically to Antarctic.
But I'm on land in South America. And then what's

(02:16):
called the third pole south north south. And then what's
referred to as the third pole would be the mountains
of Central Asia which rise to twenty nine thousand some feet.
So why are extreme environment so crucial to these studies,
especially so far as the impact of climate change is concerned.
So we know that Earth's atmosphere is warming, and certainly

(02:40):
at the edges of the planet is warming anywhere from
two to five times faster than it is at the
mid section. And so when we think across the realm
of environments, if we want to gain some insights into
what's going on most rapidly, it is these extreme edge environments.
And I tend to focus on the unsunk species mostly

(03:03):
that occur in these places. Not species like elephants or rhinos,
or lions or tigers or even whales, but species that
don't have much advocacy for them. Now, I know that
the list of organisms that you've you've studied over the
years is pretty pretty long. What are some examples of
some of these these creatures? So some of the ones
that might be slightly better known, So I go from

(03:25):
slightly better known to those that are lesser known. Um
So muskoks would be one, and they're um up in
the Arctic, and they're they used to roam with wooly mammoth.
Wooly mammoths didn't survive. Muskoks have long hair that drape
to essentially to their feet and helps to sustain them

(03:46):
throughout these long winters. So muskoks would be one from
the very north um over in the Himalayan realm. You
have a species called talking which are Bhutan's national mammal.
They go up to seventeen thousand feet. They have the
the remarkable distinction of being preyed on by tigers at
low elevation at three or four thousand feet, and then

(04:06):
up high snow leopards can take some of their young
and attacks, so they have the duality of a challenge
tigers and snow leopards. Um If we drop down into
the edges of the far southern tips of Chile and Argentina,
the Chilean national mammal are called why mole, and it's
the most endangered large mammal in the Western hemisphere. Large

(04:30):
and they're a type of a deer, but they have
a mountain goat nits and so they live in the
shadows of glaciers, usually cliffs and very rugged terrain. So
those are some examples. I've also worked with black rhinos
and the Nama Desert. I've worked with cariboo a little
bit in the Arctic. I've worked one of my students

(04:51):
is working with what are called large antler munchacks, which
is one of the most recently discovered large mammals in
the nineteen nineties and the Animal Mountains of Vietnam, and
so a number of these species don't have much of
a vocal backing. Another one are called saiga, which occur

(05:11):
in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and their populations um. The ones in
Mongolia are listed is an endangered species. I've also worked
with wild yaks up on the Tibetan Plateau at sixteen
seventeen thousand feet. So lots of these things are either
threatened or endangered, but many of them are not known

(05:32):
to the general public, whether we're talking about the public
and their host countries or certainly and the North American
or US public. The saiga is that is that the
one that has a very unique nose or snout. Yeah
that's great robbed Yeah. Yeah. Psychos look like part camel,
part moose, and part antelope. And they're quite fast and speedy,

(05:53):
and yeah, they've got these amazing probosis um that just
hang down on wobble. I want to come to the
study here that I think we're mostly going to be
talking about here, species conflict that Earth's edges, contest, climate,
and coveted resources. This was published last month in the

(06:14):
journal Frontiers and ecology and evolution. Can you introduce this
to the extreme environment that where this takes place and
the species observed in the field work. So amongst the
iconic and not so frequently seen large mammals again in

(06:34):
western North America are mountain goats, which are not even
a goat. They're really goat antelope, which are more related
to the real antelope that we have over in Africa.
But so those are mountain goats, but they live on
cliffs and very steep terrain. They have white, long fur
and are cold adaptive species. Also, the additional or the

(06:57):
other species in which we were witnessing direct interact since
between the two were called big horn sheep. Big horn
sheep are like sheep, big round, thick horns, and the
males smaller, little pointy horns, and the females. And the
places where we were working on these stem from Colorado.

(07:17):
The Colorado Rockies up to about fourteen thousand feet along
about a fifteen hundred mile gradient that puts us into
Central Alberta in Canada, areas to the north of bamp
and Jasper, and those are a little bit lower elevation,
only at about we'll just say, at a lower elevation

(07:39):
across the realm of where we were working on these species.
We focused mostly on the population in Glacier National Park,
but we also worked at in Alberta, also in Colorado
areas above tree line is where we were doing our observations,
and this came about. I was working with another biologist

(08:02):
named Forest Hayes and another one named Mark Beale. Forest
is at Colorado State University, giving credit where credit is due.
Mark Beale's a biologist where the National Park Service in
Glacier and we were looking for grizzly bears and using
a spotting scope and looking above tree lined because you
don't have trees and so it's easier spot animals. And

(08:24):
we kept seeing these white dots, and we were doing
our observations from about a mile mile and a half
away looking at white dots and those were mountain coats.
And at about the same time in two thousand nineteen,
we also saw gray dots and these were big horn
sheet and one was moving across the mountains from the
left to the right and the other one moving from

(08:47):
the right to the left, and it looks like a
collision path. And then they got to these brown wet
soil areas, and that was when we thought this is
going to get interesting. I wonder what's going to happen.
Both these goats, the mountain goats and the big horn
sheep are approximately similar in size, so we didn't know

(09:08):
what was going to happen. And so as these animals
were moving towards these wet grayst spots, we noted that
the goats were eating soil and the big horn sheep
would approach, but if a goat got aggressive, the sheep
would move off, and so we thought, oh, that's interesting.
We did that a little bit that day. Forest Haze

(09:29):
and I, who were working together, molded over and we
decided the next day we were going to go back
up to these high alpine zones and again look and
we saw more sheet, more goats. And this went on
for a couple of weeks across a couple of different years,
actually across three different years, and in Glacier National Park.
It was becoming clear to us, in part because we're

(09:52):
both scientists and were familiar with the literature and some
climate change underpinnings, and we knew that these areas had
been under snow when ice and glaciated not that long ago.
In fact, Glacier National Park in the last hundred years
has lost about eight of its glaciers. So this area
where we were watching sheep and goats, we were speculating

(10:14):
that these animals were using areas that had been well
They had to have been under ice and snow because
glaciers were there and precipitating out were minerals and these
would be salts, these would be sodium, it would be potassium.
And the goats and sheep were interacting over priority of access.
And this was These weren't bloody encounters nature too thread

(10:39):
and claws tennis And had said over a hundred and
twenty years ago. But they were displacements, and they were
either passive meaning an animal walks toward another and they leave,
where they were aggressive active in which an animal was
swinging its head, lowering its horns, or maybe doing some
rush charges at the other species. And at the end

(11:00):
of the day we had more than about a hundred
and twenty interactions, about only seven or eight I think
it was seven in Colorado where we saw them actively
at the same site at the same time, about a
hundred or so up in Glacier, and then another almost
twenty in the Canadian site, and what struck us was

(11:24):
the consistency. And what I mean by consistency is this
goats won something like of the interactions, the sheep just
moved off. They didn't want to deal with it. Goats
have small, pointy horns. But it may be that the
goats just don't give good signals. They just escalate real fast,

(11:44):
and the sheep wanted no part of it. Because the
big horn sheep. If if my childhood memories of watching
um nature documentaries are correct, I mean they're they're pretty
fierce looking when you see them engaging with each other
in combat. So I imagine it would be easy for
at least those of us who are not experts in this,
to assume that they could more than hold their own

(12:07):
against a mountain goat. The sheep rear up. They have
these club like horns, I mean almost like big thick hammers,
you know, the size of one's chest, maybe half the
size of one's cheffed. Don't want to be exaggerating here,
but they rear up and then they charged, sometimes reaching
twenty to thirty miles an hour, and they slam into

(12:28):
each other's horns, and then they reverberate and so we
were expecting, you know, given that they're about the same size, well,
if everything else is equal, about half the interactions, we
expect the sheep to win, half the goats to win.
People who know something about domestic goats, they just laughed
at us and said, what's wrong with you? Guys? We

(12:49):
knew that. And I'm thinking to myself and actually saying, well,
you know, I've spent three decades looking at these animals
and these extreme environments, including sheep and goats, and I
didn't know it. And maybe scientists are not always the
prescient ones in this, but our data were very very
clear because lots of times there's nuanced, lots of times

(13:10):
there's some counterintuitive results, and we didn't expect this to
happen so consistently, and it did across the three sites. Now,
first of all, are are both the big horn sheep
in the mountain goats in these scenarios and these encounters?
Are they both native to the regions or or or
is there an invasive layer to this? Yeah? Real good question,

(13:32):
rob Um. So big horns are native from essentially parts
of north central Canada or central British Columbia all the
way down into the deserts of Mexico. So they have
a very catholic range, meaning that a wide range of
tolerance that they can occur in deserts, they can occur

(13:54):
in mountains, they can occur in alpine zones. Mountain coats,
on the other hand, are elusively a cold adapted species,
and so when Lewis and Clark first arrived here, we'll
put it this way, their native ranges would have been
from central Idaho, Montana, Washington all the way up into

(14:15):
Alaska and the Yukon in a small part of the
Northwest territories. So cold adapted they occur in some of
the coastal ranges of Washington UM and certainly in Alaska UM.
But since different Fish and Game agency states in the
US have introduced goats into places like Oregon, where it

(14:37):
maybe it's a little controversial because there's some arguments that
they were once native there, But we know that they've
been introduced into Utah, introduced into Nevada, introduced into South Dakota,
and introduced into Colorado and Wyoming. And that's where some
of this gets interesting, because different parks manage exotic species differently.

(15:00):
The Tetons, for instance, Institute of the program where they
would remove the shape of the goats which are introduced
or an exotic species in the Tetons, and so they
were removed by harvest by shooting in the Yellowstone area.
Goats are not abundant in Yellowstone Park, but they're more

(15:20):
abundant in the Yellowstone ecosystem, and the Park Service Yellowstone
in particular has a different strategy than the Tetons, and
it's more lazy, fair, just letting things go until they
perhaps know more about it. Olympic National Park over in
western Washington, goats were introduced there in the twenties and

(15:41):
they've been removed mostly by helicopter removal, so not lethal means,
but non lethal means. Now, what are the what were
the reasons for introducing the mountain goats to these areas.
Goats were introduced by fish and Game departments for harvest,
so like in South with Dakota in the nineteen twenties,
they were introduced into the Black Hills. I don't remember

(16:04):
the years at which they were introduced into Nevada. They
were introduced into Colorado in the late forties. UM today
with a focus also on bio diversity in addition to
big game, there would probably be more studies done about
potential impacts of introducing these large mammals. For instance, moose

(16:27):
have been introduced into Colorado in the early in mid seventies,
it may have been the late seventies. And moose, of
course are riperian dependent species, and so they affect willows,
they affect cotton woods, and they affect neotropical migrant birds.
But when these initial introductions occurred, both for mountain goats,

(16:49):
for moose and some other species, there was far less
attention on biological diversity and more is providing a resource
for people, either for a trophy, animal management, for bringing
some trophies home, or for meat meat on the table.

(17:13):
So in this scenario again we have we have mountain goats,
big horn sheep and the mountain goats are essentially out
competing for the same resource. And you mentioned that the
goat farmers and people familiar with with with goats lived
with goats were not surprised that the goats were winning
out here, and and a certain certainly brings to mind

(17:33):
examples of invasive or fairal domestic goats taking over various
areas and thinking specifically of like the Galapagos islands. Is it?
What is it do you think about? Or what is
known about like the the sort of nature of the goat,
Like what is it about the goats? Um Either it's
morphology or it's like tenacity, like what why does it?

(17:56):
Why does it win out? Why does it seem to
win out in these instances? Provocative question um so. One
idea goes as following um so, and I'm going to
focus on again big horn sheep and mountain coats. I'm
talking about native species and not stepping aside because maybe
we'll return to feral species or so. Big horn sheep

(18:17):
have an array of ways at which they communicate, and
they're very visual, so they have a very diverse behavioral
repertoire as to how they interact. Um. Goats are part
of a more primitive lineage and their ancestral origins are
over into Central Asia as our sheep origins, and then

(18:40):
further over into the Mediterranean amidiest But the goat lineage
and the mountain goat lineage in particular, the species that
are ancestral, they don't have a lot of behavioral diversity.
They don't have a lot of signals um and so
they escalate very fast, and the escalations are with their
horns either a thrust headlow rush, and I'm not sure,

(19:06):
and people haven't looked at this, and so this is
either wild hypothesis telling to fit with stuff to blow
your mind, or it's um maybe some speculate, well, it
is some speculations on my part, but without the potential
for signaling and recognizing other signals. What we see is
that the goats escalate fast, the sheep want no part

(19:30):
of it. And I want to point out that these
are for what we refer to as a biotic resources,
those not of a biological nature. So when we talk
about the competition and the behavioral or social interactions between
bighorn sheep and between with mountain goats, what we see

(19:51):
is that the species are clumped around those dirt patches
that I talked about the moist soil, and this is
again referred to as a mineral lick, and these are
very patchy and distributions, sometimes they may be ten or
more miles apart. So the animals go to great length
to access these, and the goats just having a more

(20:12):
aggressive nature, they don't mess around, and the sheep have
somehow figured that out and they back off. So I
know this. This probably brings to mind salt licks and
and so forth with some of our our listeners, but
for many others we might might be a surprise to
hear about this conflict over things that are are not food,
that are not a biological resource. So, how how rare

(20:36):
is this in general a biotic resources being feuded over
by organisms? However rare is it in human observation? And
how rare do we think this sort of thing is
in the wild? So um our paper which you did
refer to, and thanks for referring to that, we focused
on for a biotic resources, which will describe in a moment.

(20:57):
Actually i'll describe them now. We focused on shade because
if one's ever watched a dog or a cat, or
a horse or a cow or a domestic goat, it's
getting warm, the earth is warming up. Shades an important
way to try to adjust one's thermal abilities to regulate

(21:17):
um So shade was one snow patches, which are disappearing
at a more rapid rate at high elevation. Is the
second one mineral licks or a third one. And at
the outset when I had mentioned we were working at
the extreme edges of the planet you think about deserts.
So the fourth a biotic resource our water holes springs

(21:38):
in the desert, which of course are important because many
species need water, not all. So are four a biotic resources.
We selected because they're discreet and we could measure them.
When is shade available? Are there no shade trees? If
there are shade trees, can we observe interactions between different
species for access in shade? Do larger species when same

(22:03):
for water in the deserts? You know, we have I
mentioned and you mentioned rob domestic goats getting loose, becoming feral,
and we have certainly in the American West thousands and
thousands of feral horses and ferreal burrows, and there are
feral pigs, and so our interest was trying to understand
the nature of interactions for these very limited resources, what

(22:27):
we're calling coveted resources, so mineral licks at high elevation,
UH water and deserts shade. We were able to observe
a few interactions, and those were mostly over the Kalahari
Desert in the Nama Desert where rhinos displaced some antelopes.
But we only saw that those interactions very few times.

(22:48):
You had asked earlier, how rare is this doing these
kind of observations. I think we got lucky and at
the outside I said, we were looking for grizzly bears,
and so there was a lot of serendipity to what
we are doing. But science has a let of serendipity,
just like all of us as humans. It's like which
is the path we pick their serendipity. Going back though,

(23:09):
to minerals at high elevation and the conflicts that we
were watching between sheep and goats at some level, as
the climate is changing and warming, we see parts of
the Arctic where surface the surface structures are being exposed
now because we no longer have ice and perma frost,
and so the same kind of patterns that we're watching

(23:31):
for sheep and goats are not that different perhaps than
what we're seeing with the eight countries that have access
to the Arctic Ocean and Arctic resources. And we know
Russia has over the last ten years either reconstituted or
built new military basis in places where that they didn't
exist in the past, or fortified those. China now has

(23:55):
a cruiser ice breaker that they use in the Arctic,
even though they're not an arctic country, and so thinking
about mineral resources and access and conflict. UM, maybe there
are some lessons that can be learned from sheep and goats. However,
the good thing about the sheep and goats is that
they're not killing each other over the stuff. I'm not

(24:17):
sure I want to think forward ahead of the next
fifty years what we might be doing with those resources
as humans. So do you think that this, uh, this
this scenario, this conflict over the resources, like we can
sort of we can hold it up kind of a
mirror to human activities and and how we fit into
the into the natural world and it's resources as well.

(24:40):
So I'm going to answer at two levels. I'm going
to point out first and foremost that our observations were
over different species competing for a limited resource, and so
that is referred to as inter specific or differences between
species competing for the um drawing in the analogy for humans,

(25:03):
we have certainly different geographies as humans. We live all
over the world, we have different cultures, we have different
belief systems, but we all have the same fundamental needs.
It's usually security, it's food, it's mates, it's shelter, and
so as we continue moving beyond the eight billion that
we're at now, it's inevitable that we're going to end

(25:26):
up competing at some level for some of the same resources.
I mean, obviously, even though I'm looking now within species
and not between the same patterns, the same competitive interactions
at one level, whether it be combat, whether it be bluff,
whether it be escalation or de escalation, we see the

(25:49):
same things within species of other non humans, or we
also see this between species. Fascinating. Yeah, I know that
some of the I saw some of the coverage that
came out about this study was even referencing mad Max,
saying that this is like it's um, it's sheep and goats,
but but mad Max. Uh, there's some pretty cool analogies

(26:11):
in this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. People have had some fun
with it, and um, I mean, we have enough challenges
in the world having some fun, even though I believe
I'm a serious scientist, actually I know I'm a serious scientists.
But being able to laugh at oneself, being able to
you know, try to appreciate the humor or the similarities
or the differences, I think it's a good way to go.

(26:34):
Oh yes, and if it draws somebody into to look
at a study that someone who might not otherwise you know,
be interested in it, than all the better. Yeah, just
thinking about shade. If I can go a little bit further, so,
there have been studies done in Africa of of both primates,
some chimpanzee, certainly elephants using shades um to either access

(26:56):
minerals or sometimes for cooling. And as are as I know,
and I could be wrong, I'm wrong all the time,
but as far as I know, UM, we don't know
if in fact shade use in these caves results in
one species being displaced by another. Um, you know, maybe
setting up some camera traps and people are now starting

(27:17):
to do that, we may have some better, better insights
into those kind of interactions, but for the time being,
you know, for my colleagues Mark and Forest Hayes and
I uh, it's been observational, even though we use camera
traps and other things that we do. Yeah, it's it's
this is this is so fascinating and the whole all
the details to about like communication between the sheep, communication

(27:40):
between the goats, and then this kind of communication breakdown
and there and then escalation and by the goats because
they are these are not species that are going to
normally be in any kind of robust communication with each other. Right, Yeah,
you know, I kind of think about it in the
way that UM maybe some of your listeners will be
able to think about how cats and dogs respond to

(28:04):
each other. And sometimes, you know, dogs will have a
different I mean, even within breeds of dogs, there are
different kinds of communication systems, and so maybe a cat's
not going to be reading a dog and the dog
has a certain intent or vice versa. Sometimes the signals
are pretty clear. Sometimes they're not for us with the
sheep and the goats, maybe not as clear than now.

(28:32):
In your long career documenting different organisms and different environments
around the world, and we we we listed some of
them earlier. What sort of perspective on the threats facing
the natural world have you been afforded? Like? What? You know? What? What? What?
What kind of vantage point has it given you? So
I've worked both in UM places that are very remote

(28:55):
and then places that are less remote. And in the
less remote places, the challenges are mostly how we don't
destroy habitats or how we maintain habitats, trying to understand
the extent to which restoring species if they've been lost
can be a good idea, but the word conservation means people,

(29:19):
and it means attitudes, and so there's a lot that
has to go on involving people and our ability to
be tolerant or to think that we're not the only
species on the planet that may be deserving opportunities to live.
And then in the remote areas, the challenges are very

(29:41):
different their climate challenges. As we watch the edges of
the planet come come under a lot of greater variants
with storms, well, just like we see in Florida or
the East Coast or the West coast, we're certainly seeing
that at the edges of the raw edges at the
planet as well. We have gas, we have mining, we
have mineral exploitation. A lot of that makes some sense, um,

(30:05):
but the question really comes down to what do we
want the future to look like? What do we want
ten years from now? Can we project out twenty or
thirty years? And if we can, how do we make
that happen? Who has to get on board? So, thinking
also about some of the challenges and remote areas and
certainly areas beyond the US, one of the remarkable problems

(30:30):
that people don't see very much is that there are
a lot of feral animals out there, and I think
about across the globe, we have something like seven hundred
million dogs. And I think about dogs free roaming in
places like the Tibetan Plateau. I think about dogs free

(30:51):
roaming in the Gobi Desert and impacts on endangered species.
I had mentioned waymole, which is the most endangered large
mammal in the western Atmisphere down at the tips of
Argentina and Chile in the Andes. Free Roman dogs, feral dogs,
not native causing lots and lots of issues and problems.

(31:11):
And there are a lot of cultural differences based on
what societies were in and how we view things. And
so some countries choose a lassa fair approach and won't
touch it, and other countries will be pretty aggressive and say,
let's give some of these native species a chance because
they didn't evolve with dogs of coursing predator, uh of

(31:33):
coursing feral predator. So so, lots of issues out there
in terms of other kinds of challenges that are biological
challenges that still fall back in the conservation realm. But
would you say that we have we have better tools
at our disposal now to aid in these conservation efforts.
Is it more about public will or or governmental will?

(31:54):
I think when we consider, like the three major challenges
in the realm of natural resource, at least I look
at three. Climate change, of course is a huge one.
A second one I will call biodiversity crisis, because that
goes to land degradation, it goes to removing chunks of
the planet, it goes to our plastic issues. But so

(32:16):
I look at climate change is one, I look at
bio diversity, and then I look at will say, one health,
one world, one health with disease. We think about COVID,
we think about ebola, We think about these other challenges
that emanate from wild species or could from wild species.
But it's how we're treating the planet. And so your

(32:38):
question is do we have new tools? We certainly have
much greater recognition of of the issues. And then, of course,
as we all know as citizens of the planet, the
challenges are how are we going to solve these? And
you know, where are we making progress? And we are
making progress and in certain places, so where we're making

(32:59):
some progress is stunning. And I wouldn't have thought of
this about twenty years ago. But we're rewild. In Europe.
We've got brown bears coming back into places. We've got
links that are colonizing and being put back into places.
We've got wolves that are into Germany. We've got an

(33:21):
area the size of California that maybe has a couple
of packs of wolves. I'm not sure Italy has over
thirty five hundred wolves with its sixty million people. UM,
so we can look into Europe. In this country, blackfooted
ferrets were extinct in the wild. We've now got blackfooted
ferrets in a number of Western states and as well

(33:41):
as in Canada, as well as in Mexico. Contours were
extinct in the wild. We've now got condoors in northern
California and southern California. We've got condoors in Mexico, contours
in Utah, condors in Arizona. UM, we've got although wolves
are certainly polarized. If you go back to the nineteen seventies,

(34:04):
the only wolves that we had were in the northern
Northern Woods. Now we've got wolves in many of the
Western states. Grizzly bears are expanding in Wyoming, expanding in Montana,
expanding in Idaho, in Washington, and so you know, we
can we can go with birds, we can, you know,

(34:24):
pick a wide array of different species, and we're looking
at lots of successes and that's because the people demand it.
And that's one of the nice things that we see.
And for much of this it's not even a partisan issue.
We've seen successes because irrespective of political standing, people want
bio diversity, they want healthy ecosystems, they want wildlife. Now

(34:47):
you're a There are several books that have come out
over the years, the most recent of which is Extreme Conservation,
Life at the Edges of the World. Can you tell
us a little bit about this book? Sure? Um, So
Extreme Conservation hits extreme environments and the species that lived there,
which must subsist and so they have to have special adaptations.

(35:11):
So this book works through thirty three different expeditions that
I did to different parts of the world, and so
not just one or two, but also working with local people,
learning from local people, listening to local people. And so,
for instance, we once worked with this convicted felon who
is a rhino poacher and his sentence was three years

(35:32):
on a conservation project, and so we learned from him
and subsequently we brought him to the US to learn
from US, and he exported and he's now back in
Namibia and he's leading an NGO non government organization. We
worked with a fellow named Freddie Goodhope Jr. He had
a lot of fun with me. He would say, Joel,

(35:53):
my ancestors and I have been here for ten thousand years.
You're a newcomer, but we'll keep you warm and make
sure or you're safe up here in the Arctic. And
so I weave through dealing with the UH the people
who I've learned from and how they have perceived in
their injustices that have come their way and their successes,

(36:17):
but then also the challenges that we've faced as conservation
biologists in the magnificent work that's being done in other places.
I spent some time on a Russian island called Wrangel Island,
where I was arrested by Russian security forces. But the
Russian scientists I worked with didn't want me arrested. They
wanted to work with me in the field. We had

(36:38):
US government and Russian money to look at science, to
look at climate change and how to do conservation. And
so just like in this country and elsewhere, people are
people in my book tries to deal through the eyes
of animals, but then through some of the learning that
I've done and the challenges of what it takes to
have cold feet on the ground working in some of
these places that can be quite brew at all excellent.

(37:01):
So Joe, for our our listeners out there, if they
want to follow you, if they want to learn more
about you and your work, where can they go online?
They could go to my website And so it's just
all the same, um lowercase Joel Burger Conservation dot com.
No spaces Joel Burger Conservation dot com. No spaces and

(37:25):
actually no spaces just means no spaces. All right. Well,
I greatly appreciate you taking time out of your day
to chat with me here today. This is this is
all fascinating, uh and I know our listeners will greatly
enjoy this. Rob Thanks and stuff to blow your mind.
What a great show you have. Thank you. Thanks again

(37:46):
to Dr Joel Burger for taking time out of his
day to chat with us again. The study is Species
Conflict at Earth's Edges, Contests, climate and coveted resources. The
book is Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World.
And you and check out his website at Joel Burger
Conservation dot com. That's j O E L B E
R G E R Conservation dot com. That's it for

(38:10):
this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Just a
reminder that our core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Monday's we do listener Mail, on Wednesday's we do
a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on
Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to
set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
weird film. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone out

(38:30):
there about this episode, past episodes, or future episodes. Uh
so feel free to get in touch with us. Thanks
as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show,
and if you do want to reach out, you can
email us at contact and Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of

(38:56):
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