By ROB CHANEY
of the MISSOULIAN

GREENOUGH, Mont. (AP) - Deep inside Lubrecht Experimental Forest, death lies inside an electrified fence.

For more than two years, a pack of carnivores has been decomposing under the watchful eye of Carleen Gonder. Piles of maggot casings rim shiny skulls, fangs bared before mummified fur faces. A hiker once stumbled on the site and thought she’d found a zoo gone literally to hell, assuming the 15 bear, wolf and mountain lion bodies had been abandoned to starve in the woods.

Not true, although the truth is only slightly less ghoulish. Known to her friends as “the Carcass Queen,” Gonder has spent all that time monitoring exactly how those bears, wolves and mountain lions return to the dust from which they came.

Gonder has spent most of her adult life defending wild places, as a game warden, park ranger and firefighter. In that time, she’s come across scores of abandoned carcasses.

Once, as a lone federal game warden patrolling Washington’s Hanford Reach, Gonder knew finding a pair of beheaded mule deer meant trouble. Years of woodcraft and detective skills led her to the spot where the poacher had taken his shot. That recovered a shell casing and a boot print. Modern communications got the word to other wardens, one of whom had just found a suspect with a questionable trophy mule deer rack.

Everything seemed wrapped up, except one unexpected detail. The suspect told his arresting officer - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent Steve Magian, now a game warden for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks - that he’d also shot six elk. Could Gonder find them, too?

The simple answer was yes. Gonder found the rotting elk carcasses. The hard part was connecting those dead elk to the suspect poacher. Could she prove the elk were killed at the time the suspect was in Hanford Reach?

The complex answer is also yes: There’s a field manual showing how to tell the time of death for most major game animals. It’s full of stomach-turning photos showing how quickly insects start laying eggs, how soon flesh starts bloating and when it stops. There are bizarre tricks for hooking muscles to car batteries to see if they’re less than four hours dead, and charts to test the reflectivity of drying eyeballs.

A good investigator can get almost the hour of death on a carcass less than four or five days old. The only thing missing from the field guide is whether all these techniques also work on the carnivores that hunt game animals.

Because dead carnivores don’t show up at game check stations or hunting camps. They’re found deep in the woods, days or weeks or months after dying. In the wildlife world, they’re the classic cold cases.

“Everything is geared to ungulates,” Gonder said. “But carnivores are hunted too, legally and illegally. I wanted to do the same thing, but look at carnivores.”

So she decided to take off her Yellowstone National Park ranger’s hat and become a student again. At the University of Montana, she put together an interdisciplinary studies program that combined biology, criminology, anthropology and curiosity. For supervising professor Dan Doyle, the mix was as fascinating as it was unique.

“What Carleen’s doing has been pretty groundbreaking,” Doyle said. “I haven’t seen anything in the literature that covers the times or kinds of species she’s done. And I’ve never seen someone able to do so much with so little.”

By that, Doyle explained that other researchers assumed such a project would require $100,000 or more in research expenses- something requiring big-league grant support.

Instead, Gonder talked some Missoula-area hardware dealers into donating fencing and supplies for a couple of big kennels, along with the gear to electrify the walls. A little solar panel mounted on a tree provides enough electricity to deter any bear or eagle that tries to get at the “fur puddles,” as Gonder refers to the remains. The Association of Midwest Fish and Game Law Enforcement Officers contributed funds.

She also had to get wildlife-handling permits from three states: Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. No animals were deliberately killed for her study. All came from roadkills, livestock protection or other unrelated incidents. Once her network of game wardens and other law enforcement friends got wind of her project, specimens started showing up in Lubrecht Forest.

“When I was a game warden, I always wanted this kind of training,” Gonder said. “I figured others would be hungry for this stuff. Stuff is getting shot and left all the time, and you need all these bricks to build a case. And how much time does a game warden have to go around pounding on doors? Until I did this, none of this had been done with carnivores.”

The potential cases are limited only by experience. There’s the rancher who claims he shot a wolf that was harassing his cows. Does the time of death match the time he was running cattle in that area? There’s the guy who says he had nothing to do with a dead grizzly, except he was working a logging contract in the area the same week the bear died.

For every legitimate incident, there’s a poacher with sophisticated hunting gear and expensive lawyers ready to dispute the evidence. Whether it’s disagreement with federal protections on endangered species, the thrill of hunting a fellow meat-eater, or a sick need to torture animals, game wardens have no shortage of suspects to chase.

If these cases involved dead humans, there would be lots of science to back up a prosecutor’s charges. Television is full of “CSI” dramas detailing the techniques detectives have of making dead men tell tales.

And real prosecutors have large binders of instructions for teaching jurors what can and can’t be believed about “body farm” evidence.

In poaching investigations, that kind of standardized fact-finding has been scarce. Until now.

Gonder’s work has revealed many unsuspected facts. For example, in many parts of the United States, insects will consume a dead animal’s hide and expose the bones. This is called skeletonization. But in Montana’s dry air, the hide may dry out before the bugs can devour it. What looks like a month-old carcass in other regions may be a year old in Montana, because the body mummifies before it skeletonizes.

An animal that’s covered by snow within hours of death will decompose much differently than one simply exposed to freezing air. Gonder discovered that some mountain lion bodies she placed in her pen the day before a big snowstorm remained unfrozen a week later. The snow refrigerated, but did not freeze the flesh, just like an igloo keeps its occupants chilled but pliant. Although she lacked the proper monitoring sensors to confirm this, Gonder believes the snow-covered lion bodies may have remained unfrozen all winter. That greatly disrupts the typical model for carcass disintegration.

“There are so many unanswered questions here, things that need more work,” she said. “If you chop the head off, you’ve provided a massive entry point for insects. If you field-dress or quarter it, that all affects the rate of decomposition. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Gonder said the decision to restart her career track has led to many sleepless nights. Its one thing to be a broke college student with a 4Runner that needs a brake job. It’s another to be a 62-year-old broke college student.

“I’m just looking for work right now,” she said last week as she prepared to remove the skeletons and pull down her enclosures. She’s defended her master’s thesis and completed her paperwork, so the academic effort has borne fruit.

One member of Gonder’s academic committee is Dave Oates, who wrote the field manual for time-of-death standards for game animals. He heads a wildlife research lab in Nebraska.

She is also supervised by UM professor Ashley McKeown, an anthropology expert who’s done research at the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, which studies how humans decay after death.

Now Gonder’s challenge is to make the rest of the law enforcement world pay attention.

So far, it seems to be working. Gonder and a handful of associates have already put on two training seminars detailing her discoveries. The first one, in 2007, filled up in two weeks, drawing 58 people from state and federal agencies.

The second one, last summer, filled up in two days.

“The thing about this is it has immediate, practical applications,” Doyle said. “A lot of what we do is basic science, and the results are hard to see.”

Unless you know how to look.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

JOSEPH COLEMAN
Associated Press

LIMA, Peru (AP) - Countries on both sides of the Pacific have reason to be very afraid of climate change. Rising sea levels could swamp coastal farms, higher temperatures wipe out entire species and increasingly violent storms exact a widening human and financial toll.

But at this week’s summit of 21 Pacific Rim nations, global warming is barely on the agenda. In its place: the financial crisis.

“The interest and focus on climate change has dissipated somewhat,” said Woo Yuen Pau, CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Financial issues are a natural fit for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, or APEC, which includes the United States, China, Japan and Russia, among others. Its annual summits traditionally focus on nuts-and-bolts issues such as spreading free trade and bolstering regional networking.

The agenda is often driven by the host nation, and in Australia last year, that meant global warming. APEC leaders in Sydney signed a non-binding agreement to improve energy efficiency and increase forest cover.

Expectations for a follow-up at this year’s meeting, which was officially beginning with a dinner Thursday, are rock-bottom.

The Pacific Economic Cooperation Council announced Wednesday that climate change was the summit’s No. 7 priority, based on an annual survey of regional government officials, business people and academics. Last year, it was No. 4.

Among the issues ranking above climate change this year: trade talks, food and energy security and reforming the APEC bureaucracy.

Top on the list was, of course, the credit crunch on Wall Street that has sent global markets plummeting. Many of the APEC leaders attended a summit in Washington last week at which 21 major economies pledged tighter cooperation to battle the financial meltdown.

Even as the leaders converged on Lima, the pain continued: Global stock markets tumbled Thursday and fears of a protracted recession sent Wall Street to it lowest point in five years.

Advocates say that despite the immediate threat of a global depression, climate change could become a much greater problem in the long run. If it isn’t dealt with now, they say, it will be far more costly down the road.

“We do not have any more time to defer the transformation of the way we do business,” said Rick Duke of the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York.

But there has been little urgency among world leaders of late, in part because of the expectation that the new U.S. administration will radically change course in environmental policy.

Outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush has argued that addressing global warming could hurt the economy by imposing costly pollution controls on businesses. The International Energy Agency estimated in a June report that the world needs to invest $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But global warming activists say such measures could in fact hasten the end of the economic downturn, for example by weaning major economies from fossil-fuel dependence and developing renewable energy.

President-elect Barack Obama’s team agrees with that view, according to Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Clean energy investments and making the economy more efficient - they see that as a key part of the economic revitalization strategy,” he said from Washington. “The solutions to global warming are the same things as the solutions to the economy.”

Such solutions could include large-scale development of solar energy, refitting factories to emit fewer pollutants and run more efficiently and pumping carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs in a process known as carbon sequestration.

Eileen Clausson, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said from Virginia that business leaders in the United States are increasingly on board with Obama’s plans to tackle global warming.

“You are talking about activities that are going to end up creating jobs,” she said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

How can you sleep Peter Garrett when the whales are dying?

When is the Australian government going to get serious about saving the whales?

The Labor government of Kevin Rudd came into power a year ago on the crest of numerous promises to the people of Australia. One of those promises was to get tough with the illegal activities of the Japanese whaling fleet.

As someone who has spent a lifetime defending whales, I have to say that the performance of the Australian government in regard to the defense of the whales has been dismal and impotent. There has been plenty of posturing and posing, meetings and diplomatic ping pong but the plain simple truth is that the government has done nothing at all.

The Japanese whaling fleet is at sea, steaming south with the intent to slaughter the same number of whales as they targeted last year. 935 threatened Minke whales and 50 endangered Fin whales.

The verdict is plain - Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett have failed to convince the Japanese whalers to budge an inch on their illegal activities.

The Japanese intend to kill endangered whales in an established whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling and in direct contempt of an Australian Federal Court ruling specifically barring Japanese whalers from killing whales in the Australian Antarctic Territory.

They are giving a finger to Australia as they pass by on their way south. They arrogantly view Australians and New Zealanders with contempt. They know that the elected officials of both nations lack the courage, the passion, the motivation and the desire to do anything that might harm trade relations with Japan.

But the politicians have a problem. Australians and New Zealanders deeply love the great whales. Aussies and Kiwis have both the passion and the desire to protect the whales. In Australia last November they voted for a government that would take an aggressive stance against the whalers.

What they got has been appeasement, excuses, and the politics of retreat.

And they have made it clear that as defenders of the whales, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is no longer welcome in Australia.

Since October of 2005, Sea Shepherd has been based in Australia in our campaign to intervene against illegal Japanese whaling activities. From 2005 until December 2007, we were able to enjoy support and encouragement from the authorities.

All that changed with the election of Kevin Rudd and the appointment of Peter Garrett as Minister of the Environment.

Over the last year, it has become quite evident that using a passive aggressive approach, the government is working to force Sea Shepherd to take our ship elsewhere.

We continue to enjoy the overwhelming support of Australian citizens and it is only because of that that we believe Sea Shepherd has not been directly ordered to leave Australian shores.

Why do we believe this?

From 2005 until May 2008, we were given a free berth in Melbourne. We were then told that the berth would no longer be available and the only place we could go would be the commercial docks at $59,000 per month. The decision was made to move the ship to Brisbane where another dock was secured.

This was after Sydney harbor made it very clear we were not welcome.

We have also been told that we could not dock in Fremantle in Western Australia.

Upon arrival in Brisbane we were told we could not use the dock we had arranged because we were too large, despite the fact that larger ships than ours had used the berth. In fact the vessel that had just left was much larger. We were forced into a commercial dock at $500 per day. This means we have to pay some $80,000 dollars for a berth at the same time we delivered nearly a million dollars worth of business to port by hiring local contractors to construct a helicopter deck, install a new hydraulic crane and to outfit the ship with new boats.

It is frustrating to be fighting to protect and defend the whales and Australia’s multi-million dollar whale watching industry and having to pay $80,000 just to have the ship stay at a berth that would otherwise be unoccupied.

In March of this year, I was struck by a bullet fired from the Japanese whaling ship. I was saved by the Kevlar vest I was wearing. Because of the threat of gunfire, I decided to provide my crew with Kevlar vests and requested permission to have them sent to Australian Customs to be brought onto the ship at departure. The request was refused thus directly endangering the lives of my crew.

When I landed last week at Sydney Airport, I was detained upon arrival and questioned for an hour and a half. They wanted to know what my agenda was, who I would be seeing, what I would be doing, where and when. They had a file on the desk of media clippings on Sea Shepherd, yet they said it was just a routine questioning.

The police have visited the ship to question the crew about our activities.

The Federal police last week sent a message to Australian Director Jeff Hansen in our Perth office requesting he come in for questioning. He did so and was asked what our plans were.

We have been told that should we return to Australia after the campaign we may have to pay “duty” on the ship for staying in Australian waters despite our Dutch registry. This would be in the area of $300,000 to $400,000 dollars.

Our application for charitable status has been in limbo for more than two years. This has cost us a great deal in loss donations.

At the IWC meeting in Santiago, Chile when I attempted on a few occasion to speak with Peter Garrett, he turned and walked away and refused to speak with me.

One of his aides told a member of the Australian delegation that they considered Sea Shepherd to be “an enemy” to the interests of Australia.

It looks like we will have no choice but not to return to Australia after this campaign.

Almost half of our crew will be Australian this year.

It seems to me that if the government of Australia is not willing to honour it’s promise to the people who elected them then they should at least allow the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to do the job the government should be doing, but refuses to do.

Whales are being killed, international law is being broken, whale defenders are being assaulted and shot at and the best that Peter Garrett has to offer is to allocate $6 million dollars for non-lethal whale research to show the Japanese that such research can be done without killing whales.

Of course the Japanese know this but what Mr. Garrett does not seem to understand is that the whales are not and never have been slaughtered for “research.” They have been killed for commercial profit - plain and simple. The Japanese are not interested in research that does not turn a profit.

It would have been better if the $6 million had been allocated to save the diminishing populations of Tasmanian devils. This allocation of funds is not going to save a single whale.

Or better yet, Mr. Garrett should have allocated some of that money to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society Steve Irwin to allow us to be even more effective in our interventions against illegal Japanese whaling activities.

Of course that would never do - to provide support for a group that is actually protecting and defending whales instead of hanging banners and talking about saving whales.

The Australian government needs to get serious about protecting the whales and honouring their pre-election promises to do so.

Associated Press

DALLAS (AP) - The wife of Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday she’ll create a refuge for wild horses, after the federal agency that manages the animals said it may have to kill some to control the herds and protect the Western range.

About 33,000 wild horses and burros roam the open range in 10 Western states, half of those in Nevada. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management wants that population to be about 27,000, to protect the herd, the range and other foraging animals.

Those horses that are too old or are unadoptable by the public are sent to long-term holding facilities. The BLM now has about the same number of the animals in holding facilities as on the range.

The agency has said the costs of keeping animals in the holding facilities has caused officials to consider euthanasia as a last-resort.

Madeleine Pickens told The Associated Press that she has proposed purchasing around 1 million acres to be a refuge for the horses now in holding facilities and that the BLM has agreed to give her the horses once she has the land.

BLM spokesman Tom Gorey said the agency welcomes the offer.

“Right now we couldn’t be more pleased with her interest, and we hope that materializes so that we can get many of these horses out of holding,” he said.

Pickens said animals brought to the refuge will be sterilized, and she will be able to take the extra horses the BLM takes out of the wild each year as well.

“We will never turn an animal down,” Pickens said.

Pickens said she is negotiating the purchase of the land but would not say where it was. She’s also creating a foundation to help with the project.

“I feel this tremendous relief,” Pickens said. “I feel like the wagon is surrounded and instead of being surrounded by evil, it’s surrounded by people who are willing to help.”

Gorey said that while the BLM has authority to euthanize the surplus horses, it’s an option the agency did not want to have to exercise.

A BLM advisory board on wild horses was considering more than a dozen recommendations to help spur public adoptions that have slowed in recent years and to curb population growth as a way to reduce long-term holding costs.

Pickens, the child of British father and Lebanese mother who grew up in the Middle East and went to school in England and France, said she always had a love for the West and wild horses.

“It’s such a beautiful sight to see,” Pickens said. “This is our national heritage, and it needs to be preserved.”

The Associated Press