How much has the U.S.’s wildlife changed since Lewis and Clark?

Ever wish you could have been part of the Lewis and Clark expedition? Us too. The Corps of Discovery came across scores of plants and animals that were new to Western science: Grizzly bears, ponderosa pines, a “barking squirrel” that William Clark would later call the prairie dog. A modern effort is underway to see how much the country’s wildlife has changed in the 220-some years since their journey. Host Nate Rott https://www.npr.org/people/348779465/nathan-rott tags along with some scientists re-surveying a part of the expedition’s route in western Montana. And he wishes he was in better shape. Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:18Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Hey, Short Wavers, it's Regina Barber here and to my co-host here, Nate Roth, and my family, Gina B.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Gina B., good name. Gina, you're super hip with the times, right?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  That's what my teenage daughter says.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe it. You've probably heard that it's the 250th birthday of these United States of America?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Yes, I live in DC and I did escape the Fourth of July, actually. But yes, I was very aware. Fireworks everywhere.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Fireworks forever. All sorts of institutions are doing stuff to celebrate this year. And one of them that we're going to be talking about had a very specific challenge. They were tasked with finding a way to commemorate the 250th scientifically.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  OK, how do you do that?

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Well, that's exactly what Bill McShay was thinking when he got asked.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  It was, well, there weren't any ecologists back then. You know, what part could we play?

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  So Bill works for the Smithsonian's Conservation Biology Institute, which is part of the National Zoo, and he's a wildlife ecologist.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  You know, I do wildlife surveys around the world.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  So he's sitting here with this question. What is he going to do? And he's stumped.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  And then it came out of the back of my brain.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  There was a major scientific-ish expedition in early American history. Gina, do you know what that was?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  I don't know yet, but I loved the music and I loved his enthusiasm. It just came out of my brain.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, just wait till you hear how dramatic this next bit is.

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  To the average American of 1800, the West was a void, a black land of desolation, from whence no man foolhardy enough to march into it might return. But two Americans did lead a party into the bleakness, setting down the facts of the wilderness.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  There were people there, but I'm guessing it was Lewis and Clark because, you know, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I know all about these guys. I hear about them all the time.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Yes, they are everywhere in the Western US. Every trailhead, every street, you name it.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  And the more I looked into it, the more perfect it was because it was the first systematic natural history survey of the Western United States.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Bill came up with this idea. What if we did another systematic survey of that same stretch of land 220-some years later, retracing the route to see how much wildlife in the country has changed?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I want to do it. I want to go.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  The good news is you can, because instead of sending a specialized team to do the survey, this time around, they're recruiting regular people like you and me and some scientists who are living along the Lewis and Clark Trail path.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  We want people to be aware of the wildlife around them and how it's better or worse than what it was 200 years ago.

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  So today on the show, we tag along with one group taking part in a massive scientific expedition, resurveying the Lewis and Clark Trail.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Put on your hiking boots, Gina, because it's about to get steep.

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  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:59Speaker 01

  OK, Nate, I have my hiking boots. Where are we going?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  OK, we are going to western Montana. Outside of the town of Lolo, we're near the Idaho border, and we're with three scientists from the University of Montana, my alma mater. Go Grizz.

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  I'm Andrei Dinu, Romanian master's student.

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  I'm Maddie Turani. I'm an assistant professor of co-ecology at the University of Montana.

• 5:21Speaker 08

  I'm Catherine Garrett. I'm a Smithsonian intern working on the Lewis and Clark resurvey.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  OK, I love this crew. They sound like super excited, smart people.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  They are certainly much smarter than me. I will give them that. So let's start walking, Gina.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  So just to set the scene for you here, Gina, we're on a dirt road surrounded by pine trees. The sun is out, so we're mountain bikers.

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  OK.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Morning, guys.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  And we are surrounded by these orange butterflies that are fluttering all around us.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  So many butterflies. I know, they're so beautiful.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  It was incredible.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  OK, what kind of butterflies are swarming us right now?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So they're California tortoiseshells. I had to look it up afterwards because it was like surreal and magical.

• 6:09Speaker 06

  I feel like we're walking in like a fairyland.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  But let's not let the butterflies distract us, Gina. I'm saying that mostly to myself.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  We are here to survey bigger animals. And to do that, we need to get to this GPS point that Andre is mapping us towards on his phone.

• 6:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, at some point, we'll have to go up on the right.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  OK, so is this GPS point someplace that Lewis and Clark went through 200-some years ago?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  It's around where they went. So this resurvey is being done within a 50-mile buffer around the Lewis and Clark Trail from Pittsburgh, where they prepped. That's not where the real journey started, it started in St. Louis. But they're doing this resurvey starting in Pittsburgh, and they're doing it all the way to the Pacific Northwest, your homeland.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Cool, yes.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  So this is one of the areas that they did pass through. And I actually feel a little bad visiting this spot in particular because Lewis and Clark and their expedition got stuck in these mountains on their way west during an early-season snowstorm. They nearly starved, like literally had to eat a couple of their own horses.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Right, that's very scary. And you're like, butterflies.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, you know, there's a little bit of a contradiction there.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  But we're doing serious things here, Gina. It's serious science. So what we're doing is we're trying to set up these motion-activated camera traps, the kind that you could buy at just about any outdoor store. The Smithsonian is having teams leave them out in these grids around the trail for two months this summer and fall to snap photos of whatever walks by. And Maddie says those photos will be uploaded to this big public database and processed by AI.

• 7:45Speaker 07

  It will give us species ID. It will give us individual ID for some of the species. So it's really convenient as well.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love how like we're blending the old camera with the new, like these AI programs.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and what's so cool about these camera traps is they'll probably take photos of animals that Lewis and Clark didn't even see on their expedition. Because one of the shortfalls of observational ecology, Maddie says, you know, that is a person who's out in the field looking for wildlife, is that some animals don't want to be seen, right? Makes sense. They're camera shy. So camera traps are much more demure than a big party of people, and they're definitely less smelly than a group of early explorers.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  True.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  What do you think you're going to see?

• 8:29Speaker 08

  Hmm. What do you think, Maddie?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Black bears.

• 8:33Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Andre is really hoping to see some wolves. Maddie wants to see some smaller carnivores.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Like hawkses, maybe badgers.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Lions and fish.

• 8:46Speaker 08

  Martin, hopefully.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Were all these species ones that Lewis and Clark saw?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So this is actually kind of wild, Gina. Like, I didn't know this before going into this reporting. Lewis and Clark described at least 178 plant species during their expedition and more than 120 animals. I say at least because some of their journals were lost. Many of these species, like the grizzly bear, were new to Western science.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And I say Western because obviously Native Americans were living there and knew about them before. But it was new to European ancestors.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, definitely, they were known, those animals. But I never thought of like Lewis and Clark as like scientists that were taking this data.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, to be fair, they weren't scientists. They were both in the military. But, you know, Lewis was given a crash course in botany before the expedition because one of the goals of this whole journey, besides finding a passage to the Pacific Ocean and sizing up all the new land that the US bought in the Louisiana Purchase, was to document the natural resources of the Western US. But enough history lessons. I think it's time for us to go off trail.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  That's how you get eaten.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And Gina, like, I want to be honest, I don't know if this was really the best way.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  I guess this is the thing when you have the random points and you have to reach it. Have to do a bit of.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Bushwhacking?

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. And just think, well, it would be the better way.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds like a rough hike.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Dude, it was so rough. Like, we went straight up a mountain.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  All right, I'm gonna take a break at this rock, take my hiking boots off.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Now imagine doing this in like leather breeches.

• 10:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly, in a snowstorm.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  So we scramble up this mountain, like literally scramble. Crawling on hands and knees to get up.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're breathing pretty heavy there, Nate.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Dude, I was definitely feeling the elevation and it wasn't even that high, but I'm just live at sea level, so it was killing me.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Because we have to feel a bit of what they used to feel back then.

• 10:50Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  Struggling and...

• 10:54Speaker 08

  We're getting the experience.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  At least we know where we are more.

• 10:56Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  So at this point, Gina, we're close to the GPS point, Andre says, and that means that we just need to find a good place to set up the camera trap, ideally like a game trail.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Right, like places you're gonna catch wildlife.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Exactly, gotta catch them all, Pokémon, right?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  So a bit further up, we find this like flat mid-slope area where Andre notices some overturned rocks.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  I wouldn't be surprised if this is just moved by the bear to look for insects and stuff.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Oh, that rock?

• 11:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, something big would have to move it.

• 11:29Speaker 06

  They used to, they usually do this with even bigger rocks, but just with the fall.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I mean, I've seen Jungle Book. I know how this works.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, gotta find those bugs.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  So was this a good spot?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was as good as we could find. And so Kat starts getting out all of her gear.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  And then she hangs the camera trap at knee height. That's the standard the Smithsonian is having everyone use. She does that on a tree. And then to test if it's working, Andre walks a bit down the trail and, uh, well, listen to the tape. Andre, for those who can't see, is crawling around in the brush like a bear.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I mean, this sounds like real, hands-on, scientific method, you know?

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Yes, it is the essence of science.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  So after a bit of adjusting... Cool, we did it.

• 12:17Speaker 08

  I can boogie back.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Now you just gotta do what, 15 more?

• 12:21Speaker 08

  15 more here, 40 more somewhere else, 50 more somewhere else.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude. But who's counting?

• 12:28Speaker 08

  No one's counting.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Okay, I have a question. So this camera trap is going to take photos in the summertime.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  But Lewis and Clark went through this area in the winter, like...

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Also right.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So won't that mess up the results if they're trying to compare wildlife today versus 220-some years ago?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, it definitely will. And that's one of the first questions I asked Bill about, the mastermind of this whole project, when I talked to him after this little foray. And here's how he put it.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Is this cutting-edge science? No, this is not cutting-edge science. This is a lot of fun, a lot of fun that has some value to it, you know, informing people of what's there, what they have, what's still left, what's come back. That's all, that's all of value to the public, even though it's not cutting-edge science.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  So what are the major changes he's expecting to see?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, one of the obvious ones is bison, right? There used to be bison all over the Great Plains. Now they only exist in small patches. There's obviously a lot fewer apex predators like wolves and grizzly bears and all that that are on the landscape. Rivers have been dammed. The Missouri River, which they travel down, is dammed numerous times. And there's a lot more people on the landscape. But Bill says, big picture...

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Things are better today than you think, that there's more wildlife out there than you think. And, and it's distributed in a lot of places that include people. That, you know, you don't have to have wildlife in one place and people in another, that most of our wildlife live with people and, and we get along just fine.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Wow, that's surprising and good to hear.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, Bill's hope with this whole thing is that scientists and wildlife managers can then use all of the data they collect.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  I think we can use the good places to inform the bad places.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And he thinks that's particularly true for Native American communities, which have, you know, a very different view of the Lewis and Clark expedition than a lot of history buffs do.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  I think they have much better wildlife communities than a lot of the land around them. And this is an opportunity for them to highlight that these reservations have done a better job with preserving their wildlife than a lot of us Westerners have done. And I, I hope that point comes across.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Wow, Nate, this was all super fun. I'm glad you survived the hike and took me on this virtual hike. I really enjoyed it.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Gina B., thank you so much for joining me on this expedition.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Shortwaveers, we would like you to follow us. We don't want bears to follow us, but we want you to follow us on the NPR app or wherever you're listening to your podcasts.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And I'm actually cool with it if bears want to follow us, but this episode was produced by Burley McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. I'm Nate Rot.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave on NPR.

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