Wildlife Scientists Are Having a Field Day On Ted Turner's Western Ranchlands - land provides place for melanism research - Brief Article

National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 1998 by Tom Dworetzky

Joe Truett knew there was a unusual variety of western diamondback rattlesnake in the Pedro Armendaris Lava Field where he was conducting his research; other people had previously reported seeing some of the reptiles there. But on this scalding summer day in New Mexico, the biologist was still surprised by what he saw after finding one of the creatures beneath some scrubby debris. "Normally, these rattlers are sort of sandy colored, but this one was black," he recalls. "It was unlike any diamondback I had seen before."

Scientists like Truett know that some wildlife living among lava rocks have evolved dark skin or hair color--a phenonmenon called melanism--to blend into the unique habitat. "It seems that melanism in diamondbacks has cropped up in the Armendaris area only," says the biologist. "The Armendaris is isolated from the other major lava fields, where diamondbacks are not particularly dark."

For Truett, the rattler was just one of many examples of melanism and other wildlife adaptations he saw during a recent one-year study designed to describe the unique and diverse community of desert reptiles and mammals that live in this seemingly inhospitable place.

Covering nearly 200,000 acres of the arid central New Mexico basin, the Pedro Armendaris Lava Field was formed by volcanic eruptions 760,000 years ago. Today, the eastern half of this unusual ecosystem falls under the jurisdiction of federal land managers. The western half lies within the boundaries of the sprawling Armendaris Ranch, one of three New Mexico ranches owned by media baron Ted Turner.

While Truett's melanism research is not revolutionary, it does represent Turner's commitment to a new approach to managing privately held lands. Biologists such as Truett have been hired to describe and inventory the flora and fauna on many of the 1.3 million acres of Turner land holdings in six states. These inventories allow Turner ranch managers to accurately assess the impact their land-use decisions will have on native species. "It's extraordinary for a ranch owner to fund biodiversity studies," says Truett.

The Turner biodiversity program is indeed one of the largest privately funded research efforts of its kind in the world. Among other things, it allows various environmental projects that are aimed at introducing or restoring endangered and threatened species to some of the ranches to move forward. "This program is part of a long-standing commitment that the Turner family has made to wildlife conservation," says Montana-based scientist Mike Phillips, who worked for more than a decade for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on programs to reintroduce gray wolves and red wolves to their former habitat.

Today, Phillips is the executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund (TESF), a nonprofit private charity founded by Ted Turner in 1997. The TESF is part of an umbrella trust called the Turner Family Foundation, which last year committed considerable financial resources to such scientific efforts as the Pedro Armendaris Lava Field study and to a variety of projects designed to help restore some imperiled species.

"We want to show our neighbors that being good stewards of the land and caring about endangered species is not that difficult to do," says Turner. "A lot of people do not want endangered species on their property because they don't want to have to deal with federal and state agencies. But we've found that dealing with these agencies in the spirit of cooperation is not a pain in the neck at all."

Recently, Turner's staff at his Ladder Ranch in New Mexico provided facilities for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to acclimatize endangered Mexican wolves before releasing them into the wild. Meanwhile, on a portion of the Armendaris Ranch, the TESF staff is currently researching the possibility of introducing black-tailed prairie dogs as part of a plan to bring the endangered black-footed ferret to the area. "The ferret, which spends much of its time in burrows underground, is a poor digger," notes Phillips. "So it lives in prairie dog burrows and without them it is out of luck."

Whether such projects can succeed remains to be seen. But Truett believes that at least in the case of the lava field, the research will unquestionably pay off. Understanding the resources of the area, he says, "offers a unique opportunity for a private landowner to preserve and manage an unusual place."

California journalist Tom Dworetzky wrote about dust mites in the August/September issue.