While in the field around the US working on 'Eating Aliens' I often saw animals that did not officially exist in the places where I was seeing them. Grant's gazelles running wild in Texas were one of the more dramatic examples. There are a lot of other species native to north America whose ranges I have noticed in the field do not seem to line up very well with the official party line.One native example is the black bear. I have seen similar maps used on many otherwise credible websites showing the range of the black bear along these lines. But it only takes a moment to prove that this alleged range of the black bear is incorrect.
I know Virginia's wildlife very well, so lets look at the Virginia portion of this supposed range. The map shows the bear's range coming sharply down the middle of the state, just west of Loudoun County in the north and continuing down to the west of Richmond and Brunswick County. These maps sure do make it look like black bears aren't likely to be found much farther east than Charlottesville or Richmond.
Yet we have solid data from the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries proving that this is wrong. A dead bear, brought physically into a check station by a hunter, is a pretty good indication that bears are present in a particular county. At least a few bears are being tagged most years in Loudoun and Brunswick Counties and even in the City of Virginia Beach, waaay out of the alleged range. Suffolk, almost 100 miles outside of the official range, had 22 black bears killed last season alone.
Black bears are in fact very well distributed throughout all of Virginia, with the sole exception of much of the Delmarva Peninsula. The harvest data proves this, without even getting into the questions of trail camera photos or other sightings that don't result in a dead bear with a state inspection.
The farther away that you go from hard science sources, the more ridiculous some of the claims about black bear ranges get. This hunting site displays a range map for black bears which appears to almost completely exclude Virginia. Defenders of Wildlife, a serious organization, limits the range to what looks like only about a third of VA (look to the right side of the page). This is a perfect example of (unintentionally, I believe) false information being used as part of advocacy for policy-making.
This is just one species, in one state. It got me thinking that there could be a whole lot of other species whose ranges and populations densities are actually very different from what the official data visible to the public represents. This cannot be good for environmental policy-making.
What happens when some staff person for CITES needs to make a judgment call on whether a species merits additional protection? What about a legislator about to vote on whether to open or close a season for hunting an animal? What about land-owners wondering whether there is a species they need to be concerned about in the area before cutting down trees or brush? Bad maps and bad data like what we find with the bears is much of what they will encounter and it will result in bad decisions.
I ran into some problems with this stuff while going through the editing process for 'Eating Aliens.' I'd get asked about what someone in a white lab coat thinks about whether a particular invasive animal is present or how it got there. But as much respect as I have for the guys in the white lab coats, wildlife does not live in a test tube. We are very good at tracking and studying the animals that we know are out there but by definition we lack good data on the wildlife that we didn't expect to be there in the first place. Personally, I don't believe that we necessarily need a federal study in order to start responding to an ecological problem and I don't believe that someone needs a Phd or a badge from FDA to determine whether they are looking at a snakehead in the bottom of their boat, or a cougar staring them down in the Virginia woods.
Even when a group of biologists knows what is going on (for example, DGIF's own maps show a very sound assessment of black bear ranges), the system overall is apparently not very good at disseminating this information accurately among other stake-holders, advocacy groups and the public in general.
I would guess that these inaccurate bear maps are probably just decades out of date, but who knows? Maybe these maps were never correct. I bet that they'll still be used ten years from now. It is so much easier to grab and copy a map from someone else's book or website and use it for whatever you need than it would be to actually confirm the data. In this age of 'content farming' the accuracy of information has nearly zero value to most of the internet.
The fog of war applies well to making sense of the distribution of wildlife. Its all too fluid and complex and deliberately hidden by the subjects themselves for us to ever have a perfect understanding of what is out there in nature. Which is part of what makes zoology so much fun.
[Photo copyright 2010 by Jackson Landers. That's a bear track I found. In Virginia.]
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