How did I get here?

[Eric Burnham is a Senior Research Associate at NMSU. His research takes principles from trace explosive detections to detect rare and elusive Mexican Gray Wolves non-invasively. He's currently running a crowdfunding campaign to extend his work from captive wolves to those in the wild. Consider checking out his project page --->]

I've been interested in wildlife since I was a kid. I grew up in Colorado, and part of the year, my family would live in the mountains west of Boulder. I would often see animals such as coyotes, elk, deer, and porcupines. I became interested in gray wolves after reading a book by Barry Lopez entitled, Of Wolves and Men. I also visited Wolf Haven International in Tenino, WA around that time. I found the story of wolves in North America to be very compelling because they had been entirely extirpated from the lower 48 states in the early 20th century, and there was (and is) an on-going effort to reintroduce them. They are also one of the most well understood animals in science, while simultaneously being the most misunderstood by human culture.

As I learned more about this highly intelligent animal, my desire to know more about them increased. I had many questions - why were they exterminated in the lower 48 states? Why had they developed a reputation for being ferocious, and dangerous toward humans? I was not happy with my career choice as a custom furniture maker, and I knew that I had always been far more interested in science and wildlife. I decided to go back to school and get training to become a wildlife scientist. I felt that becoming a scientist was the best way for me to help with wolf reintroduction, given my set of skills.

In the winter of 1999/2000, I found myself working for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service north of Jackson Hole, WY. I was monitoring wolf pack locations, and also working on a study of wolf prey selection. The goal of the study was to find out which elk the wolves were taking. Were wolves focusing on healthy, adult males; or were they focusing on the very young and the weak? It turns out that they were taking late-in-the-year calves, and old, sick, and/or injured adults. I have a few stories I could tell you about that field experience, but the most important thing that happened was I had a new idea: would it be possible to get information about wolves from their scent left behind in footprints, hair, or scats? Scent dogs can do this, of course, but I wondered if technology existed that could also do this. I wondered what information was available in a scent; for example, could one determine the age of an individual? This would be really exciting to know, because if you could tell how old individuals were in a pack, then from that, you could infer other things. You could determine whether the animals in a pack were mostly old, and maybe the pack wouldn't survive much longer. There could be even more information, such as whether a mother was nursing pups, whether an animal had cancer, or how inbred the individual was. This possibility was, and continues to be, very exciting to me.

As I read more about it, I found that the answer was - Yes, there is technology that can do this. I contacted Dr. Gary Eiceman, who is the world's leading expert on portable and hand held devices that measure trace amounts of chemicals in the field. Dr. Eiceman was very interested in my ideas, (most analytical chemists are not interested in wildlife, generally they are interested in traces of explosive materials), and I moved with my wife to Las Cruces, New Mexico. I got my M.S. at New Mexico State University in Wildlife Science. For my thesis, I demonstrated that closely related canids (foxes, dogs, and coyotes) could be classified by species using analysis of volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) over scats with 82.4% accuracy. This technique was far less expensive and faster than DNA-PCR, which is the prevailing technology.

At present, I'm working on identification of individuals, and prediction of age and gender using scats from captive wolves. I don't yet have the final results, but they do look encouraging so far. If this is successful, it will provide a new means for estimating the population size, and structure, of free-ranging wolves.