Dave Maehr (1956-2008)

(memorial written by Darrell Land, Florida Panther Team Leader, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, 18 November 2008)

On 20 June 2008, the wildlife profession lost one of its own.  Dave Maehr, 52, and his pilot Mason Smoak were killed in a small plane crash near Lake Placid, Florida while monitoring radiocollared black bears.  Dave was a professor at the University of Kentucky; he leaves behind his wife Diane and his two adult children Clif and Erin.

I first met Dave in the spring of 1984 in Gainesville, Florida; Dave was a bear biologist for the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission and I was just starting graduate school at the University of Florida.  My graduate work was completed a year-and-half later and at the same time Dave became the new leader of the state’s Florida panther team.  One of Dave’s first actions was to hire a temporary biologist to serve as a “toter and chopper” for this team.  So, in December 1985, Dave and I headed to Naples, Florida and embarked upon a decade’s worth of panther research and management together.

Dave was a strong-willed person with a tremendous inner drive to keep moving forward.  He had a low tolerance and little patience for what he considered mediocrity.  With each passing year and with each new panther publication, Dave became more convinced that a certain amount of wave-making was necessary to achieve long-term panther conservation goals. 

Dave’s tenure with the Commission began to unravel over a captive breeding program.  In the early 1990s, the panther population consisted of 50 or fewer animals.  The managing agencies decided to implement a captive-breeding program as a last-ditch effort to save the panther.  Dave and his fellow panther biologists were unhappy with this decision because it moved our focus away from addressing the root of the problem – habitat loss throughout the panther’s former and current range.   Dave was adamant that the real solution was to provide opportunities for natural panther population expansion through large-scale conservation initiatives rather than micro-managing a relict population composed of wild and captive panthers. Unhappily in 1991, Dave and his panther team began the process of removing panther kittens from the wild and placing them in various captive breeding facilities.  We completed these removals in August 1992. 

Fast-forward 3 years to Monday, 24 January 1994.  I was standing beside Dave in our office’s small library as he inserted his resignation letter into the fax machine.  One month earlier, we had received a letter from the Chief of the Bureau of Research within the Division of Wildlife that informed us that the panther capture season was on hold until a new plan could be developed.  Dave and the agency had both decided it was time to change direction. Dave had already secured a job with a local consulting firm where he was going to try to put his panther expertise to work in the private sector.  He had witnessed the confrontational relationships between private landowners, developers, and regulatory agencies and felt there had to be a better way.  Dave hoped to introduce his knowledge of panther biology and its habitat needs much earlier in the planning process so that fewer battles would be necessary down the road.  In his spare time, Dave also enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Florida, wrote a book about the Florida panther and continued his history of publishing scientific articles. 

Dave earned his PhD and accepted a position at the University of Kentucky (UK) in 1997.  I had the great pleasure of making a couple of trips to Lexington to visit with Dave and his family.  I had never seen Dave more content; he and academia fit each other like a hand in the proverbial glove.  During his brief decade at UK, Dave became a full Professor, was involved in the largest elk restoration in the eastern U.S., initiated 3 research projects on bears (1 in Kentucky and 2 in Florida), and worked on many other research projects on various vertebrates. He was also a leader of the federal Ocelot Recovery Team and an active member of The Wildlife Society. During those trips to Kentucky, I was fortunate to get to know many of his 27 graduate students and found them to be a loyal bunch, filled with the same kind of drive and passion as was Dave.  When we all gathered this past June to provide comfort to the Maehr family and to say our good-byes to Dave, I was struck by the realization that Dave’s professional legacy would truly live on through his students.

Postscript:

Remember the controversial captive breeding program?  Shortly after we removed the last of the 10 kittens into captivity, the US Fish and Wildlife Service approved the concept of “genetic restoration” whereby we could mix western puma genes into our panther population.  This genetic management began in 1995 with the release of 8 female puma from Texas and appears to have been very successful at increasing panthers’ genetic diversity.  The 10 removed kittens matured in captivity but were never permitted to breed; only one of those panthers remains alive today.

Ian Ross (1958-2003)

from Martin Jalkotzy's tribute in International Bear News, November 2003

After graduating from the University of Guelph (1982), Ian studied the impacts of industrial development on grizzly bears in northwestern Alberta. It was the beginning of an illustrious 20-year career conducting research on large mammals in western Canada. He worked on cougars in southwestern Alberta from the early 1980s until 1994. That project became one of the longest running research projects on Puma concolor in North America. The cougar project received national recognition on radio and television and Ian used that attention to foster a thoughtful and effective wildlife conservation message. He participated in drafting a management plan for cougars in Alberta as well as a conservation strategy for large carnivores in Canada. He was the senior author on nine papers in peer-reviewed journals in addition to many other technical reports and popular articles. After the cougar project wrapped up, Ian conducted environmental impact studies in western and northern Canada. He recently rewrote the grizzly bear status report for COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada). He also worked tirelessly with The Wildlife Society-Alberta Chapter dealing with wildlife conservation issues. He served as President of the Chapter in 1997. Ian also continued to capture wildlife, including grizzly bears, for research projects, and in doing so assisted many graduate students with their research. He conducted his capture work using an exacting professional approach while retaining an empathy for the wildlife he was pursuing. He cared for each individual and did his utmost to conduct captures humanely. Ian was a  committed and emotional friend and family man. Having no children of his own he was a hero to his young nieces, nephews and children of friends. He always remembered everyone’s birthdays. He hiked the foothills of the Rockies west of Calgary, as well  as the U.S. desert southwest, the Canadian Arctic, Mexico and Africa. He loved to hunt and his dinner table was a testament to his hunting prowess. His conservation ethic permeated all of his life. He did not consume needlessly and he encouraged all of us  to do the same. In January 2003, Ian returned to field research when he joined Dr. Laurence Frank on the Liakipia Predator Project, a project designed to find ways to allow for the coexistence of hyenas, lions, leopards and people in the agricultural matrix that exists outside national parks in most of southern Africa. Two days before his death he was on top of the world having collared his first leopard. On the evening he died Ian was tracking a radio collared lion from a light aircraft. Its wreckage was located by searchers the next morning. Ian Ross died at the peak of his career, doing what he loved. As he wished, Ian was cremated and his ashes dispersed in Kananaskis Country, a place where he had spent a lot of time with his cougars.

Eric York (1970-2008)

Dedication by Tom McCarthy, Science and Conservation Director, Snow Leopard Trust

It is very hard to write about Eric in the past tense, because I am so unwilling to admit he is not here. I know a lot of folks who feel the same. This is just not right. But we only get one chance to say our words about a departed friend, so I will do what others are doing and share why he meant what he did to so many of us.

I met Eric at U-Mass in the late 1990s. We studied under the same professor, he doing his masters and me a Ph.D. I was a lot older than Eric, so I should have been able to teach the kid something. But it was the other way around from the start. The first thing he helped me with was building trap cameras for my snow leopard and bear research in Mongolia, something he and others had perfected for fisher and other critters in Massachusetts. I could tell he wanted to go set the cameras himself in Mongolia, he had a serious itch to see places like that. My time with him at Amherst was brief and I headed back overseas. We ran into each other here and there, or emailed now and then, but it wasn’t until a mutual friend, Zara McDonald, suggested Eric as someone who could run our snow leopard collaring program in Pakistan for us. I didn’t hesitate to jump on that idea, knowing we could find no one better. In Pakistan it was a lot like at U-Mass, this old snow leopard biologist was ready to give Eric some pointers. But it took about an hour for Eric to again become the teacher and he changed a lot of our methods, much for the better. He caught the cats with skill and compassion, and trained several Pakistani biologists in the process. He was a natural teacher. I think it was partly because Eric didn’t “do” wildlife biology, he lived it.

Eric, my carhart-clad friend and teacher, I wasn’t done learning from you yet. We had some work (and hunting) to do. My trip to Grand Canyon got set back too long, for that I will always be sorry. The next cat is for you. Travel well my friend.