INTERVIEW WITH DALE NEILSON: Naturalist

WHAT IS A NATURALIST?

Well a naturalist to me is someone who is obviously well versed in nature, but I think a naturalist needs to wear a lot of hats.  In the bigger picture a naturalist is involved in the life sciences and the earth sciences.  You have to have some background in botany and zoology.  You can break it down into plant taxonomy, herpetology and the like but I think it is also important to have a background in geology and the earth sciences.  The more that you are knowledgeable in these aspects the better naturalist you are.  You can be darn sure that the naturalists in Yellowstone National Park have super backgrounds in geology.  Obviously they're talking to tourists about Grizzly Bears, Cutthroat Trout and so forth but they are also talking about geysers, hot pots .  They've got to know about that.  There are different levels.  Some naturalists are incredible.  They can talk about anything.  I've known a few folks like that.  One was Ned  Bowhart who was at the USU bee lab.  An amazing guy.  To me that is what a naturalist is.  Now there are a lot of people who at this point are what I would call enthusiasts that will eventually become naturalists when they are more rounded.   If you have someone who establishes Milkweeds in their yard, that is not enough to be called a naturalist.  So there are different levels. I'm probably a naturalist to some degree.  I'm not a pro naturalist.  I'm weak in a lot of natural history fields.

YOU'VE BEEN AT THIS A LONG TIME. DO YOU REMEMBER ANY MOMENT, TIME OR CIRCUMSTANCE THAT WAS PIVOTAL TO YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE?

There is no specific incident but rather an accumulation of a long line of very positive experiences from a lot of different people.  It kind of started out in the 1960's when my older brother was a wildlife student at USU.  He took an elective course in Entomology and he, my little brother and I, we all worked on his insect collection which was part of his course requirement.  That was really interesting to me to take all these trips into the canyons.  We had our killing jar, great big Jiff peanut butter jars with wide mouths.  We used carbon tetrachloride and cotton balls to snuff them out.  We had mounting boards and all the gear but the important thing was a lot of emphasis on recording the data. 

You had to have the insect label in the right way indicating the state, the county, the canyon and the meadow, the date of collection and the name of the collector.  All that went on the pin to never come off.  Separate that from the mounted insect and it's worthless.   I still have an insect collection from the '60's in the basement.  I actually refer to that now.  I look at some of those insects and can't believe that I caught those in that location because they're gone now.  There's a four and a half acre meadow here in River Heights.  It's actually pending for sale right now.  The reason it hasn't been developed is because it has a high water table.  You couldn't put houses with basements in it.  Everything around it has been developed, 360 degrees.  Now someone is going to give it a shot.  It sold for a million dollars.  When I was a kid, that meadow was only 200 yards from my house.  We could collect Purplish Coppers, Wood Nymphs, Alfalfa Butterflies, and several more species of butterflies as well as a lot of wild bees.  There were a lot of flowers.  Now it is essentially grass and Red Clover.  There's nothing there.  Anyway that kind of sparked my entomology interests a long time ago.  so that would have been about 1967.  

Our family has always been interested in hunting and fishing as well as the conservation side of it.  I come from a really ethical hunting family.  We didn't shoot anything unless you were going to eat it and utilize it  as much as you can.  We would do all of our own butchering and if we didn't have the hide tanned for ourselves we would sell it to Valley Metals for about two dollars.  My Dad even saved the liver.  The same thing waterfowl hunting.  We used to love to go duck hunting at the Bear River Refuge and Cutler marsh.  We always plucked our ducks and geese and saved all the feathers to make our own pillows.  We still have some now that are fifty years old.  We had a big garden.  We had water rights and we grew everything, bottled it, froze it and put up all our own food.  You had to pay attention to what you put into the system and what you got out of it.  Whether it was a hunting situation or a home gardening scenario.  That was another input.  The same thing with fishing.  We didn't buy tuna fish in cans.  We used to bottle Cisco from Bear Lake.  We used to fish Mantua in the 70's.  At that time there was not a single tree growing around the lake.  It was bare.  It went from water, to dike, to fields.  Now it is all ringed with trees.  We used to fish over there all the time.  Over time I've gotten into mushroom hunting.  We now have spots all over Utah, southern Idaho.  I think we have around eighty Morel sites.  Probably sixty or seventy Chanterelle sites and an equal number of King Bolete sites.  One thing this year was the big Cottonwood fire down in the Tushar Mountains.  We have about six sites down there for both Boletse and Chanterelles and they are completely burnt off.  In my lifetime I doubt if I will see those come back.  Those particular mushrooms don't do well in the duff when the trees are gone.  They are plugged into the tree.  In the case of the Boletes it's generally Engelmann Spruce.  After a fire the spruce don't generally send up suckers and survive but die off after a few months.  So I think our Tushar Mountain populations have had it.  Maybe my son will eventually see the day when he can pick them again down there.  

Among my influences I had some fabulous professors in the department of biology.  A lot of them were WWII veterans.  They were all my Dad's age.  If they were alive today they'd be over 100 by now.  Don Davis, Austin Haws, Wilford Hanson had a big effect on my entomology career.  When I was in high school I was hired by Doug Dewey an internationally recognized cytogeneticist and  USDA grass genetics expert to work on the farm in Millville.  That was a lot of fun and I learned a lot out there.  In the late 70's I was a part of the Bridgerland Y.C.C (Youth Conservation Corps)  group.  It was a big one that year with about fifty kids.  Skyview, Logan and a bunch of kids from Brigham that went to West Boxelder High.  We'd all meet at the Logan Ranger Station every morning and we'd all get in these old buses that were painted green and we'd go up and work on rip rap in Blacksmith Fork Canyon.  We did environmental awareness projects and worked at Tony Grove.  We built the trail from Logan Dry Canyon to the top of Mount Logan.  Which at the time was a bit iffy because we were hacking our way through undisturbed mountain meadows to the very top.  It was all staked out about ten minutes before we actually began work with Polaskis and shovels.  We were just like a living machine and built a trail all the way to the top.  I was kind of aware at that time that it was not the best approach to trail making.  Blazing the shortest way right up a hill.  A lot of those students went on to become natural resource managers, wildlife people and school teachers.  I've kept in touch with a fair number of them over the years and some still now.  I have an old photo of the crew.  Actually, next year I'm going down to the Logan Hotshot office and I'm going to take a fifty year after picture.  Not all the people will be there but the background will be and some of the old buildings.  It's interesting because at that time every morning when we got there we'd have to jog around the block to keep in shape.  It was about a mile. Everybody had to be in shape. That was a nice thing about it.  Actually one of our environmental awareness training sessions was at Logan High and Jack Greene was the speaker.   I asked him last year if he remembered that and he said maybe but he has talked to so many groups.  So it has been a combination of a lot of activities, family, friends, jobs that all kind of came together.  When I went to USU in the first quarter I registered in civil engineering.  At the time there were lots of jobs in that.  People were building dams and roads and it was exciting.  I had one quarter of that and decided, not for me and I switched to biology.  So that's the summary.

WHAT ARE THREE THINGS THAT WE HUMANS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD

Well the first thing is that it is changing all the time, if not for the better.  Stay up to date on environmental issues.  On a small local scale and on a national scale.  On a local scale considering development on open space there is a movement to always make the rules less restrictive.  More houses allowed per acre.  On steam frontage it was a hundred foot buffer.  But that was too much so it was cut down to sixty feet.  Then to thirty feet.  Pay attention to zoning and proposed zoning changes.  Ninety nine percent of the time zoning changes make development less restrictive.  On a larger scale when they talk about the size of national parks or national monuments people need to be informed on what's going on so they can provide input.  I think there is strength in numbers and I think a lot of younger people don't follow the news, or they get filtered news but not the whole story that they might act upon.  So I think ti is important to be informed about changes, small and large.  

Another thing would be that people need to know their limitations of their own knowledge and if it is a scenario where they need more help they need to talk to experts that they know.  I see cases where people will think that they can solve the problem themselves.

An example, not about environmental policy, is that if you decide to be a mushroom forager and you go up into the mountains, and you study books and you watch Youtube videos, you're part of a Facebook group and you know some really choice mushrooms and you are 95% sure.  Well you're probably better off to check with a professional mycologist just to make sure you are 100% right.  You don't want to make a mistake with mushrooms.  Actually I've seen people who charged forward and suffered the consequences.  Know what you know but don't worry about asking people who are more knowledgeable for advice.  That has been an issue when they are setting aside state wildlife management units.  They don't create new ones very often but Utah has some and they go back and forth with people who have different interests but maybe not expertise levels.  

A third thing is that you have to take action.  Action in numbers.  If you see something that is just not right you need to step in and say hey look I think there is a better way.  Or I know someone who could suggest a better way.  I'm all in favor of letting the experts get all of the glory in setting environmental policy.  It doesn't matter where it comes from as long as it is the right thing. In Yellowstone Park wolves and Grizzlies wander out of the park and they don't respect boundaries. Now the states are setting up their own hunting seasons.  The animals step out of the park and they're shot.  Something went wrong in that whole big picture.  I don't know what it was but I think the people who made the decisions didn't communicate with each other.   Just stay up to date.  Bring your own story.  Everybody has a unique experience.  It might not be much but it might have an effect somewhere.  

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE GREATEST GIFTS THAT HUMANS BRING TO THE PLANET?  WHAT CAN WE OFFER THAT MIGHT ADORN RATHER THAN THE PATH WE'VE BEEN ON WHICH IS OFTEN DESTRUCTIVE?

I think that first of all we need to look at what we have already done and build on that.  For example with the forest fires.  According to the historians they haven't been this bad.  They haven't been as intense.  I understand that climate change is involved but I think that Human impact is part of it as well.  For a while there were so many fires in California with fires all the time and smoke blowing this way I was wondering if there were any forests left to burn.   You have 80-100,000 acre fires everywhere.  There are only a limited amount of forests.  I think that land managers have the knowledge of what created those scenarios.  That knowledge is something that Humans can build on.  Basically building upon past examples.  I'm excited to see what AI is going to do in resource management.  Fortunately people are more and more conscientious about the environment.  I think a lot of people consider themselves to be environmentalists, conservationists.  So that is a good thing.  But really I think Humans need to bring in history and technology to solve current and future problems.  The problems will be big ones and there will be lots of fights over funding but it has got to be done.  

ARE THERE ANY MORAL OR ETHICAL OBLIGATIONS TO BEING A NATURALIST?

 Yes, both ethical and moral.  I think naturalists have to interpret nature in a way that they can be a conduit, a face between nature and the public.  They need to get people to know what's out there, what's going on, fascinating things to see and do.  I used to love going to naturalist talks up in the Tetons and Yellowstone.  They'd have their green uniform on and their Smokey the Bear hat and teach about all kinds of things.  We'd ask them all kinds of questions and they had an answer, a good answer.  I think that's important.  I think it is also important that naturalists are not agenda driven.  I never did see that but I think it is possible nowadays.  It was pretty much the facts.  If you surprise a Grizzly it might attack and kill you.  It's not going to be your best friend.  So one thing that I've noticed about real naturalists, at least professional ones, is they are incredible communicators.  If you look at the background of old time naturalists they were often the leads in theatrical productions in high school, drama students.  In college they were often communication majors.  The naturalists who are the face of the national parks are really pros.  They are not just somebody who wanted a job being a park ranger.  Professional naturalists have a terrific role and there are probably not as many of them as there used to be.  At least I don't see them now when I vist the national parks.  There were also interpreters.  People like you would have at Mesa Verde.  They would tell the stories of what you were looking at.  

ARE NATURALISTS STILL IMPORTANT IN THIS MODERN URBANIZED WORLD?

Yes, definitely so.  Unfortunately in a lot of high school curriculum now where the life sciences are an elective, a choice.  Many people don't choose them anymore.   When I went to school they were mandatory.  You took biology, chemistry and botany.  WhenI was in high school I didn't have any choice but now kids have so many choices; video production or social media techniques.  I think there needs to be more environmental awareness courses that are required, at least between the start of junior high and the graduation from high school.

WHAT IS ONE, OR SEVERAL, WORDS THAT YOU WOULD BE COMFORTABLE BEING KNOWN FOR?

I think it boils down to "biologist" . Some people consider me to be a biological storyteller.  I put on different hats depending upon who I am talking to.  "Biologist" is a word that is all encompassing.  

DALE NIELSON INTRODUCTION BY KAYO ROBERTSON

Yesterday I interviewed naturalist Dale Nielson.  I first met Dale a number of years ago at the local Bridgerland Audubon waterfowl refuge.  That was a number of years ago and among  his natural history investigations then were bivalves, among the most endangered of North American creatures.  Over 70% of them here before Euro-American settlement are now considered extinct..   He was looking for local remnant populations of freshwater mussels.   Although I've found old shells I really knew nothing of this most interesting creature.  They once filtered the waters of the Bear River and literally paved many local rivers and streams.  The Bear River was filled with them.    We found none but I learned how to look for them.  Pay attention to lines dug along the bottoms where they drag themselves along. I had meant for the interview to last about an hour but I kept him answering questions for three times as long.  Dale knows things.  He is a gentle and thoughtful teacher.  His native humility and roundabout way of answering questions made the interview seem much like following a brooklet through forest and meadow.  Although younger than myself, Dale made me wish I were a child again and that he were my teacher.

And so we spoke.  We shared notes.  I asked questions and listened.  Dale grew up in Cache Valley and lives in River Heights, the same community in which he lived as a child.  His father was a U.S.D.A. employee.  He hunted.  He fished.  He found artifacts of the land's people, removed by an invading culture.  He wandered.  He watched.  He paid attention and he remembered.  Dale's knowledge is born, reborn and nourished through direct experience.  At the age of twelve he was a tagalong member of a team investigating the revegetation of slag heaps left by Kennecott Copper (now multinational corporation Rio Tinto) with drought tolerant and native plants, that might survive, contain the dust and, over time, perhaps contain the toxic composition of the slag.

He never stopped.  His path sought out good mentors; zoologists, botanists, geologists, wildland horticulturalists.  He gained employment with the USDA and spent decades progagatingand learning from native grasses.  These were the perennial grasses that fueled much of the Great Basin ecosystem before colonial ungulates broke the system and allowed non-native annuals such as Cheatgrass to form the vast monocultures that we see today.  The work was to find native grasses with genetic propensity to re-establish themselves over a wide variety of Great basin terrain.  Many genetic varieties of grasses are specialists that do well only in certain locations.  I've been working for a couple of decades trying to renew abused landscapes with native grasses with mediocre to sub-mediocre results.  Through Dale's experience I came to understand why.  I found answers from Dale's experience that hundreds of hours of personal research had failed to reveal.  I marvelled at the difference of resonance and vitality of knowledge available from a person who knows versus that contained in books and research papers.  Some things are better told than written.

Dale's passion is currently Utah's rare butterflies. National studies suggest that as many as 70-80% of our Lepidopteran species are in decline.  Arid regions like the Great Basin and Southwest face disproportionately steep losses because local species of butterflies and moths are highly vulnerable to rising summer temperatures and shifting seasonal moisture.  I mentioned the abundance of butterflies that I once chased and studied as a child in the 1950's, their disappearance through poor grazing practices, and habitat loss due to agricultural cropping, rampant pesticide use, urbanization and industrialization.  Since no striking scientific studies have been done to determine causation (studies cost money and butterflies and moths don't make for much economic return) Dale was reluctant to speculate.  He did note that I had missed a very important aspect of Lepidopteran (butterfly/moth) well being.  In order to not waste precious energy in competition 40-70% (again the lack of studies) of butterflies and moths are plant specialists.  That is the larvae, or caterpillars, feed only on one species of plant.  Great Basin native plants have been incredibly reduced in both numbers and range.  Currently 20-30% of our native Great Basin plants are listed as "imperiled", or at great risk of extinction.  As the native plants disappear, so do the butterflies.  Dale made it clear that, despite the PR, butterflies are not great pollinators.  Particularly the larger species like Monarchs and Swallowtails.  I never thought of this although countless times I have watched as these elegant creatures alight well away from a flower's pollen laden anthers, unroll their inch long tongue and delicately sip nectar.  Dale has been involved in creating a Monarch sanctuary in the cold, dry desert north of the Great Salt Lake. 

"O.K. Dale," I asked, "how do you create a Monarch oasis in the desert? Just build it and they will come?" 

"Oh no," says Dale.  "Their migration routes are well known.  Just find a seep along a migration route, plant the right trees (Russian Olive), plant Milkweed in the shade of the trees and voila, Monarch sanctuary."

The conversation goes on and on.  Q and A.  Question and Answer.  I ask how many colleagues he has that know as much about the Great Basin's rare butterflies.  He replies that there are at least a half dozen.  All elders.  The passion, born of interest, has not been passed on.  Dale speaks of loss in the valley: hedgerows, pastures, grasslands, marshes, winter range, migration routes.  This kind of talk always leads to what might be done?  At this point in a conversation my heart usually turns to fire, my mind to cynicism.  I make note that Dale takes a different path.  He becomes gentle, "I would like to tell them," he says," that perhaps there is a better way to do things."