UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2005

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Prerequisite

A Wild Life
Peter Zahler travels the globe studying wild animals and war zones

—Deborah Klenotic




	Peter Zahler and his wife, Lisa Herb, used indigenous transportation while working in Mongolia. Zahler’s study of the woolly flying squirrel took him to the mountains of North Pakistan (see A Wild Life: more images).

IF WILDLIFE CONSERVATIONIST Peter Zahler ’99G wore a radio collar, his remote sensing report would tell us he has worked in five countries in five years, observing creatures of all kinds, from the giant woolly flying squirrel to the endangered flare-horned markhor (a member of the goat family).

But he’s not just a zoologist. He develops environmental assessment, conservation, and education programs, too. Zahler worked in Afghanistan after 9/11 to design and implement an assessment of war’s impact on the environment for the United Nations Environment Programme. For the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), he directed the Pakistan program and served as technical advisor in Iran on a project for conservation of the last 50 extant Asiatic cheetahs. In Mongolia, he developed and ran the WCS Country Program where Kirk Olson ’03G is studying the Mongolian gazelle, whose numbers are threatened by over-hunting and the degradation of its migration route.
Early this year, we caught up with Zahler at the WCS home base at the Bronx Zoo. Now assistant director of the WCS Asia Program, he oversees conservation efforts in Russia, China, Mongolia, Iran, Pakistan, Bhutan and the Central Asian states, as well as in Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, and the South Pacific Islands. He’s also working on his doctorate in natural resources conservation at UMass Amherst.

UMass: What does the assistant director of the WCS Asia Program do?

Peter Zahler: I help the country program directors run their programs. And I liaise with donors, write proposals, run budgets, and on and on. Although we have projects in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, neither has a real “program” and thus no director, so I help with these, too. Which brings up another, fun part of my job: to make full-scale programs happen in new places, if and when I can.

UMass: Where does your study of the giant woolly flying squirrel in Pakistan fit in?

PZ: I was between projects and thinking about what I’d like to work on next. My criteria were: mammal, reasonable size, something nobody knew much about, and a species in need of conservation interventions. I narrowed it down to the squirrel and something called the aquatic genet [a distant cousin of the mongoose]. But the latter lives in the Congo basin, and after a bout in the swamps of Venezuela a few years before, I was tired of hot, humid, miserably infectious tropical areas. When I learned that the squirrel lives in near-alpine environments in the Himalayas, it was a no-brainer. All I had to worry about were landslides, avalanches, and well-armed locals. I’d take them over bugs any day.

UMass: Just how giant is the giant woolly flying squirrel?

PZ: It’s the longest squirrel in the world. From nose to tail tip, it’s four feet long.

UMass: Why is the squirrel endangered?

PZ: I suspect the woolly flying squirrel has always been constrained to a small region in northern Pakistan. It is not hunted, partly because it’s nocturnal and rare. Also, it’s haram—a banned food in the Muslim world.

Its major threat is forest loss. The region where I worked is one of the last great swaths of arid, high-mountain coniferous forest in the Himalayas, and it was fast being cut down by the timber mafia—rich, nonlocal Pakistanis who buy the “rights” to clear-cut forests from local villagers for peanuts and then trash entire valleys. Which is why my research quickly expanded into a long-term community conservation program, convincing local communities to control logging. When they leave their forests standing, villagers have access to timber for firewood and building materials and nontimber products such as pine nuts, mushrooms, and soil, which otherwise quickly erodes in what is the most mountainous place in the world—the confluence of the Himalayan, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges.

UMass: Does the giant woolly flying squirrel really fly, or does it glide, like the flying squirrels here?

PZ: It glides just like a paper airplane, without flapping, and it can cover a lot of ground. I saw one go almost two football fields in a single glide, which was especially annoying because it glided across a deep gorge from the cliff where I was climbing to another cliff, one that it took me about two hours to clamber around. It took the squirrel just seconds. So you see the evolutionary reason for the development of gliding. It’s a great way to avoid predators, not to mention nosy scientists.

UMass: How does one capture a giant flying squirrel to put a radio-collar on it?

PZ: It took me almost two field seasons to figure it out. One day some police officers told me that the squirrels produce a material, salajit, which is collected by some locals as an aphrodisiac. By that time, I’d heard all sorts of tales about the squirrel (it milks goats in the high pastures, it hangs upside down like a bat), and I ignored this one, too…until two big, bearded guys toting machine guns came out of the rocks and into my camp. They were salajit collectors. They offered to catch me a squirrel for some money. How could I refuse? I handed them a big cloth bag, expecting that to be the last I saw of them, but six hours later they came back with a woolly flying squirrel in a bag. The squirrels sleep in cliff caves during the day. If you know where they are, you just have to climb up or rappel down and grab them. Of course, knowing which caves they’re in is the hard part. The climbing up and rappelling down aren’t so easy either, as these cliffs are nearly vertical, and some are many hundreds of feet high.

UMass: What behaviors did you observe?

PZ: Giant woolly flying squirrels move less like squirrels—quick and scampering—than like little bears, slow and almost ponderous. And they eat almost nothing but pine needles. Which is why I couldn’t lure them into my traps with nuts and fruit. No other mammal feeds so much on pine needles. They’re a terrible food source, with a tough waxy covering and nasty secondary compounds that are poisonous to many animals. But if you can adapt your physiology to eating them, you have a superabundant food source and virtually no competition.

UMass: You were in the field with Afghanistan Task Force of the United Nations Environment Programme Post-Conflict Assessment Unit (PCAU) after the United States invaded following 9/11. What was that like?

PZ: I was in Afghanistan in the summer of 2002, essentially after the war. Although there were still skirmishes along the Pak/Afghan border, most of the country was relatively safe. Landmines put a crimp in our work, however. There were an estimated 10 million landmines in the country at the time, which made fieldwork—or even going to the bathroom—a dangerous proposition. We had local guides who knew where things might go boom (I tried not to think about how hard-won that information was), and other than that, we tried not to wander. Having to restrain where I walked was hard for me; a couple times I found myself racing across a field to look at something and then stopping in sudden horrific dread. I’m still here, but I was very lucky. Afghanistan is filled with one-legged men, women, and children who weren’t so lucky

UMass: What did you do as project coordinator?

PZ: Before my arrival, the PCAU had focused on the Balkans, mostly on issues related to toxics and pollution—depleted uranium, damaged factories and storage facilities, and so on. The Afghan project focused to a large degree on damage to the ecosystem, or natural resources, as compared to the human or urban environment. The reason was that the wars were different. The Balkans wars focused on urban centers (though fairly rural, they had infrastructure and factories and such), with a great deal of aerial bombing. The Afghan wars varied over 23 or so years of conflict. The biggest problem was a slow, conflict-related degradation of the country’s environment and natural resources. Degradation—rampant deforestation and overhunting, erosion, desertification, soil degradation, etc.—was from destroyed infrastructure, the displacement of millions of people, an utter lack of law enforcement, and a flood of modern weapons. The PCAU wasn’t used to the idea of looking at wildlife, wetlands, and forest cover, but eventually I persuaded them; we did assess urban pollution, but we also examined the other issues. (Read the 2003 report at http://postconflict.unep.ch/afg_new.htm.)

UMass: What were the biggest impacts of war on wildlife in Afghanistan?

PZ: The major effects on wildlife are degradation and deforestation. The loss of forest (and shrub and grass) cover across the country has had devastating effects on a host of wildlife through a cascade effect on the ecosystems. Soils blew away, water tables dropped, and now in places there’s nothing to eat at any level of the food chain.

Add an influx of powerful, accurate, automatic, and long-range weaponry, and suddenly every small boy can go hunting quite successfully. With human starvation a huge issue, most large species of wildlife were probably hunted out pretty quickly, and what couldn’t be eaten could still be sold as fur to buy food or more weapons, or at least used as target practice

The third nail in the coffin was the lack of law enforcement for 25 years. A good percentage of the Afghan population was raised in warfare and had rarely known peace or the rule of law other than that imposed by local commanders. Even here in the United States, despite our strict laws and thousands of enforcement officers, we still have night-spotting for deer, poaching, illicit import/export of wildlife, illegal campfires, general trashing of the environment, and on and on. Imagine what it would be like in a country where there is nobody to enforce the law, there are no laws, your family is starving, and you’re likely to die tomorrow anyway.

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