Women on the Wildlife "Beat"

By Sandra Cleva

Enforcing the Nation’s wildlife protection laws is an important part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) conservation mission.  As inspectors, investigators, scientists, and managers, women play a key role in getting this job done. 

USFWS Wildlife Inspector Karen Gorr does her part for wildlife conservation at the international airport in Houston, Texas.  For Gorr, a typical day’s work might include suiting up in head-to-toe protective gear to examine a shipment of hunting trophies coming in from Africa or checking out potential wildlife contraband discovered in luggage from an international passenger flight. 

Houston is one of 30 ports of entry nationwide where USFWS inspectors like Gorr monitor an annual wildlife trade worth more than $1.28 billion.  These professional import/export control officers ensure that shipments comply with U.S. wildlife protection laws and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species—a global accord through which more than 150 countries control the international movement of thousands of different animal and plant species.  Inspectors intercept smuggled wildlife and help the United States fulfill its commitment to global wildlife conservation. 

As part of the Nation’s front-line defense against wildlife trafficking, Gorr inspects shipments of live animals and wildlife parts and products entering or leaving the United States.  She makes sure that declarations accurately describe the contents of the shipment; that the required permits and licenses have been obtained; and that live animals are being transported humanely. 

If Gorr or her fellow inspectors find a problem, they stop the shipment.  The importer may lose the cargo to forfeiture and face fines or even a full-scale criminal prosecution, depending on the type of violation involved. 

A native of Boston who earned an associates degree in Large Animal Science, Gorr spent nine years working with horses in various capacities before becoming a federal law enforcement officer.  After getting her start in 1979 with the Federal Protective Service (which oversees the security of employees and visitors at U.S. government facilities), she transferred to the U.S. Customs Service in Maine, where she helped police commercial trade and passenger traffic along the Canadian border.  In 1985, she moved to Houston to work at the airport there as an inspector with the agency’s canine unit, keeping illegal drugs from being smuggled into the United States. 

In 1988, Gorr’s longstanding interest in animals prompted her to join the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspection program.  She went from searching for illegal drugs to looking for illegal wildlife. 

“After 13 years, I still have a passion for the job,” Gorr said.  “It’s rewarding to be part of a group that has an impact on conservation and that has set the standard for countries around the world to follow in protecting wildlife from illegal trade.”   

Gorr and her two fellow USFWS inspectors in Houston typically process over 900 shipments a year.  The port handles a large number of importations involving hunting trophies.  Inspectors must take special safety precautions when they work with these shipments because of the fumigants and pesticides used to treat the animal carcasses. 

While many of the animals in the trophy trade are legally hunted and imported, Gorr still remembers her surprise several years ago when she pried open a shipping crate to discover a full tiger mount—which she promptly seized. 

“Cargo inspections take up most of our time in Houston,” Gorr said. “But we also work closely with U.S. Customs and Agriculture Department inspectors at the passenger terminal.” 

Cross-training for these officers is an important focus for USFWS inspection staff in Houston.  Unwary travelers all too often return from abroad with illegal wildlife souvenirs, and many smuggling rings use human couriers.  Last year, for example, interagency cooperation helped foil two smuggling attempts at the airport that involved more than 4,400 sea turtle eggs. 

Outreach is also a key part of Gorr’s job. “One of the challenges for me is keeping up to date on wildlife laws and regulations, so that I can keep the public informed,” Gorr said. 

School programs are a staple for the inspection staff in Houston, as are presentations for groups involved in wildlife trade or wildlife conservation.  Gorr, for example, has trained collection managers for Texas museums on how to import and export wildlife and taught volunteer docents at the Houston Zoo about wildlife trade and conservation laws.  For the past three years, she has participated in Houston’s “Sensory Safari,” a special outreach program on wildlife conservation for deaf and blind children.   

Gorr and the USFWS’s 92 other wildlife inspectors are stationed mainly in major cities where airports, ocean ports, or border crossings handle large volumes of traffic.  Many of the agency’s criminal investigators (officially called special agents) work at these same locations, pursuing cases that often involve smuggling and illegal wildlife trade. 

The USFWS, however, is responsible for enforcing federal wildlife laws in all parts of the country.  Special agents are located in virtually every state, and the crimes they investigate vary with the territory they “police.”  Officers like Special Agent Kim Speckman, who works in northwestern Montana, help protect wildlife resources in areas where “wild things” and “wild places” still thrive. 

A veteran field agent with 20 years of experience in natural resource law enforcement, Speckman transferred to the Great Falls office earlier this year.  Wildlife crimes on her new “beat” can include such violations as the shooting of gray wolves and grizzly bears (both protected under the Endangered Species Act); interstate commerce in unlawfully hunted big game; sale of eagle parts and feathers; and illegal waterfowl hunting. 

Back-country patrols with her new “partner,” a government-owned quarter horse named Nick, are a routine part of Speckman’s job.  Together, their excursions include forays into areas still officially considered wilderness. 

Like other USFWS agents across the country, Speckman works closely with her counterparts at state and tribal enforcement agencies.  She also teams with the lone USFWS wildlife inspector in Montana to address wildlife import/export problems along the Canadian border when possible violations require additional investigation. 

Speckman, who grew up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, traces her career ambitions back to childhood.  “I’ve always had an interest in the outdoors, hunting and fishing, and law enforcement,” she said.  “It may sound corny, but my childhood dream was to be a Mountie.” 

Speckman earned a degree in Animal/Plant Sciences at the University of New Hampshire and then put herself through a basic police academy.  She began her career in natural resource law enforcement as a ranger with the National Park Service, after getting her foot in the door by volunteering at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.  Her duty stations as a ranger included Denali National Park in Alaska, Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. 

“My experience working cooperatively with local game wardens while I was a ranger convinced me that I wanted to specialize,” Speckman said.  She became a Fish and Wildlife Service special agent in 1984 and completed her initial assignment with the agency in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she worked on cases involving waterfowl hunting violations, wetland easement enforcement, and raptor electrocutions. 

Waterfowl hunting remained a focus for Speckman when she transferred to Slidell, Louisiana, in 1986.  Her casework also included investigations involving illegal fishery and big game hunting activities, as well as import/export violations at the port of New Orleans. 

During this period, Speckman fulfilled another “lifelong dream” by obtaining her commercial pilot certificate.  In 1988, the National Park Service offered her the opportunity to serve as the district ranger/pilot at Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwest Alaska—an opportunity she could not refuse. 

“Although it was a difficult decision for me to separate from the USFWS, it proved to be the right choice in the long run,” Speckman said, explaining that qualifying for a field position in Alaska had been part of her motivation for learning to fly.  She was in the right place at the right time with the right skills when the USFWS’s special agent/pilot job in Nome opened up two years later. 

Speckman spent the next five years in Alaska working primarily with native villages on subsistence hunting issues.  One of her most memorable investigations also dates to this period.  She succeeded in bringing criminal charges for trading in walrus ivory against a flamboyant Nome saloon keeper (a convicted, albeit pardoned, murderer) who USFWS agents had long suspected of trafficking in marine mammals.   

In 1995, Speckman returned to New England to work as an agent/pilot in Essex Junction, Vermont.  As the USFWS’s only agent in the State, her investigations focused on unlawful commercial exploitation of wildlife—a threat to both migratory birds and big game species.

“I feel that what I do really makes a difference,” Speckman said.  “Every day and each case presents unique challenges.  That’s the nature—and the beauty—of this job.”       

To do their jobs, however, both USFWS agents and inspectors need to be able to identify a variety of wildlife species.  They must know exactly what has been imported, hunted, shot, or sold to know whether it is legal or not. 

But species identification is not always clear-cut.  That’s where the expertise of Bonnie Yates and her colleagues at the USFWS’s National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, can prove crucial. 

Yates, a senior forensic scientist who heads up the Laboratory’s Morphology Section, is an expert in the form and structure of mammals.  She started working at the agency facility in 1992, only a few years after it opened as the world’s first crime laboratory devoted exclusively to supporting wildlife investigations.  In fact, Yates may well be the first forensic scientist ever to specialize in the morphology of mammals.    

A native Texan, Yates earned an M.S. degree from the University of North Texas (UNT), where her studies centered on biology, geology, and zooarchaeology (a discipline that focuses on the identification and interpretation of animal remains from historic and prehistoric archaeological sites).  From 1980 to 1992, she supervised the University’s Zooarchaeology Laboratory.  She co-edited the journal Zooarchaeological Research News for a two-year period during this time, taught in the school’s Geography Department, and served briefly as the assistant director for the Environmental Sciences Division of the Center for Environmental Archaeology (also a UNT institution). 

“When I saw the job announcement from the Forensics Lab looking for a morphologist to work on mammal identification, I thought, ‘Why this is what I do,’” Yates explained.  “In both fields, I identify animal remains and interpret what’s happened in the past.  In zooarchaeology, the human-animal interactions involve sustenance.  In wildlife forensics, they all too often involve people making money off of animals.” 

Yates and the other forensic scientists in the Lab’s Morphology Section examine wildlife parts and products seized at ports of entry or collected as evidence of wildlife crime by USFWS officers and by other federal, state, and international enforcement agencies.  They use the classic tools of morphology—visual and microscopic comparisons—to trace these items back to a family, genus, or species source. 

It is, of course, much easier to identify whole animals.  But Yates and her staff, which includes experts in ornithology and herpetology, often have little more to work with than hair, bone, feathers, or skin.  They rarely know for sure the animal’s country of origin—information that  narrows the range of possibilities in conventional morphological studies. 

These challenges have forced Yates and her co-workers to develop identification techniques that specifically address the needs of wildlife law enforcement. Yates, for example, is particularly proud of her research on animal hair identification. 

In one such study, she found a way to determine whether the fibers in super-soft woven shawls come from the hair of Tibetan antelope (a protected species).  Her work set the stage for the first successful U.S. prosecution involving the illegal importation of this contraband fabric, known in the fashion industry as shahtoosh.                                          

Yates’ expertise in animal hair identification occasionally attracts requests for assistance outside of the enforcement arena.  “No one is doing this kind of research anymore,” she notes. “But we’re seeing new applications and rekindled interest.” 

Yates has helped ecologists determine whether lynx are still in an area and whether black-footed ferrets feed on prairie dogs.  In the first case, she examined hair collected randomly from the area in question; in the second, she looked at hair recovered from fecal samples.  

Once Yates and other scientists at the Lab complete their analyses of a piece of potential evidence, they report their findings back to the USFWS officer or enforcement agency working on the investigation.  If criminal charges are filed, they may find themselves in state, federal, or international court testifying as expert witnesses for the prosecution.  Yates has traveled as far afield as Hong Kong to provide expert testimony in a wildlife crime case. 

Yates’ staff in the Morphology Section includes two junior forensic specialists for whom she serves as both supervisor and mentor. “Training others has become the most rewarding part of my work,” Yates said.  “Morphology is an experiential discipline.  You must hone the eye to see detail and reconstruct what’s not there.  And you must retain what you’ve learned.” 

By working with young scientists, Yates is training the Lab’s future analysts.  “There’s such a long learning curve in morphology,” she said.  “Mentoring remains key to the discipline as it has since the days of the great 18^th and 19^th century naturalists.” 

The challenges of supervision and staff development are also part of the job for manager Mary Jane Lavin.  As the Deputy Assistant Regional Director for Law Enforcement in the agency’s Great Lakes-Big Rivers Region, Lavin oversees Service investigations in eight mid-western states and wildlife inspection activities at three ports of entry—Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis/St. Paul.  Her responsibilities include resolving enforcement policy and personnel issues.  She also supervises the region’s senior resident agents and lead wildlife inspector (all first-line supervisors of enforcement officers in the field) as well as administrative support staff in the regional office in Minneapolis. 

“One of my biggest challenges as a manager is trying to figure out how to do more with less,” Lavin said.  “Its my job to find innovative ways to approach problems and keep the program not only going with the resources available, but responsive to new demands.” 

Lavin, who has been part of the Division of Law Enforcement’s management team since July 2000, relishes the opportunity to put into practice her personal philosophy on effective leadership.  “I’ve had the opportunity to help shape the region’s enforcement program, to try some new things, and to reemphasize to our people that they are our greatest resource,” she said. 

A native midwesterner who grew up in the Detroit area, Lavin earned a B.S. degree in zoology from Michigan State University.  After college, she joined the Peace Corps and spent three years as a volunteer in Sierra Leone, where she taught science at the secondary-school level and worked on community health problems. 

When Lavin returned to the United States, she joined the U.S. Customs Service and worked as an inspector in Detroit before becoming a USFWS special agent in 1987.  “I felt like the job was created for me,” she said.  “I enjoyed law enforcement work and had believed strongly for years in the importance of wildlife conservation.”    

Lavin served her “apprenticeship” as a criminal investigator with the USFWS’s enforcement office in New York City, where import/export violations provide a large part of an agent’s caseload.  One smuggling investigation she worked on resulted in the seizure of half a ton of African elephant tusks—a seizure that still stands as the largest ever of ivory in the United States. 

In 1988, Lavin headed back to the Midwest to work as a field agent in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  In 1993, she transferred to Bellingham, Washington, a one-person duty station about 20 miles south of the Canadian border.  

Lavin took her first step toward entering the agency’s managerial ranks when she was selected in 1999 to serve as a senior special agent in the Division of Law Enforcement’s Washington Office.  Her work there included national coordination of USFWS investigations and policy oversight as well as liaison with other federal and international enforcement agencies. 

During her two years at headquarters, Lavin also worked on a number of global trade issues.  She represented the United States at an international workshop on protecting the Tibetan antelope; helped train Customs officers in the Caribbean on wildlife trade enforcement; and was a member of a USFWS delegation that visited Russia to learn more about sturgeon conservation and the Russian caviar industry. 

The first woman to hold an upper level management position in USFWS law enforcement, Lavin notes that she actually felt more of a pioneer during her days as a field agent, when many of the enforcement officers and most of the criminals she dealt with were men.  But the fact that wildlife law enforcement remains an off-the-beaten-track career choice should not, according to Lavin, discourage women from considering the profession as a way to promote resource conservation. 

“Real opportunities exist for women in wildlife law enforcement, both in the field and in management,” Lavin said.  “If you care about wildlife and the environment, you can definitely make a contribution.”