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 18th
and 19th 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.”