 Welcome back to day two of discussing and understanding animal welfare challenges in research and education on wildlife, non-model species and biodiversity. We have an interesting list of speakers today, and starting this session will be Dr. Lisa Tell. She is a professor in the Department of Medicine and Epidemiology School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California Davis. And she is a diplomat in the American College of Zoological Medicine and the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners, Avian Specialty. After obtaining her veterinary degree from the University of California Davis, she trained at the National Zoological Park in Washington DC as a zoological medicine intern and resident. In 1994, Dr. Tell joined the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine faculty. And from 1994 to 2006, she was the chief of service of the veterinary medical teaching hospitals companion, avian and exotic pet medicine service. In 2006, Dr. Tell's academic career shifted to a focus on human food safety when she was appointed as the western region director of the avian specialist for the minor use animal drug and food animal residue avoidance and depletion, in addition, she successfully finished an apprenticeship that established her as a master hummingbird bander and became the director of the hummingbird health and conservation program. In the course of Dr. Tell's academic career, she has enjoyed mentoring numerous undergraduate and veterinary students, training several clinical house officers and human pharmacists and serve and serving as major professor or co major professor for graduate students. Her research has focused on diagnosing and treating avian diseases, clinical pharmacognetic studies in birds and ecology. Dr. Tell has been a leader in establishing health parameters for hummingbirds banded and or subcutaneously placed radio frequency identification tabs tags in thousands of hummingbirds, representing five different species and developing welfare conscious approaches and techniques for studying diseases that impact hummingbirds. Our second speaker is Dr. Mark Drew. He received his MS degree in biology from the University of Edmonton in Alberta, and his veterinary degree from the University of Minnesota. He completed a residency in zoo and wildlife medicine at the University of California. Dr. Drew was the wildlife veterinarian for the California Department of Fish and Game and then taught zoological medicine at Texas A&M University. He was the wildlife veterinarian for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game for 22 years. Dr. Drew is a diplomat and past president of the American College of Zoological Medicine and the past president of the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians. Our third speaker will be Dr. John Bryan II. Dr. Bryan is a native Georgian who received his undergraduate education from Emory University and his professional veterinary degree and certificate in international veterinarian medicine and graduate master's degree from the University of Georgia. Following veterinary school, Dr. Bryan received postdoctoral training at the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in the diagnosis epidemiology and pathology of wildlife disease. In 2009 to 2014, Dr. Bryan served as the veterinary medical officer and wildlife veterinarian with the Biological Resource Management Division of the National Park Service, where he served as chair and attending veterinarian of the National Park Service Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, veterinary diagnostic service coordinator and field wildlife veterinarian. In 2014, Dr. Bryan returned as a public service assistant and wildlife veterinarian focusing on exotic invasive species and wildlife diseases. In 2018, he left the SCWDS to establish Zachary Consulting LLC, a freelance wildlife veterinary consulting service specializing in the broad spectrum of wildlife issues, including disease investigation and diagnosis, welfare compliance and oversight, research and management. Dr. Bryan is a member of the Wildlife Society, the Wildlife Disease Association, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, and the American Society of Memologists where he currently serves on the ASM Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee as the ASM delegate to the Association for Management and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International. Dr. Bryan also serves as an ad hoc consultant to ALAC International and holds current veterinary licensure in the states of Colorado and Georgia. Our fourth speaker is Dr. Jean Fair. Jean is a scientist of the Biosecurity and Public Health Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory with a focus on epidemiology and animal disease ecology. She is the founder of a long term research project on the impacts of stress on avian populations. In 2012, Dr. Fair was editor in chief of the guidelines for the use of wild birds in research. Since 1989, Dr. Fair has captured, banded and collected information from over 25,000 wild birds on three continents. In addition, she has been involved as the PI on numerous laboratory animal infection studies and has extensive experience with handling wild rodents and bats for global biosurveillance programs. Dr. Fair has over 90 publications, primarily in wildlife ecology and epidemiology. She routinely works with the North American Ornithological Council on Animal Care and Use Issues on behalf of the North American Ornithological Community. Since 2011, she has taught in association with IACOC 101, a wildlife IACOC course, including one in Washington DC in 2016 that had a panel of experts of the directors of the ALAC, OLA and USDA. Dr. Fair was IACOC chair at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2004 to 2013. From 2013 to 2016, she was on assignment as a science program manager with the Cooperative Biological Engagement Program for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. In this position, she worked with partner countries to develop a biosafety and biosecurity culture and worked with animal care facilities to obtain ALAC accreditation. The final speaker for this series is Dr. George James Kanagi. Dr. Kanagi has been at the University of Washington since 1976, where he continues as a Meredith professor in the biology department, college of arts and sciences, and curator of mammals at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. He received his BA in Zoology from Pomona College, followed by a PhD in Zoology at UCLA. His postdoctoral experiences in behavioral physiology and eco-physiology were as fellow of the Alexander Van Humboldt Stuckling at the Manx Planck Institute in Germany. And as postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at UCLA and the Physiological Research Laboratory Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. His research supported by the National Science Foundation includes both field and laboratory studies at the interface of ecology, behavior, physiology, and evolution. His work with small mammals addresses a variety of topics, including daily and seasonal patterns of activity and energy allocation, reproduction, hibernation, chronicle biology, and geographic analysis of population genetic structures. With that, we hope that you enjoy the fourth session. Good morning and thank you for attending this session. My name is Lisa Tell and today I will be talking about extra-label drug use in wildlife. Before we get started, I was asked to introduce myself. I'm a veterinarian and a faculty member at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. I clinically trained at the National Zoo and I've been working with wildlife my entire career. I'm currently the Western Region Director for the Food, Animal, Residue, Avoidance, and Depletion Program, which is commonly known as FARAD. FARAD is a USDA-sponsored program and we provide veterinarians with withdrawal interval recommendations when drugs are administered to food animals in an extra-label manner. This program is a collaboration between the five universities that are listed here on the right-hand side of the slide. During this session, I will distinguish on-label versus extra-label drug use, which I will commonly refer to as ELDU. I'll talk about the extra-label drug use rules and regulations for animals that can be consumed by humans, and I'll also cover the requirements for legal extra-label drug use and briefly touch base about the challenges that we face when trying to establish withdrawal intervals following extra-label drug use in wildlife. Finally, I'll mention some available resources. With any drug use, there's the potential for drug residues to be present in animal tissues. Now, technically, a drug residue is the parent or the metabolite that can accumulate in edible tissues or products such as eggs or honey from a treated animal. In order to avoid unsafe residues, a withdrawal time is observed, and this is the time that it actually takes for the drug to deplete to a safe concentration for humans to eat. Drug sponsors go through an approval process with the Food and Drug Administration and they get an FDA-approved withdrawal time. This is in contrast to a withdrawal interval, and that withdrawal interval is estimated when drugs are administered in an extra-label manner. So, why is it so important to observe the withdrawal time? Well, it's because the withdrawal time is designed to protect humans so they don't consume drug residues at concentrations that could have negative effects. A classic example of a residue toxicity case was illegal use of clembuteral to increase weight-gaining calves, and that resulted in numerous people developing heart palpitations, abnormally fast heart rates, and muscle tremors after eating veal liver. Other examples would include things like penicillin allergic reactions or chloramphenicol-induced bone marrow suppression. In contrast, indirect impacts are more long-term and could result in cancer, mutagenicity, or reproductive disorders. As a measure to protect animal and human health, the Food and Drug Administration has a drug approval process. For drug use to be considered on-label, the drug must be used exactly according to the FDA-approved label, which includes the species, dose, route of administration, frequency of administration, treatment duration, and indication for use. On-label use also applies to limitations and the withdrawal time. On this slide, you can see the label information for the product and a set, including the species, dose information, indication, limitations, and the withdrawal time. This is a list of the FDA-approved medications for free-ranging wildlife, and as you can see, this list is really short. Furthermore, when you look at the active ingredients, there are even fewer unique medications that are approved for wildlife. For example, if you look at the 14 approved products for cervids, of those 14 products, there are actually only six unique active ingredients. Now, let's take a look at withdrawal times. Here's a sampling of drug approvals and their withdrawal times. You'll notice the withdrawal times for xylazine and yohimbine are do not use less than 15 or 30 days before hunting season or during hunting season. For ivermectin that's administered to reindeer, there's a 56-day withdrawal time. That means that the animal's edible parts shouldn't be eaten for 56 days following drug administration. In contrast to on-label drug use, extra-label drug use, or ELDU, was legalized in 1994 by the Animal Medicinal Drug Use and Clarification Act, which is also known as AMDUCA. ELDU is when medication use differs from the approved label for anything listed on this slide, including a lower dose or a shorter treatment interval. For example, for xylazine as in this slide, a limitation on the label is not to administer during the hunting season. However, if xylazine was administered during the hunting season, that would be considered extra-label drug use and the withdrawal time of 15 days would have to be extended. This is a look at withdrawal interval requests submitted to Farad over the past 10 years. I find it interesting that given the small number of wildlife drug approvals, only 4% of the submissions to Farad were for wildlife. It's hard to know if this low number is because wildlife veterinarians don't know about the services that Farad provides or if medications are being used ELDU without veterinary oversight. For the wildlife submissions, about half were for waterfowl followed by cervids, game birds, and wild boar. The rest of the submissions were small percentages for different types of animals. This is a list of the top 10 drugs for wildlife for that 10-year period. As you can see, the predominant drug categories include pain medications, antibiotics, and anesthetic agents. Farad received inquiries for enrofloxacin, but extra-label use of fluoroquinolones and food animals is prohibited, so Farad doesn't provide a withdrawal interval for those cases. Now let's get into the devil in the details. There are several stipulations for legal extra-label drug use. First, if an FDA approved product exists and fits the medication need, then that product has to be used before going extra-label unless there's a solid reason for why that product cannot be used. If there isn't an FDA approved product and extra-label drug use is necessary, then there has to be a veterinary-client-patient relationship and the licensed veterinarian would be the one supervising the extra-label drug use. With wildlife cases, that traditional VCPR really isn't possible, but Farad considers licensed veterinary supervision of biologists or game wardens or others administering medications extra-label to fulfill that requirement. In addition, ELDU is only permitted for FDA approved human or veterinary over-the-counter or prescription products. This means that EPA approved products cannot be used extra-label. Also, I want to point out that not all of the over-the-counter medications are approved by the FDA, and therefore extra-label use of those unapproved medications would not be allowed. Finally, Amduka stipulates that ELDU only applies to therapeutic use and convenience purposes or cost-saving measures are not allowed. Before moving on, I want to expand on the requirement of therapeutic use. This stipulation was actually put in place so that ELDU is not employed for production uses such as weight gain. However, overall, it means that suffering or death should not occur, and Farad considers this to fit several wildlife situations such as behavioral management issues. Another requirement for extra-label drug use includes identification of treated animals. For free-ranging wildlife, it is especially important to tag or mark animals when a drug has been given ELDU, regardless of whether they're being treated before, during, or after the hunting season, given all the potential times and the ways that a carcass could enter the human food chain. These tagging and marking techniques will be discussed in a subsequent session. Amduka also requires that the substantially extended withdrawal interval be established based on scientific data. I will talk about the challenges with establishing ELDU withdrawal intervals for wildlife in a minute. Lastly, Amduka stipulates that assurance has to be taken to ensure that illegal residues will not be present in order to protect human health. In addition to human health, it's also good to be mindful of the potential for secondary poisoning of other animals. With all extra-label drug use, due diligence to thoroughly document drug administration is essential. So how is a substantially extended withdrawal interval that is based on scientific data estimated? Farad's most common method for estimating a withdrawal interval is to use data from published pharmacokinetic studies, but with wildlife, that's really challenging because of the limited numbers of studies. Of the 16,000 studies in the Farad database, only about 500 are on wildlife. Therefore, we have to extrapolate from studies on domestic species. Another option is to extrapolate from an FDA-approved withdrawal time for a domestic food animal product, or extrapolate from foreign drug approvals. If available, pharmacokinetic models can also be used to establish withdrawal intervals, but typically these models are for domestic species. If there isn't any sound scientific data or if a reasonable extrapolation cannot be made, unfortunately Farad won't be able to provide a withdrawal interval recommendation. For free-ranging wildlife, one thing that might impact drug depletion could be the drug delivery system. Very often, a remote delivery system is used which could affect drug absorption and elimination. This is a unique situation that has to be considered when estimating withdrawal intervals. Another challenge with establishing ELDU withdrawal intervals for wildlife is that extrapolation from pharmacokinetic data for other species is often necessary. However, drug metabolism might be different, the primary residue may differ, or the percentage of parent drug and metabolites might not be the same. Given these unknowns, ELDU withdrawal interval recommendations for wildlife are often conservative. Now I'd like to point out situations when withdrawal intervals can't be provided and animals shouldn't be allowed to enter the human food chain. They include when a prohibited drug is administered or when extra-label use of a prohibited drug class occurs. One prohibition to highlight is FDA-indexed drugs. Indexed drugs cannot be used ELDU and none of them can legally be used in animals that have the potential for entering the human food chain. As a final subject, I would like to briefly touch base on compounding. By definition, compounding is combining, mixing, or altering ingredients to create a medication tailored for an individual patient. Now compounding is permitted under MDUCA as long as ELDU stipulations are followed and the compound has to be made from an FDA-approved animal or human drug. This means that compounding from bulk powder is not allowed. Additionally, compounding from a human drug for use in a food-producing animal is not allowed if there's an animal drug that can be used instead. Compounding for wildlife presents another challenge because there are limited pharmacokinetic studies for compounded formulations and without this data, a withdrawal interval really can't be estimated. Finally, compounded preparations are considered unapproved new animal drugs because they haven't undergone the safety and efficacy testing. Resources for on-label and extra-label drug use are available on the Farad website. Through an online interface, veterinarians can submit a request for withdrawal interval advice. In addition, citations that Farad uses for estimating extra-label drug use withdrawal intervals can be searched using this online interface. Lastly, Farad publishes recommendation summaries in the form of digests and there's a digest dedicated to extra-label drug use in wildlife. This can be found on the Farad website. In closing, these are some key points about extra-label drug use in wildlife. First, there's such a small number of FDA-approved medications for use in wildlife species, therefore ELDU is common. However, it's important to remember that only FDA-approved medications, both over-the-counter and prescription, can be used ELDU and ELDU of indexed drugs is prohibited. Also, in order for ELDU to be legal, non-veterinarians administering medications to wildlife need to be guided by veterinarians. Ultimately, the goal is to protect human health, therefore animals-administered medications that require withdrawal intervals should be tagged or marked to minimize the chance of residue-tainted food products. I'd like to thank the individuals today who spearheaded this workshop and I thank you for attending this session. I was the wildlife veterinarian for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game for 21 years. What I would like to discuss today is the use of pharmaceutical agents in wildlife by a wildlife management agency with a specific reference to a state wildlife management agency. To begin, it is important to understand the role of wildlife management agencies, which is the sustainable management and harvest of wildlife in natural environments. In other words, the agency is charged with maintaining harvestable surplus of wildlife and fish for hunting, fishing and trapping. In North America, wildlife are broadly classified or considered to be those species that are free-living and not domestic or feral. Wildlife includes animals in all taxa, including amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. In general, wildlife is managed by state, federal or tribal governments. The management of wildlife is a partnership between public land management agencies and private landowners, because many wildlife species occur on both. Since the most important component of the existence of wildlife is appropriate habitat, the management of various ecosystems and habitat types is central. The North American Wildlife Conservation Model, which is how wildlife is managed in the United States, consists of two basic principles that fish and wildlife belong to the people and that wildlife populations need to be managed in a way that their populations will be sustained forever. These principles form the foundation of wildlife management in the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, as well as elsewhere in state wildlife management agencies in the U.S. The Idaho State Constitution, Article 1, Section 23 states, unwavering rights to hunt, fish and trap, including by the use of traditional methods, are a valued part of the heritage of the state of Idaho and shall forever be preserved for the people and manage the laws, rules, and proclamations that preserve the future of hunting, fishing, and trapping. Public hunting, fishing, and trapping of wildlife shall be the preferred means of managing wildlife. This constitutional right is similar to constitutional provisions in 22 other states states that mandate preservation of the rights to hunt, fish, and trap. Currently, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game has approximately 569 employees. They're spread across seven bureaus which include fisheries, wildlife, enforcement, communications, engineering, information systems, and administration. There are approximately 100 individuals working in the Wildlife Bureau across the Strait as biologists, technicians, or researchers, and approximately 100 game wardens in the enforcement bureau. To accomplish various management and research objectives, many wildlife species are captured and handled by Idaho Department of Fish and Game personnel, including biologists, game wardens, technicians, and the veterinarian. Restraint and handling of wildlife in the field by veterinarians and biologists often starts with chemical immobilization agents, but also includes the administration of antibiotics, anti-inflammatory agents, vaccines, and handheld menthix. Each year for the past 10 years, Idaho Department of Fish and Game has captured and handled around 1,100 animals per year of many species. Some of these animals are physically restrained using a variety of different methods, and about half of these animals are captured using chemical immobilization drugs, again deployed from a variety of different mechanisms. For chemical immobilization or restraint, both controlled and non-controlled substances are used. Dr. Tell has already provided information about approved drugs and the use of approved drugs under Amduka, including extra-labeled drug use. Some of the drugs used by Idaho Department of Fish and Game are indeed approved drugs. Some are DEA-scheduled or controlled substances. Some are commercially available drugs, and some are compounded by veterinary compounding pharmacists. Most are used in an extra-labeled manner, although some drugs are actually approved for the species in which they're administered in this state. The drugs that are used for capturing handling of wildlife in Idaho include approved narcotics like etorphine, etorphinol, and naphthalene, neuroleptic tranquilizers like ACE-promazine, a zapperone, haloperidol, diazepam, and medazolam. Sedatives like xylazine, detomidine, and metatomidine, and cyclohexamines like ketamine and teletamine in the form of telazol. Several of these drugs have antagonist or reversal agents, including naltrexone, yohimbine, telazoline, adepamazol, and flumazanil. Idaho Department of Fish and Game has authority to use indexed approved narcotics from under an INAD with the supplier of the drug, and the one drug there is thiphentanil. Due to the constraints of dart size, many of the drugs used for chemical immobilization are compounded. Maximum practical dart size in most species is five ccs or five milliliters. In order to accommodate smaller dart size, drug compounding is essential. The products that we use that are produced by compounding but in our pharmacist are produced under strict manufacturing practices under existing compounding rules. These drugs are compounded to a higher concentration than what is commercially available. Drugs are also mixed to a higher concentration than what is standard on the label or in non-standard combinations like xylazine and telazol. Many drug combinations are available premixed like BAM or ketamine xylazine in a five to one ratio or ketamine metatomide in a 15 to one ratio or now med A combination and now buffine, metatomide and azaparone. And in addition, several drugs of high concentrations are mixed independently into appropriate drug combinations like BAM2 or minibam. This slide shows some of the concentrations of drugs that are available through compounding veterinary pharmacist shown here in red compared to the black standard concentrations that are available commercially. The use of these drugs greatly enhances the ability of people working with wildlife to put enough drug in a small enough volume to minimize impact trauma and assure a complete absorption of the drug in a prompt manner. While wildlife veterinarians are the primary drug conduit within wildlife management agencies, most administration is actually done by wildlife biologists with minimal direct supervision by veterinarian. In Idaho, it's important to understand that I was the only veterinarian for the Wildlife Bureau and my practice area encompassed the entire state. I was stationed near Boise, but it can take eight hours or more to drive to northern Idaho and six hours to get to eastern Idaho. By the time I could actually get from the office to the location of the moose or the bear in town, the local biologist or game warden could easily take care of this situation. In addition, since I cannot duplicate myself and be in more than one place at one time, and there were multiple times when multiple situations with animals in town or capture events were happening at the same time in multiple areas in the state, since most administration of drugs is done by wildlife biologists and wardens, these individuals work under a VCP relationship with me. That VCP starts with a required 16-hour class on chemical immobilization that individuals that are expected to use or wanted to use controlled substances or other drugs for chemical immobilization were required to attend every two years. As a veterinarian, I was active in field activities as much as possible with direct contact with biologists and game wardens and the animals that they were working on. The VCP also included the provisions of amduka using extra-label drug use under a VCP. All animals were required to be identified and meat withdrawal times were established for each of the drugs in each of the species in which they were used. To comply with amduka, Idaho Department of Fish and Game Policy included all of the following. As a licensed veterinarian, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game Personnel were working under me with a VCP. Idaho Department of Fish and Game Personnel are the actual animals agent. Fish and Game Policy required identification of each animal that received drugs using ear tags showing here on the picture. There's a green button that says IDFG with a sequential number. The first two numbers referred to the last two digits of the year and then 000 to 9999 on the on the strip side of the tag. It says before consuming call IDFG at the number that was at that time for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Health Laboratory. All of that data, the signalment, the date, the location of the animal, the drugs used in the dosage were required to be reported to my office within 48 hours after the drugs were administered. That allowed me the information to establish a meat withdrawal time using either Farad or published references. And that information was then entered into a database that could be retrieved if an individual harvested a tagged animal and made contact with Idaho Department of Fish and Game. In that situation, if the animal was harvested within the meat withdrawal time, the person that was in possession of the carcass was asked but not required to surrender the carcass. That allowed Fish and Game to dispose of the carcass in the nearest landfill and also offered an option for issuing a new tag for the same species in the same season if it was still available. Because the goal of capturing or handling wildlife by Idaho Department of Fish and Game was generally to assess management actions or conduct research, the goal was to release animals unharmed into their normal environment. It was not possible to prevent predation and consumption of drug residue in prey species because these animals were released back into their environment as soon as possible after handling. And in our situation in Idaho, our complete suite of predators included wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, lynx, bobcat, black bears, and grizzly bears. If animals died during capture or were euthanized due to injuries from capture, carcasses were retrieved if at all possible and then taken to the nearest landfill or burial pit to prevent relay situations. If retrieval was not possible, the carcass was generally left in the field. But it's important to understand that the animals captured handled by Idaho Department of Fish and Game were not directly intended to be food animals, even though they are considered game species and could be harvested for food. These animals were handled as part of long-term management or research efforts, and the idea was to keep them on the landscape for many years, not to subject them to immediate harvest. So most animals were also captured or handled outside the typical hunting season whenever possible. But there were also situations, particularly with animals in town, where they were handled and or released during an active hunting season. So for hunting in Idaho, it's important to understand how hunting works and some of the issues that hunting brings up. In general, Idaho Department of Fish and Game sets the seasons for big game, small game, and trophy species harvest. But understand that it's not a simple one season for everyone. So for instance, for black bear, there's a spring rifle and a fall rifle, archery, and dog season. What that means is that some bear populations potentially have harvest seasons that may last many months. In elk, similar situation, there are spring greenfield hunts, there are fall rifle, archery, and muzzle loader seasons, and winter depredation hunts, which means that some elk populations are also subject to harvest for several months. But it's important to understand that hunter's success is relatively low, and the actual risk of the few individuals that are handled with chemical immobilization drugs being harvested by hunters is relatively low. For instance, if there's 500 to 1,000 animals that received chemical immobilization drugs in a given capture season in the upcoming harvest season, which the population consists of potentially 50, 60, or 100,000 animals, those individual animals are rarely harvested. It's also important to understand that there's tribal harvest for the five recognized federal tribes in the state that have different bag limits and seasons than those set by Idaho Department of Fish and Game. A further complication is that in Idaho, there's a wildlife salvage rule where citizens can collect wildlife that die naturally, including those hit by vehicles or cars for consumption or other uses, and then we have to deal with poaching. Another complication or issue for concern is that in Idaho, as well as in other states, it's important to understand that wildlife move, sometimes long distances. Winter and summer migrations may be dozens to hundreds of miles. Some animal species follow plant phenology in elevation, sometimes for dozens to 50 or more miles. Wildlife cross state and international borders, sometimes without even the benefit of a health certificate. And even if animals are handled or captured in Idaho, they can and do move across state lines and international borders and could be and have been harvested by hunters or trappers in another state. It's also important to understand that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game is not the only agency that handles wildlife in Idaho. Although Fish and Game is the primary agency, there are many other entities that on their own handle animals. There are five recognized Native American tribes that have their own wildlife management agencies that handle animals of a variety of different species. The United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services deals with predators and species that may negatively impact agriculture. The Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also handle wildlife, particularly on federal lands. University researchers, university graduate students handle wildlife. And wildlife rehabilitation activities happen outside the scope of Idaho Department of Fish and Game involving both the capture of animals and the release of animals. Some of these activities are known to Fish and Game through a permitting system. Some of them are not. For conclusions, I'd like to make an implicit request to the audience to understand several things. One would be the role of wildlife management agencies, the role of veterinarians within those agencies to try to balance the need for appropriate treatment of wildlife with a regulatory oversight, particularly for the chemical immobilization drugs. It's a complex situation with oversight by multiple regulatory agencies, some of which is contradictory, some of which is not helpful, and some of which restricts the use of the most appropriate or effective drugs in the species that we're trying to deal with or handle. While it may be simple to say, thou shalt not, the risk is that without access to appropriate pharmaceutical agents, the handling, treatment, and ultimately the welfare of free range in wildlife for management, research, or health would be severely compromised. And concern for animal welfare is one demand that the public will make on wildlife management agencies, especially if the only alternative in a thou shalt not sense would be euthanasia for all animals that it cannot be confined or held after receiving pharmaceutical agents to fulfill the meat withdrawal time, or if the drugs that are available to us are not effective or not appropriate for the species in which we're trying to deal with. And lastly, understand that wildlife are not domestic, they are not confined, and they're also not expected to be on the dinner plate. Wildlife are part of our heritage, the landscape, and the ecosystems in which they exist. We need to work within those parameters on wildlife. We can't make wildlife come to us. The application of it in our medicine to wildlife takes a different thought process and likely a different approach to regulatory oversight for the important and essential pharmaceutical agents that are needed by wildlife management agencies to manage and do research on wildlife species. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. I'll open for questions. Hello, my name is John Bryan, and I work as a freelance wildlife veterinarian. And I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to gain experience in this field, working with academic, federal, private sector, state, and international agencies and entities, including those of foreign governments. Each of these areas or categories is often beholden to its own unique regulatory requirements, a reality which can at times be overwhelming in terms of organizing and carrying out wildlife activities. This is especially the case when a wildlife animal use project involves navigating the regulations and requirements of more than one of these. So this will be the crux of our brief talk today. This presentation will stray just a little bit from the center point of discussion for the session. However, identifying challenges to the implementation of reduction, refinement, and or replacement strategies when it comes to the restraint, handling, and chemical management of wildlife must begin with an understanding of regulations. Please keep in mind that this topic is profoundly vast, as bureaucracies tend to be, and that the true size of this topic is beyond the scope of this presentation. In other words, we'll present these issues from a broad, big picture perspective. So let's talk about some of the focal points. These are the general topics we'll cover today. The experiences and perspectives presented here by my colleagues in session four are expertly crafted to tackle particular challenges concerning wildlife field work. For example, those involving capture, handling, and pharmacology. However, this presentation will pan out a bit, as described, and attempt to present some of the challenges of wildlife field work from a broad global perspective. We'll initially take a look at the various regulatory bodies when it comes to wildlife animal use activities. For example, their mandates, jurisdictions, potential for overlap, and the potential for incongruencies concerning capture, handling, and pharmacology. First, the regulation and oversight of wildlife animal use activities from the federal and state levels. Next, we'll look at oversight of wildlife animal use activities from the academic and private sector, and then regulation and oversight of wildlife animal use activities from a bit of an international perspective. And lastly, we'll take a brief look at some general points to keep in mind when considering wildlife animal use activities. In other words, why is any of this important and or relevant to the topic at hand? We'll begin with some of the basic tenets of wildlife animal use activities for field work as seen through the administrative and regulatory eyes of the states. The specifics of oversight of free range species, wildlife, vary from state to state, and from territory to territory. However, the general concepts undergirding states mandates are relatively consistent. State wildlife agencies, with some exceptions, hold final authority on wildlife oversight within their boundaries. For example, the principal agent, authority, and manager of free range species in a given state is that state's recognized wildlife agency. This means that any and all wildlife animal use activities taking place in a given state must be known to and in accordance with that state's wildlife agency. Three of the central ways in which state wildlife agencies fulfill this role or meet these responsibilities involve wildlife management, research, and education and outreach. We'll focus on the first two. State wildlife agencies are primarily mandated to manage free range populations of animals, and they often do this via conservation, disease management, and outbreak response, permitting for legal take activities, for example hunting and fishing, and population management, for example culling and your breeding animals. This is in no way a complete list of the duties state wildlife agencies shoulder. However, these are the main issues that often directly impact activities involving animal capture, handling, and pharmacology within the state. And in the United States, for these reasons, the states form the first level of bureaucracy and regulation with which any wildlife animal use activity must coordinate. Now let's take a look at some of the basic tenets of wildlife animal use activities or field work as seen through the administrative and regulatory eyes of U.S. federal agencies. Now somewhat contrary to expectation, the federal level of wildlife oversight is a little less broad. In other words, a bit more focused or narrow when compared to the states. Now the following point is certainly beyond the scope of this presentation, but one primary reason for this stems from the enumerated powers of the Constitution. In short, what's not reserved for the federal government will basically be left to the states. A state's authority and mandate to serve as the primary agent of wildlife management within its boundaries mainly stems from this. For the most part, a lot of federal wildlife oversight concerns the conservation and protection of certain species. Typically, the management of such species falls under the authority of the federal agency tasked with administering a law designed to protect that species. For example, because they are covered listed under the Endangered Species Act, final authority or the management of Florida Panthers and California Condors rests with the federal government, specifically the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and not the states of Florida and California respectively. This doesn't preclude collaboration and or federal agency delegating some responsibility to a state agency though, but the hierarchy is relatively established. In a similar manner concerning marine mammals, such authority likewise falls to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The National Park Service is in a somewhat unique position, however, in that, unlike most other federal agencies, the NPS does not, does indeed have final management and oversight authority over wildlife within its geographical jurisdiction, unless the species of course in question is listed on the Endangered Species Act, etc. Next, let's have a quick look at some of the general aspects of wildlife and the use activities from the perspective of academia and the private sector. In general, academic institutions and private sector entities hold no inherent authority to manage wildlife or the habitats in which they live. However, state and federal agencies can by special arrangement collaborate with and even delegate certain aspects of management oversight to academic and or private sector groups or entities. The take-home point here though is that these entities can and do conduct wildlife animal use activities, yet they must collaborate in state and or federal agencies to proceed. They cannot lawfully, unilaterally engage in wildlife animal use activities. In other words, academic and private sector entities must conduct their wildlife animal use activities in accordance and compliance with not only their own policies and the laws and regulations of state and federal wildlife agencies. And such permissions often come in the form of licensure and permits. In other words, licenses and permits from the appropriate state and federal agencies. Lastly, we'll briefly touch on the realities of conducting wildlife animal use activities internationally. In other words, from an international perspective. The take-home is rather simple here and it is this. Host countries in which the activity takes place have every right to require full compliance with any and all of their own regulations. Demonstrating that you jump through all regulatory hoops required for your own country is often only half or less than half of what's needed in these circumstances. Host countries can and do often do require completion of their regulations as well. So working internationally may demand two distinct and possibly redundant comprehensive sets of qualifying dossiers in order to proceed with the project. And all aspects of regulation can be in play. For example, permits, licensure, pharmacology, etc., etc., for all countries involved if there are multiple. Bureaucracy on this level can be daunting. And the complexities that come with the regulatory requirements of adding wildlife drug, capture, handling and sampling protocols can be profoundly demanding. The overall take-home message can be summed up as this. Challenges to successfully conducting wildlife animal use activities in the field start before any boots hit the ground. Regardless of the purpose, state, federal, academic, private sector, and or international regulations and oversight concerning the use of wildlife for any purpose must be followed. And achieving compliance with all necessary regulations on each of these levels is a demanding endeavor. Although institutional animal care and use committees and foreign animal welfare oversight bodies, as applicable, have direct oversight in reviewing and approving animal use activities, approval for such activities often includes, on the part of the group conducting the activity, a full accounting of having obtained all required permissions and regulations at every bureaucratic level. Moreover, horizontal differences in regulations may also pose additional challenges. For example, wildlife animal use activity taking place in multiple states may face different laws and regulations from state to state, further compounding efforts at project continuity and protocol application. For example, team members licensed and permitted to conduct activities in one state may not be allowed to conduct the same activities in another state. This is especially true concerning drug enforcement agency regulations and veterinary licensure. And such challenges can be immeasurably amplified when working with variable formulations of chemical capture protocols, endangered species, multiple locations or states, and or work in the international arena. This is a bit of a nightmare scenario, but ponder the possibility of a wildlife animal use activity involving the repeated capture and handling of an endangered species act and IUCN recognized endangered species that migrates between the U.S. and another country with stopovers in multiple states. Such a project would likely require, number one, on the U.S. side permissions from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, possibly the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, if the species is a marine mammal, possibly the NPS, and each U.S. state in which the species will be engaged. This includes capture and handling permits, drug permits, and or veterinary licensure if applicable, etc., etc. Number two, on the international side, similar if not identical permissions to those of the U.S. from any and all other countries in which the species will be engaged. And number three, review and approval from any academic and or private sector IUCN with a jurisdictional claim, which may demand that the team present prior to the start of work, obtain permissions from any and all of the applicable aforementioned. Challenges in conducting work considering the use of wildlife in the field are many and do often require special understanding of the regulatory variables from state to state between federal agencies, academic and private institutions, and in the international arena where appropriate. If these particular challenges are not met or appreciated, the consequences can result in delayed wildlife projects, loss and or waste of funding, inadequate allocations of resources, and lower standards of animal welfare, among others. The current challenges presented by such a complex of bureaucracies are unfortunate, but must be taken into account by wildlife animal oversight bodies when conducting assessments of wildlife animal use activities. Hello, my name is Jean Fair, and today I'm going to talk about some of the challenges in the capture and handling of wild birds in research. To offer a little background on myself, I'm a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where I specialize in the ecology of infectious diseases and ornithology. In addition to serving as a chair for the institutional animal care and use committee, or IACUC, for 10 years, I was the editor-in-chief of the third edition of the guidelines for the care and use of wild birds in research. Today, I'm going to discuss some of the challenges of doing research on wild birds in the field, as well as wild birds brought into captivity. This includes working with IACUCs and biosafety professionals to better understand the limitations in field work, as well as share some of the most useful resources that are available to everyone. While both basic and applied research of birds has been going on for hundreds of years, birds themselves have been hit in many directions in the last several decades. This has led to large-scale population declines and impacts on individuals. A recent study has documented an estimated loss of 3 billion birds, or almost 20 percent of individuals, since 1970 in North America. Basic science and natural history studies of birds are still vital, but researchers are now forced to investigate the different impacts to birds in conservation efforts. Young research professionals are now opting to do more applied research on birds to better understand how to mitigate potential impacts to populations and to species. Free-ranging wildlife is the basis for thousands of studies each year globally. With a worldwide abundance estimates of 9,700 bird species, birds are considered one of the most diverse tax-on groups. Ornithologists contribute to biology by studying the ecology of birds in the wild and identifying the key threats and ways of enhancing survival of species. Due to the wide diversity of bird species and field situations, methods for the capture and handling of wild birds vary just as much and may also vary dramatically for a single species depending on the field conditions. Ornithologists are the best experts for understanding the best methods, and it is their responsibility to know the nuances of capture and handling techniques and the state of art for reducing impacts on birds. There are many misconceptions for working with wild birds and birds in general that permeate society as well as science-trained professionals. One study found that 19 percent of a university science students believe that touching nestlings will result in nest abandonment. However, there are mitigations that ornithologists should make to avoid leading predators to two nests, which is a different issue. Again, this may vary depending on the species and the field situation. Ornithologists must regularly work to address misconceptions when they are working with their institutional animal care and use committee for iCook. Much of field research on wild animals seeks to investigate behavior, examples of habitat loose use movements, interactions with predators or competitors, or the rates of survival and productivity. If that's the case, then actions beyond what is required by iCook should focus on having the least effect possible, with the goal of being no effect. This is on the subject animals during the capture, handling, marking, and tracking. In almost all cases, scientists will care the most for understanding the impact they are having on their organisms. However, scientists also seek to be able to ask challenging questions that remain for wild birds and to not be overly hindered to the point of not being able to ask the important questions that are needed now. The role of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee is critical for ensuring that research on animals is conducted humanely while reviewing that the science is designed to answer the questions at hand. This includes the research protocol review as well as annual review program reviews and facility reviews. If the institution is accredited with the Association for the Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International, they conduct reviews on site every three years. The iCook is responsible for oversight of the Animal Care and Use Program in its component as described in the Public Health Service or PHS policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. There are many resources for researchers and iCooks for laboratory animal research. These include the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals as well as others. The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals is recognized as the definitive source by iCooks. The role of the iCook is detailed in legislation and binding rules which are in turn inspired by the three Rs, the principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement. It has been suggested that there is even a fourth r, reject, which allows the iCook to refuse permission for a project which does not promise sufficient benefit to offset the pain and distress likely to be caused by the proposed research. Replacement means a substitution for conscious living higher animals, reduction means the reduction in the number of animals used to obtain the information of a given amount and precision, and refinement means any decrease in the incidence or severity of inhumane procedures applied to those animals which still have to be used. When it comes to field work with wild birds, sample size is important to be able to adequately test the proposed hypotheses. Depending on the focal species and the field situation, sample sizes may be the hardest to approve upon. Unlike in laboratory settings, there's considerable more variability in the field and that is usually or should be taken into consideration when designing field investigations on wild birds. Luck is often the case as well when it comes to investigating wildlife in the field. Most of the refinements in orythology have come in improvement of techniques and technologies used to study wildlife. Using remote technologies may be more useful now instead of capturing birds. However, it is important to then understand the impacts of new technologies that may have on bird behavior. For example, in the case of drones, they may be extremely disruptive to nesting birds and have been the cause of having large-scale nest abandonment of thousands of nesting seabirds at once. Often, refinement of studies comes while conducting the study itself. It is important for ornithologists to continue to publish studies on the impacts of methods on individuals and populations, especially if negative impacts are documented. While not as common in wild bird research, replacement does occur in investigations and it may be the only option when it comes to threatened and endangered species. Much of research on wild birds is specific for understanding the species and or local situation in the field and requires data collection about that population or field site. All investigators from the principal investigator to all students involved in research projects should be adequately trained for all aspects of field research and the capture and handling of birds. Additional training for biosafety and field safety may be required depending on the project. Training of animal handling for wildlife projects are most often completed by the senior researchers and not through iCook trainings, although both may be mandatory for researchers. iCooks should understand the value of knowledge transfer from senior researchers to younger research professionals and students. It is helpful for members of iCooks to learn about and participate in wildlife iCook 101 type training events and to go into the field with researchers, not with the intent of oversight, but for learning about wildlife research in the field and the constraints and limitations that may be present in the field. Additional insights can allow for iCooks to become adaptable to understanding method changes and in the evaluation of research protocols. There are numerous resources for the different taxon groups for wildlife that can be used by both researchers and iCooks. One of the most comprehensive resources for wild birds is the guidelines for the use of wild birds in research. Originally published in 1975 by the American Ornithological Union or AOU as it was known at the time, it was first called the American Ornithologist Union ad hoc committee on the scientific and education use of wild birds. The current and third edition of the guidelines was peer reviewed and contained science-based discussions of the best practices for the most aspects of research with wild birds in the wild and in captivity. In 2010 ornithological experts were invited to edit the guidelines. The team of ornithologists completed thorough literature reviews of all peer review papers and the gray literature that documented the best described methods for capture and handling of wild birds in the field and in captivity. It also details research that has been documented impacts of studies and scientists on birds. In 2021 the Ornithological Council updated all references of literature on the methods and impacts to birds that has now been added to each chapter. Since 2010 the documentation impacts of drones as a research method has also been added to the guidelines. There are eight chapters of focus areas that are included in the guidelines for the use of wild birds in research. These include permits, investigator impacts, scientific collecting, marking, transport, housing and captive breeding, minor manipulative procedures and major manipulative techniques. Each chapter outlines the best practices and known issues for most techniques used to study wild birds. All researchers in the United States must obtain different types of permits to be in compliance for research on birds in the wild and wild birds brought into captivity. These include migratory bird treaty act permits, bird banding permits, federal and state scientific collecting permits. You may need permits to work on public lands such as national forests or the BLM or national parks as well as state lands and have approval for working on private and Native American lands. There also may be Endangered Species Act permits or CITES permits or certain certificates of scientific exchange. While predicting every scenario that may occur in field research is impossible, the field collection of biological samples does contain risk as well as safety in general in a field setting. The practice of biosafety is traditionally limited to the laboratory setting. Just as with the ICUC committee, biosafety professionals should be trained in understanding the risk of research in the field with wild animals and the trade-offs of risk in the field. Proper PPE should be appropriate but not hinder wildlife professionals and add additional risk for both researchers and animals. Both the techniques for capture and handling will vary greatly depending on the species involved. It is important for researchers to know the best practices for their species and how their species may be more or less sensitive to being captured. It is useful to think through secondary or indirect impacts on birds, such as increasing predation on a bird or nest. The types of euthanasia used for birds in the field will also vary for the species and field situation. Researchers and ICUCs must work together to determine the best euthanasia techniques and researchers must be ready to use these techniques in an emergency situation with an injured bird. To summarize, I can offer a few suggestions for the improvement of wild bird research and the collective understanding of the challenges of work in the field with wildlife. The goal researchers, ICUC and biosafety professionals is the same in ensuring the ethical treatment of animals and fostering high quality science that increases our understanding of the natural world. First, we can get more wildlife experts and principal investigators to serve on ICUC committees. We can provide training opportunities for researchers, ICUCs and biosafety professionals and we can have more use of wildlife specific guidelines, such as the guidelines for the care and use of wild birds in research and we can attend more ICUC wildlife 101 type workshops and lastly we can encourage the publication of relevant data on the impacts of research on birds, especially if it's a negative impact. Researchers continue to innovate new and better ways for investigating wildlife and the future holds even more promise for continuing to learn about the variation and natural history of birds and the understanding of populations and the possible mitigations for conservation. Thank you. Hello, my name is Jim Kinnege and I've been at the University of Washington since 1976. My research and teaching with undergrads and PhD students has involved work with small mammals of many diverse kinds. I've worked in North and South America, Australia, Asia and Europe and my research lies at the interface of ecology with behavior, physiology and evolution. The key to my work has been to capture and handle animals in their natural habitats and to release them for subsequent recaptures and study of their seasonal activity and reproductive and life histories. We bring those same species into the lab to study their behavior and physiology under controlled conditions and we've also collected specimens for our University's Research Museum where they serve as morphological vouchers and provide tissues for genetic analyses. I'd like to clarify why it's important to capture and handle small mammals both in teaching field courses and in research. We need to maintain this access to discover more of the remarkable diversity of lifestyles out where they have evolved in nature. I was inspired to do this when I was a student because the field courses I got to take and my talk is a personal history of sorts. Over nearly 60 years I've experienced many changes in the challenges and obstacles of administrative and regulatory oversight to my research and teaching. Mammals have evolved over the past 200 million years to become an extremely diverse group consisting of about 29 distinct orders ranging from the tiniest truths to the greatest whales. This diversity includes some 160 families and a species count approaching 6000 adapted to live in all of earth's environments moving about on land and water and in the air and consuming a huge variety of different diets. To clarify what we mean by small mammals I'll point out that just two mammal orders rodents and bats make up nearly two-thirds of all mammal species but we've got more orders with more small species. Many small marsupials then the shrews and moles, elephant shrews and others. So in fact easily three-quarters of all mammal species are small mammals and then when you consider the enormous populations of many rodent species in particular one can imagine that something like 90% of all the individual mammals on earth are small mammals and these are the mammals that can be most easily captured and handled in the field. It's easy to set out hundreds of these small live traps. A small handful of bait provides more than a day's energy supply as a reward for the smallest of rodents. Individually marked animals return repeatedly over months and years to be retrapped. In cold seasons of overnight trapping for nocturnal rodents cotton balls are thrown in along with the bait and the animals fluff up a nest for insulation during their overnight lodging. The animals can be removed directly from the traps by hand in many cases with species that are not inclined to bite. Day active small mammals such as squirrels are often trapped for just a few hours in the morning to avoid exposure to the sun's heat though the traps are typically shaded for protection. In some habitats one can catch as many as half a dozen different species. These small traps serve well for animals up to about 150 grams or so but larger traps like the wire traps in the lower left are more commonly used for squirrels and other larger species. Bats require misnets same as for birds and here you see a bat and says the suspended netting into which it's flown. Many species especially when they weigh less than 50 grams are easily held between the thumb and forefinger by the scruff of the neck for examination and identification. We can do this in a field course introducing students to small mammal populations. The animals such as this deer mouse remain calm when held gently and once released they quickly reorient and scurry away into safety. It's easy to weigh small mammals the animal enters a bag from the trap and the bag is suspended from a spring balance. This basic handling is easily accomplished by just one person alone and without need of an immobilizing inhalant. Again holding the animal gently by the scruff and securing the tail between your fourth and fifth fingers you can identify sex and reproductive condition. In the lower center a kangaroo rat is being identified by its unusual lower incisors also showing the expansive external furline cheek pouches characteristic of this rodent family. In the lower right you see a male ground squirrel with its testicles being palpated and measured. For physiologically oriented field studies we've made injections for example water with stable isotopes oxygen 18 and deuterium to measure energy and water metabolism or injections of oxytocin to induce milk let down for micro sampling of milk. And of course we've taken blood samples for metabolic and hormonal studies with drawing the sample from the anterior orbital sinus into a micro capillary as shown in the upper right. Another minor procedure is attaching radio telemetry collars. Some of these procedures may be more easily carried out using a brief exposure on the order of 10 to 20 seconds to an inhalant anesthesia in a jar carried along in the field as each trap is checked. The inhalant has evolved from ether to isofluorain over the course of my career. You also see here a freshly captured kangaroo rat held briefly in an aquarium and photographed from below using an angled mirror to observe how it processes the special leaves it eats. The plastic jars shown are adequate as holding containers or for brief transport but by adding bedding and food they can be used for more extended transport to the lab or for shipping. As a postdoc I took two species of desert rodents in these jars on an airline flight to Germany to a lab where I studied their circadian rhythms for a couple of years. We've also selected limited samples of targeted species to capture alive and euthanized to prepare as museum specimens. These voucher specimens include stuffed skins and skeletons and we prepare organ tissues to be held in freezers as in the photo. These are analyzed for genetic makeup. In summary so far I hope you see that a wide variety of valuable data and observations can be obtained easily in the study of small mammals. Next I want to mention more explicitly some kinds of data that can be acquired by studying small mammals in the field based just on my own experiences with students and postdocs. I'll start off with my own experience as a grad student in a three-year study in the northern Mojave Desert of a community of three heteromide rodents. Two bigger kangaroo rats and a tiny pocket mouse that weighs only six grams. You can see here the kinds of data that can be obtained by repeated monthly sampling of the same marked individuals in the population of each species. In this case three consecutive nights of trapping every month for several years that allowed me to document annual cycles of recruitment and population abundance. The absence of captures of the little pocket mouse in winter corresponds to hibernation. The figure on the right shows the annual cycles of body mass and differences in the breeding periodicities of the two kangaroo rat species reflecting differences in their diets and water balance physiology. The method of marking and identifying individuals with toe clipping but in later studies and because of species difference we've also used ear tags or pit tags. My next example is an expanded study of seasonality of reproduction in response to desert environmental conditions that involve five species from the same area over three breeding seasons with several consecutive days of trapping every month. We also began to study reproductive function in the lab by bringing freshly captured individuals in to set them up under various experimental variables such as diet, dietary water content and day length. These are animals that do not regularly drink water out where they live in the desert. To understand the gonadal function and histology behind the reproductive responses we included samples from the field that were sacrificed using inhalant anesthesia overdose for autopsy analysis. The five species responded very differently based on body size and diet and variously produced litters that varied from only one to as many as 11 pups and mating seasons that varied from one to six months depending on the species and each year's particular environmental conditions. In some species cases we found years of complete reproductive failure. The value of this study arose from the detailed comparisons that were possible from extensive monthly sampling which revealed diverse reproductive strategies and life histories among these five coexisting species. Our most extensive study of a single population lasted for a decade and involved golden metal ground squirrels in our Washington Cascades which breed just once a year and hibernate for about six months. Our theme was seasonal variation in energy expenditure and allocation to reproduction. With 275 traps on a 22 hectare grid we trapped for many consecutive days during mating, gestation and lactation with a team of three to five members. By weighing females frequently we determined dates of parturition and mating by backdating through gestation. We counted the number of pups by X-raying females in late gestation and then observed the number that emerged upon weaning. This kind of field study is extremely intense and the squirrels were amenable clearly habituated to being trapped and observed something not necessarily possible with all small mammals. Here's a simplified summary of a general monthly energy budget. You see the low monthly expenditures during hibernation followed by the launch of the breeding season with males spending much more energy moving around than the females who emerge later in estrus. From then on the female budget exceeds that of the males because of gestation and even more demanding lactation to support growth of the young. The various components of each budget are a summation of behavioral and metabolic analyses from field observations of time spent moving around foraging, resting and being vigilant as well as thermoregulation. At the heart of all this remains the importance of regular trapping to monitor the animals and perform special procedures. The patterns of body weight demonstrate the remarkable differences between the sexes in energy allocation. Females emerge from hibernation at the lowest weight of the year, accelerate their feeding behavior to support production of young and then fatten to double their beginning weight for hibernation. Males maintain a high body weight all year and accumulate and defend a food cache in their burrows that allows them to emerge from hibernation in top condition for mating competition. Here are data from the stable isotopes that determine metabolic rate measured by an initial ejection and blood sample followed at two or three days by a second blood sample that gives a reading of total water metabolism and daily energy expenditure. In the upper figure you see that during mating the male spends much more energy than the female, about two and a half times basal metabolism. During lactation however an average female energy budget is much higher, more than three times basal. In the lower figure you see both energy intake and expenditure measurements and computations from a special year when we focused on just the last five days of lactation, the peak shown here for females with either three, four or five young. For mothers with the biggest litters the energy budget is accelerated to about seven times basal require an extraordinary food consumption to support a litter of five young that by peak lactation weighs more than the mother herself. This is extremely different from the relative lactation energy budget of larger mammals. I'd next like to talk about glucocorticoid hormones which have received considerable attention in field research. The actions of these hormones are somewhat more complex than they are often assumed to be in studies that are more narrowly focused on glucocorticoids as a proxy for the concept of stress. These hormones are involved in energy metabolism and feeding behavior, the natural acceleration of energy metabolism when special demands arise. We made our first measurements of plasma cortisol and corticosterone in gold and metal ground squirrels because of our interest in the energetics of lactation and in hyperphagia and fattening associated with hibernation. We trapped our animals early in the morning and took blood samples after the animals had been in the traps for two to three hours. You can see in the graphs that females during lactation undergo a three-fold increase to a seasonal high of corticosterone over the early season low with levels much higher than males. Interestingly, cortisol decreases during lactation. We also studied glucocorticoids in this chipmunk, a smaller and even easier to handle hibernating squirrel. We measured hormones across the active season as in the ground squirrels and we also made a special assessment of the effects of capture and handling. The biggest seasonal increase we found in either sex or either hormone is outlined in the red box, a four-fold increase in corticosterone in females during lactation, basically the same result as in the ground squirrels. We captured the chipmunks repeatedly during the season in the small box traps where they remained quietly in the morning for a few hours before we took these blood samples. We also measured the apparent effects of capture and handling on the glucocorticoids of chipmunks using a special trapping protocol. We set just a few traps closely together in a small space that we could visually monitor from a single vantage point to determine the precise moment of capture. By running to the trap and quickly carrying out our usual blood sampling, including 10 to 20 seconds exposure to inhale and anesthesia, we obtained blood within two to three minutes of capture. We returned each animal to its trap, waited 30 minutes and then took a second blood sample. We noticed the normal chipmunk behavior of stuffing cheek pouches with bait seeds while in the traps for 30 minutes. glucocorticoids consistently increased above the initial values ranging from 50% increased to more than double depending on the season and the hormone. We interpret these increases as a response to capture and handling including the initial blood sampling, which seems to be a valid demonstration of a glucocorticoid response to a special energy demand. From the short duration of 30 minutes of this acute response, we are not aware of any chronic negative conditions or harm that resulted to the animals. Nonetheless, our papers have received many citations by researchers who were pursuing the concept of acute and chronic stress in other animals. I mentioned earlier the value of depositing novel and diverse specimens in our trusted research museums. Here are some examples where we've identified significant genetic geographic variation within and between species. These papers uncovered new patterns of historical change in genetic population structure, the speciation process, and even hybridization. Such studies are important not only as contributions to evolutionary biology, but also for conservation efforts that may apply to local populations or entire species. I hope I've been able to highlight for you some of the advantages of conducting research in the field on small mammal populations. These animals are abundant and accessible and they can be studied with little need for special restraining or handling techniques simply due to their small size. I also wish to advocate for the important educational role of promoting in the field live trapping demonstrations of small mammal populations for our college and university students.