Shielded Species Get High-Tech Lab Help

The tiny carcass was hanging, limp-legged, on a post, its wings drooping at its sides, a nail driven through the spindly neck. In the teeming forest around it, there were no witnesses who could talk.

It might have been hard to believe that this was the animal that ignited the worst of the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest: a spotted owl, a reclusive bird so rare that a single one of its nests could shut down logging on miles of surrounding countryside, a bird that had become the very symbol for the debate over America’s old-growth forests.

But that was timber policy. This was murder. “If you think your parks and wilderness don’t have enough of these suckers,” suggested a typewritten note attached to the tiny feathered breast, “plant this one.”

Federal agents gathered the bird and the few clues that remained--two beer cans, a Band-Aid, the nail, a match and the typewritten note--and took them to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in southern Oregon. The verdict: The owl had been shot with a high-powered rifle and been kept in a freezer for some weeks before being nailed to the post on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

From there, said Fish and Wildlife Service senior agent Dick Lichtenberg, agents were able to determine with reasonable certainty who had posted the bird, although they never made an arrest. “We had the physical evidence,” he said. “But thinking we have the person who did it and really nailing him are two different things.”

In another era, agents wouldn’t even have been able to come that close. Ballistics research, DNA analysis, trace fiber comparisons--these were the tools of high-powered labs zeroing in on crimes against humans. Wildlife agents were largely left with confounding crime scenes deep in the forests, their victims without names, their witnesses the chirping birds.

But the wildlife forensics lab in Ashland, the only one of its kind in the world, has added a new dimension to wildlife law enforcement, bringing some of the most sophisticated tools available to investigations ranging from deer-poaching to the international trade in bear gallbladders, African elephant ivory and walrus tusks.

In the process, the laboratory has charted important territory in wildlife biology, developing some of the first scientific protocols for identifying species worldwide and pioneering the analysis of animal DNA--a field stunningly more complex than human genetics.

“We feel there are 350 crime labs in the U.S. dealing with one species, human beings. And we get all the rest,” said Kenneth Goddard, director of the $5.5-million laboratory, which opened nearly a decade ago on a quiet street here.

For the first time, wildlife agents who used to be dependent on catching an errant hunter in the act now are able to gather physical evidence from the site of a suspected wildlife violation much as police would scan a homicide scene.

Convictions, previously difficult without an eyewitness, now are common on evidence as little as a pile of entrails in the middle of the woods, a bloody feather, a broken bone, a slab of meat in a freezer.

Thanks to the laboratory’s work, wildlife inspectors at U.S. borders are able to reliably identify goods manufactured from a wide range of protected species, to tell the difference between ancient mammoth ivory and prohibited modern elephant ivory and to analyze the trade in a wide range of Oriental medicines produced with the organs of protected animals.

In part because of the expanded forensics capability, the Fish and Wildlife Service through the courts is now imposing $2 million a year in criminal fines and annually handing out over 63 years of jail sentences, said Tom Striegler, the agency’s chief of law enforcement.

“You can go out and watch a blind full of duck hunters all day, and watch the number of birds they drop and make a good case without needing a lot of forensic evidence,” Striegler said. “But when you have a kill site where all you can find is blood and other remnants of the kill, and you want to tie that to a carcass or a mount on the wall miles away or even in another state, you need a good forensics work-up.”

For years, wildlife agents either had to pass on a case or wait until a police lab had time to help, said Goddard, a former criminalist and crime lab director in Riverside, San Bernardino and Huntington Beach.

“It’s very hard for a crime lab to set aside a homicide case or a rape case when they’re horribly backlogged to do a deer test,” he said.

Moreover, none of those labs had the ability to analyze features unique to wildlife that, previous to the forensic laboratory’s enormous research and cataloging efforts, were simply unknown.

“They could match a bullet or a tire track, but when you start talking about blood, tissue, hair, fur, feathers, beaks--there were no cookbooks. So the basic work simply didn’t get done,” Goddard said.

The lab stepped square onto the front lines of the nation’s endangered species debate in 1995, when one of 14 Canadian wolves relocated into the wilderness of central Idaho was found shot to death near the carcass of a calf.

The case quickly became a political firestorm: the debate between ranchers and wildlife advocates over the controversial relocation program, accusations that federal Fish and Wildlife agents acted improperly in trying to search the ranch where the wolf was found, a defiant county sheriff, congressional hearings.

The rancher whose calf was eaten insisted he hadn’t shot the wolf and didn’t know who did.

And what seemed like a simple case of man-shoots-wolf-eating-calf--an action that would have been legal and for which the rancher would have been compensated under terms of the relocation program--became enormously more complicated when the forensics lab went to work.

First, investigators found that although the wolf had indeed eaten some of the calf, the calf wasn’t killed by a wolf: There was no hemorrhaging around the wounds as there would have been had the animal been eaten alive. Moreover, there was every indication that the calf had lived only briefly after birth: Its lungs were only partially inflated, there was no food in its stomach, one of its sides was still covered with placental material.

The strongest suggestion from the lab’s analysis, said special agent Paul Weyland, was that the calf had died shortly after birth and been moved many yards away to another location and that the wolf was shot by someone lying in wait for it to begin eating the calf. That could have been any of a number of people who knew the wolf was in the area and didn’t like it, he added.

Agents were enormously frustrated when the federal government agreed earlier this month to pay the rancher a settlement of $440 to avoid further court hearings on a lawsuit he had filed over the relocation program.

“I think it sets a horrible precedent. It was just too political, and the bottom line was no one wanted to stand up for what was right,” Weyland said. “But the lab did an excellent job. They worked miracles over there.”

The forensics work often leads to arrests, convictions and--after a suspect is confronted with an array of physical evidence--guilty pleas.

Such was the case of a grizzly bear, a mother with two cubs, found dead in Idaho’s Selkirk Mountains--a bear with a radio collar that had been monitored by wildlife agents for nearly a decade. Witnesses remembered seeing a pickup truck in the area, and when agents closed in on the truck’s owner, he admitted shooting the bear but said it was in self-defense, as the bear was charging him.

The evidence, as analyzed by the field agents and the lab, told a different story. First, the path of the shell casings showed that the suspect had been walking toward the bear, not fleeing from it. Rhoda Walston, veterinary pathologist at the lab, autopsied the carcass and traced a trajectory showing the bear had been shot from the side, not the front. Moreover, the damage to her spine showed she would have been instantly paralyzed after the first shot.

Confronted with the evidence, the man agreed to pay a fine for not reporting the shooting of the bear and also was charged restitution for the bear’s cubs, which were never found and presumably died in the wild.

Some of the lab’s most important breakthroughs have been a combination of pure inspiration and dogged detective work.

For years, border inspectors had been plagued with an inability to tell the difference between ancient mammoth and mastodon ivory, whose trade is legal, and modern-day elephant ivory, which is prohibited. Only recently, lab scientific director Edgard Espinoza realized that the answer was as simple as a 25-cent protractor: tiny cross hatches in the ivory, visible if placed on a photocopier, are angled differently depending on how old they are and can reveal the difference between ancient and modern ivory in an instant.

“We tend to be successful when we look at things from a different point of view,” Goddard said.

Likewise, a laboratory team spent years on an investigation of headless walrus carcasses that had washed up on beaches in Alaska. Area native tribes, which are allowed to hunt walrus as long as the entire animal is utilized, suggested the animals had been strafed by Russian MIG jets on the other side of the Bering Sea. Some tribe members, they said, may have found the dead walruses on the beach and taken their heads at that point. Investigators suspected the walrus were being shot down on the ice floes and quickly decapitated for their valuable tusks.

Goddard and Espinoza led a team that spent more than a week in the field looking for clues, during which time they crashed an airplane, sank a Jeep in an Arctic stream and foraged through so many walrus carcasses that they had to burn their clothes. Sea currents were analyzed but indicated it would not have been possible for the walruses to have washed over from Russia.

“Nothing was telling us anything, basically,” Goddard recalled, until Espinoza noticed that the neck bones of the walruses were bleached whiter than any of the other bones: a clear indication that they had been exposed, headless, at sea for many weeks before drifting ashore. Moreover, the markings on the bones indicated the heads had been severed by experts in the hunting of walrus, an expertise likely developed only by Alaskan tribes through the centuries.

A commission of native leaders accepted the findings and agreed to crack down on the problem.

The laboratory’s most challenging work has been not in the field but under the microscope, where scientific teams are attempting for the first time to catalog species-specific characteristics that can aid in the positive identification of an animal species from among thousands of different populations around the world.

When the lab started its work, there was little way of, say, making a positive identification of a feather or a hoof and linking it unquestionably to a specific type of bird or population of deer. Now, thanks to the exhaustive cataloging, microscopy and other analysis efforts of the lab, such identifications are becoming possible.

The work is much more complicated than it sounds. Not only are there thousands of different species of birds, for example, but feathers vary depending on what part of the body they are from, and what season it is.

Even more complex is the analysis of DNA--a process that now enables investigators to make a positive link between, for instance, a pile of entrails in the woods and a slab of meat in a freezer, or a spot of blood in the back of a pickup truck, or a bloody knife.

It is not nearly as simple as comparing human DNA, which, for the most part, carries a distinct individual genetic fingerprint thanks to the wide mixing of human populations across the globe over the years. Not so with animals, where local populations, because of inbreeding, often may have nearly identical DNA.

In a recent case in San Bernardino, DNA research coordinator Steven Fain was asked to look at a black bear cub: There were suspicions it had been illegally removed from a nearby zoo, but the owner claimed he had found it in the wild. The DNA matched that of two bears at the zoo, but it was also similar to that of bears in the mountains nearby, although substantially less so. The case could not be resolved.

“We have studied every single one of the black-footed ferrets known to be in existence. They’re all identical. If there is a difference, we haven’t found it,” Espinoza said. Likewise, it is uncomfortably difficult to tell the genetic difference between a wolf and a domestic malamute; and yet those distinctions, when a case goes to court, must be precise. “We have to say this blood came from a deer in Idaho and no other deer in the world, because we have studied all of the population,” Espinoza said. “Little by little, we’re getting there. We have now studied all the representative populations of mule deer in America.”

The laboratory also has identified genetic signatures for most bear and wolf populations in the United States. Experts are beginning to work on hemoglobin distinctions and, with the aid of computer technology, attempting to single out unique characteristics in features like skull structure.

On the ballistics front, the lab is the only crime lab in the country with scanning electron microscopy equipment, allowing it to make much more detailed analysis of such things as shotgun casings. The lab has aided the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Oregon State Police on homicide investigations but still does most of its work at the most basic level: a bullet in a dead deer, shotgun pellets in a truckload full of ducks.

These are crimes whose perpetrators aren’t expecting a forensics arsenal, and that, in the end, is what most often makes the case.

“What we usually have is a guy leaving fingerprints on a beer can, he hikes into the kill area, shoots the victim, guts the victim on the trail, transfers the victim into the truck, cuts him up and puts him in his freezer,” Goddard said. “If we can’t make a match between suspect, victim and crime scene, shame on us.”