Paul Marinari releases a black-footed ferret into a preconditioning pen

Paul Marinari has been the on-site facility manager of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in northern Colorado since 1996, but his focus on animals and commitment to conservation goes back much farther. “I pretty much knew that I wanted to be a biologist when I was in 5th or 6th grade after a report I did on sea slugs,” Marinari says. “As a kid, I was always identifying birds at the bird feeder in the back yard, incubating and hatching quail eggs then releasing them in the wild, going to nature centers.” His interest in animals and science, along with childhood trips to zoos and wildlife parks, “pretty much sealed the deal on my desire to concentrate on biology and anthropology while in college.” After finishing his undergraduate degree, Marinari went to the University of Wyoming for an M.S. in Zoology and Physiology.

Marinari says that his arrival to UW in 1989 was a case of being at the right place at the right time. “Plans to reintroduce ferrets were already well underway” and Marinari was able to work on a black-footed ferret project as he pursued his masters degree. He also worked with other endangered species like marble murrelets and spotted owls, gaining the experience that would eventually help him land the position of on-site facility manager at the Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center.

A normal workday for Marinari differs depending on the time of year. “Breeding season goes from about January to June, with most of the kits born in May. We then have to make sure the kits survive and that our management doesn’t have a negative impact on overall productivity and survival.” In the fall, each kit has to be prepared for reintroduction by being placed in the outdoor preconditioning pen. Here they learn basic survival skills like how to hunt. At the same time the kits are being trained, Marinari has to start preparing for the next breeding season. It’s a position that is both challenging and rewarding, Marinari says. With the largest captive colony of black-footed ferrets in the world, the Center is responsible for the breeding, safety, and health of 65 to 70 percent of the captive species. The pressure of “knowing that a large part of the international program depends on good kit production numbers at the Center” is a constant in Marinari’s work.

However stressful his job may get, Marinari is grateful for his opportunity to be involved in Black-Footed ferret conservation. “Every day the animals will find some new way to surprise you.” For Marinari, it is a huge reward to know that “all the folks that are working on ferret recovery are making a difference in the world.” His experience has led him to believe that “no matter what folks decide they want to do with their lives, they should find something their passionate about and go for it! Everyone can truly make a difference in shaping the world we live in and the world we leave behind for future generations.” “See what’s going on in [your] own neighborhood.” Marinari says, “and make a positive difference locally.”

SAMANTHA TRULL, Duke Lemur Center

Samantha Trull weighing an infant aye-aye

As a Primate Technician at the Duke Lemur Center, Sam Trull gets to observe, care for, and interact with prosimians all day. Like many others working in wildlife conservation, she has always known that she wanted to work with animals. “I originally wanted to become a veterinarian,” Sam says, “but as I grew older I became more interested in wildlife conservation than veterinary medicine.” She started volunteering at the Duke Lemur Center the summer after her sophomore year of high school, 12 years ago. Getting involved at a young age helped guide her academic path. She earned her B.S. in Zoology at North Carolina State University in 2003, and her M.S. in Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford England in 2006, all while continuing to work at the Lemur Center. She plans to spend the rest of her life working with primates. “To hear a group of ringtailed lemurs vocalizing, hand a slow loris a worm, or weigh a baby aye-aye is an amazingly fulfilling experience,” Sam says. “I would do anything to make their lives a little better, and I will continue to dedicate my life to the conservation and welfare of lemurs, other primates, and all animals.”

Sam cares for many different species, but her favorite species is the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis). Sam loves “their curious nature, amazing morphological adaptations and the challenge that they present as a species to take care of in captivity.” Native to Madagascar, aye-ayes are currently critically endangered. They are also considered by many primatologists to be “the most unique primate in the world.” It is Sam’s job to make sure they don’t get bored. “Aye-ayes investigate everything, and because of their continuously growing incisors and extraordinary foraging technique, they require constant environmental enrichment!” This means Sam has to gather huge fallen logs (7-8 feet long and 10 inches in diameter) in the North Carolina forest surrounding the Center, and maneuver the logs into the aye-aye habitats. She places the logs diagonally—as “this more closely resembles how the trees would fall in the wild”—and lets the aye-ayes go wild. “The aye-ayes will spend hours investigating and chewing off pieces of the log looking for cavities where larvae and other insects may reside.”

A typical workday at the Center starts with preparing meals for all the animals in her care for the day. The rest of the day is split up between feeding, cleaning habitats, and special projects like aye-aye enrichment. “Every day is slightly different and sometimes I have to weigh infants, or help with the treatments of a sick or injured animal.”

RYAN WATSON, Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation

Ryan Watson with a Spix’s macaw

“For me, what I do for a living is more than just a job, it is my lifestyle,” says Ryan Watson, the Blue Macaw Coordinator at Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation in Doha, Qatar. Watson lives on-site at Al Wabra, where he works six days a week managing private captive breeding programs for several macaw species. But for Watson, the personal and professional are intertwined even beyond his living where he works: he met his wife through the Lear’s Macaw Recovery Project, which they are both involved with. A field biologist, she also lives and works at Al Wabra. “A lot of our time outside of work is spent discussing our future plans to continue conservation and research work with blue macaws,” he says.

For someone whose career and home life are so interconnected, it’s not surprising that Watson’s passion for his work is deep-seated. “My interest in wildlife conservation first began approximately 25 years ago when I watched a 60 Minutes story about the African rhino poaching crisis,” he says. The senseless killing of the animals for their horns left a strong impression on him, and he remembers “wishing that there was something I could do to help save them.”

Though Watson became interested in animal conservation early on, he also recounts the particular incident that inspired him to work with birds specifically. As a young boy in Australia, Watson had the experience of having a captive red-tailed black cockatoo fly to his arm and sit on his shoulder. “At first I was quite terrified that such a large bird with a powerful beak might inflict some damage, but … I let the gentle creature fly to me and walk up to my shoulder. That experience is what really ignited my passion for birds and is one I will most probably never forget,” he says.

Throughout his childhood, Watson kept and bred various bird species. Later, he went on to work at hand-rearing facility called Birdworld, and then became a bird-keeper at the Adelaide Zoo in western Australia. From there, he went on to work for several other organizations including the Keauhou Bird Breeding Center in Hawaii, and earned a postgraduate degree in ornithology from Charles Sturt University in Australia. Watson’s path to his current position at Al Wabra took him across the globe, where he worked with various species of birds and gained experience in conservation efforts. It was while he was working for the Echo parakeet recovery program in Mauritius that
the position of Blue Macaw Coordinator for Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation was advertised globally. “I had long wanted to be involved with recovery efforts for the Spix’s macaw, a species who’s tragic story I had been following since the 1990’s, so I applied for the position and thankfully was offered the job.”

In the course of his career, Watson has learned that law and legislative policy are as important as the hands-on work he does directly in animal conservation. “The most important changes need to occur at policy level,” he says, “so during an election, choose to vote for a candidate who takes environmental issues seriously.”

At Al Wabra, part of Watson’s job is ensuring that he “make[s] the best possible pairing recommendations and decisions which are likely to lead to breeding success.” It’s no simple task, but Watson faces the job’s challenge with a wealth of passion and experience.

This program premiered February 23, 1997.

Such dogged tracking allowed Warren to capture some remarkable and emotionally wrenching scenes, such as one in which a mother lemur appears to mourn her infant son, killed in a fall from a tree. “It was quite heart-rending to watch,” Warren recalls. “The level of maternal concern was remarkable and touching.”

Another memorable experience during the project, Warren says, was the September, 1995, discovery of Sapphire, the unusual white lemur infant with blue eyes that is a central character in A Lemur’s Tale. In a recently written account, Warren recalled the first encounter: “It was oppressively hot, but at least the giant tamarind tree under which we were sitting offered us some shade. Beautiful light filtered through the feathery green leaves, dappling the soft grey fur of some Ring-tail lemurs that were draped, like lifeless puppets, over the branches.

“All was not normal in this troop, however, for among this year’s clutch of new infants was an almost all-white male baby. He wasn’t truly albino, for he had black rings around his tail just like the others, and his eyes were a sparkling blue. Only days old, he appeared small and fragile, as he clutched tightly to his mother’s fur. Those of us present all knew that we were looking at a very special animal.”

Captivated by Sapphire, Warren tracked the troop over the next few months, usually working solo. “It’s much better to be on your own,” he says. “The animals are much more willing to trust you, and they behave more naturally in front of just one person than a crowd. After a while, they even began following me. One female liked to watch me change film; meanwhile, her friends would be rummaging through my cases.”

Such intimacy enabled Warren to share in both the joys and sorrows of lemur life. He was there with his camera when Sapphire eventually died from unknown causes, but also when a set of twins overcame the odds to survive. Still, Warren did not know for months — until his film was processed — whether he had actually captured these moments. “It’s pretty nerve-wracking,” he says, in part because filming often occurs in less than ideal conditions. “It’s very hot, and in the rainy season there are torrential downpours. Then there is so much plant growth that it is very dark on the forest floor, where the lemurs spend a lot of time. The one plus about filming in Madagascar is that you don’t get poisonous snakes.” Overall, he estimates he shot 20 times more film than was used in the final product — about average for wildlife filmmakers, he says.

While Warren is pleased that his lemur portrait has been shown widely in Europe and the U.S., he is even prouder of his success in getting the film’s narration translated into Malagasy, the island’s native language, so that he can share his work with the people of Madagascar. Soon, he will return to the country to distribute 50 copies of A Lemur’s Tale to schools, libraries, and conservation groups. “It strengthens the value of the work if you can take it back to where you filmed,” he says. “It shows people that they have something of tremendous value right on their own doorsteps.”

“Biologists have described something like half a dozen new species or varieties of lemurs in the last couple of years alone,” reports Conservation International’s Lee Hannah, who oversees the group’s conservation programs in Africa. One of them, a bamboo-eating lemur, has astounded researchers because it eats huge quantities of the giant grass, which is naturally laced with toxic cyanide. “It eats enough cyanide each day to kill a human several times over, but obviously has adapted to cope with that,” he says.

Mohamed Bakarr, Hannah’s colleague, notes that the bamboo-eating lemur is just one of Madagascar’s “endemic species,” or unique residents. More than 75 percent of the nation’s 836 known mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian species are exclusively residents of the island. They include the endangered Plowshare tortoise, the world’s rarest, and the recently rediscovered Madagascar Serpent eagle, believed extinct for 60 years. Huge numbers of plants are also unique. The island, for instance, boasts seven kinds of umbrella-like baobob trees; only one type is found in the rest of Africa.

How many of these species will still be on the island in 20 years, however, is an increasingly worrisome question. Since humans first arrived on Madagascar about 2,000 years ago, they have cleared up to 90 percent of the island’s forests for logging or agriculture and grazing land. Along with the trees, at least a dozen species of lemurs have also disappeared, according to researchers at the Duke University Primate Center.

Among the extinct species was the largest lemur species ever known, a giant that weighed as much as 400 pounds and may have stood as tall as a gorilla. Other lost lemurs apparently traveled like South American sloths or Australian koalas, clinging to trees with long claws or hanging upside down from branches.

In an effort to prevent more lemurs from disappearing, Conservation International and other groups are scrambling to set up protected areas that both the Malagasy government and the nation’s 12 million people can rally around. But conservation “is a challenge in a country with such severe economic problems,” Hannah says. “If you come in and say you are interested only in lemurs, people lose interest pretty fast. That’s why we have such a strong emphasis on linking conservation to economic development activities.”

The light of dawn, however, revealed that the howling ghosts were in fact large-eyed, monkey-like creatures. The night’s scare still fresh in their minds, the explorers dubbed the exotic animals “lemurs,” a Roman word meaning “spirits of the dead.”

This NATURE program, A Lemur’s Tale, opens a revealing window into life — and death — in a troop of these rare animals. Using painstakingly-gathered film, A Lemur’s Tale tells the bittersweet tale of baby ring-tailed lemurs, including an unusual near-albino infant named Sapphire, learning to survive in their treetop homes. Some leap exuberantly into adulthood. Others, however, cannot overcome the many dangers that wait in the forest.

Biologists believe Madagascar, a large island off the east coast of Africa, is home to more than 50 kinds of lemurs, which are related to modern monkeys and apes but evolved before them. “The current theory is that the island broke away from the mainland about 60 million years ago, prior to the evolution of modern apes,” says Lee Hannah of Conservation International (CI), an international environmental organization based in Washington, DC, that is working to protect lemur habitats. Though it is not clear if lemur ancestors were on the island when it broke away from the mainland, or if they arrived sometime later, it is believed that they never faced competition from modern apes for food and living space. As a result, says Hannah, “lemurs had a chance to evolve in relatively sheltered isolation, and Madagascar is large enough to allow for a lot of diversity.”

Indeed, Madagascar’s lemurs range from the tiny pygmy mouse lemur, which weighs less than an ounce, to the cat-sized Sifaka — shown in A Lemur’s Tale — which can weigh 15 pounds. Smaller species are generally active at night, while bigger species feel secure enough to feed and romp during the day. Despite their different sizes, however, lemurs have a lot in common. All except the Indri lemur, for instance, have long, furry tails, which help the animals to keep their balance as they leap from tree to tree. Though lemurs can’t use their tails to hang from branches the way some monkeys can, tails can serve other functions. The Ring-tail’s striking appendage, with its 13 light-and-dark bands, is sometimes waved like a flag, helping troop-mates to see each other.

As a lifestyle, most lemurs prefer to stay up high in the canopy, spending their time foraging for leaves, fruit, and insects. An exception is one of the stars of A Lemur’s Tale: the Ring-tail, which is found in the forests of southern Madagascar. It may spend as much as half its time on the ground, sunning, grooming, and playing. Ring-tails are among the world’s best known lemurs because, unlike most of their relatives, they adapt well to captivity. More than a thousand live at almost 150 zoos worldwide. In the U.S., more than 50 can be seen at one facility alone: the Primate Center at Duke University in Durham, NC.

In the wild, however, Ring-tails live in smaller groups, usually with less than 25 members, which roam territories of up to 60 acres. As A Lemur’s Tale shows, females dominate these groups, with the children of higher-ranking mothers inheriting leadership positions. Indeed, females, who can live up to 25 years of age, will stay with their packs for their entire lives. Males, in contrast, move from troop to troop, fighting for the opportunity to mate. A Lemur’s Tale captures one of these dramatic, ritualized combats, in which the males smear their long tails with scent and use them as wispy, smelly swords.

But conflict isn’t all there is to lemur social life. Like monkeys, lemurs spend a lot of time cuddling and grooming. Lemur hands, however, aren’t as dexterous as a monkey’s, so they use their teeth instead: six comb-like teeth that stick straight out from their lower jaws are perfect for grooming.

Unfortunately, sedate lemur grooming sessions are being increasingly interrupted by the harsh realities of the outside world. Madagascar’s people, struggling to survive in one the world’s poorest nations, are clearing lemur forests for farmland and hunting the animals for food. Groups such as CI are trying to blunt the threat by creating protected reserves and working with local communities to improve farming practices. Says CI’s Mohamed Bakarr, who helps manage the group’s scientific and technical assistance programs in Madagascar: “We need to find ways to make existing farmland more productive, so that demand for more pristine forest declines. If you are going to make conservation work, you have to address those issues.”

Online content for A Lemur’s Tale was originally posted February 1997.