Painting the Cows: Twenty Years of Wildlife Conservation in California and the West

In a dozen conversational essays full of wild, self-deprecating humor, comic misadventures and quirky observations on people and nature, Harvard-educated, California-based wildlife biologist Roberts discusses his 20 years as a field ecologist, conservationist and forest ranger. Controversy seems to dog Roberts everywhere, whether he is tagging illegally grazing cows with marking paints or debating ways to control predators like coyotes, lions and sheep-killing eagles. Easy-going in style yet serious in import, the essays cover a wide terrain, from the Sierras, where the author helped to reintroduce an endangered species--the peregrine falcon--to Rwanda, where he worked with gorillas at Dian Fossey's research center in 1985, a year before her murder, to Montana's Yellowstone River Valley (bordering Yellowstone National Park), where he reluctantly concluded, in an environmental impact study, that a building expansion project planned by a New Age religious cult led by Clare Prophet would not severely jeopardize wildlife. Roberts coolly fences with hostile marijuana growers, indifferent bureaucrats and ornery cowboys, and describes close-up encounters with bears, mountain lions and bighorn sheep whose existence is threatened by the construction of golf courses. A hunter himself, he defends the sport as justified by the dynamics of population ecology; yet, as a Forest Service biologist working in Washington, D.C., he helped defeat a right-to-hunt law that would have criminalized antihunting activists' attempts to directly impede hunting. Overall, these essays poignantly reflect the hard choices and moral imperatives involved in exercising wisely our responsibilities to wild animals. (Nov.)