SALT LAKE CITY — Sometimes it’s difficult to tell when Kim Hersey is on the job or on her own time. As mammal conservation coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, she tracks, studies and sometimes catches bats, coyotes, shrews, eagles, owls, otters and almost every other nonhunted animal in the state.
Which sounds a lot like what she does in her free time. She and her husband, Kent, took a vacation trip to New Zealand, where they backpacked into the wild to observe wildlife. For their honeymoon they went to Costa Rica, where they hiked into the jungle to look for monkeys.
It’s a good thing that the man Hersey married also works for the DWR, as a big-game project leader, and shares her passion for the animal world.
“For vacations we spend money to travel to the other side of the world to do the same thing we do here,” says Kim. “But we’re not writing grant proposals or running statistical analyses.”
Hersey, a 37-year-old mother of two, has managed to turn a hobby into a profession. She was a sensitive-species biologist for nine years in Utah before taking her current position overseeing Utah’s non-game mammals.
“It’s finding that balance,” she says, summarizing her job. “How do you deal with the growing human population and the demands on resources of that population with ensuring we still have healthy, diverse populations of wildlife on the landscape?”
Hersey works in the office and in the field, which requires diverse talents — “You have to be comfortable camping alone in the middle of the desert and changing a tire,” she notes. Not to mention using various means of transportation to find the animals. She has ridden the tram to the top of Snowbird Ski Resort to study pikas; she has spent long hours in canoes studying turtles and muskrats; she has rafted whitewater to study otters, bats, Mexican spotted owls and yellow-billed cuckoos; she has snowshoed into the backcountry to set up trail cameras for martens and boreal owls and to track wolverines; she has flown in helicopters to do golden eagle and sage grouse surveys (“I spend more time looking at the bottom of a bag than I do at animals,” she says) and small airplanes to do pronghorn surveys.
“I think the only thing I haven’t used is Rollerblades,” she says.
Hersey’s biggest project these days is a bat study. That means setting up “mist” nets at any of 65 sites around the state, from the desert to the mountains, and camping out for extended periods of time. She keeps the nets open till as late as 1 a.m. Among other things, she is looking for signs of white-nose syndrome, which has decimated bat populations in the eastern U.S. (an estimated 6 million to 7 million have died so far). The syndrome is spreading westward, but so far hasn’t turned up in Utah.
Why should you care? “Bats perform an unseen service for us,” Hersey says. “They eat a lot of agricultural pests. We want to be able to detect (the syndrome) and know our options if it gets here.”
Hersey developed a love of animals while growing up in Ohio, where she played in the fields, streams and woods of adjacent farmland and camped out in the summer. Her parents were schoolteachers — her father taught biology, her mother geography, which led naturally to her interest in animals and the land.
Even before she completed her undergrad degree in biology at Wittenberg University, Hersey began taking a vast array of seasonal jobs, paid and unpaid. She did an undergrad research project in Michigan studying wood turtles. She spent a summer in Indiana catching songbirds. She went to the Los Angeles area to study bobcats and coyotes. She returned to Michigan to begin an eight-month project to study white tail deer disease, then returned to the L.A. area to research the effects of urbanization and fragmentation of natural areas, specifically for reptiles, small mammals, bobcats and coyotes. She found herself tracking coyotes through Los Angeles in the middle of the night and observed them “hanging out in little green spaces” in the city.
She earned a master’s degree in wildlife and fishery science at the University of Tennessee, writing her thesis on muskrat and river rat populations in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park.
Then she saw a job opening in Utah. “I thought I’d be here a couple of years, and here it is 10 years later,” she says. “It was too good to leave.”
A few years ago she was part of an effort to confirm reported wolf sightings in the state. She drove to Spanish Fork in the morning and played a prerecorded wolf howl, hoping to attract a wolf. Ultimately, what she discovered was a coyote-dog hybrid that turned up in the Diamond Fork area. Recently, a coyote hunter mistakenly shot and killed a radio-collared gray wolf near Beaver that had been collared a year earlier in Cody, Wyoming — 624 miles away. There have been an increasing number of unconfirmed wolf sightings in the state.
“The wolves that come here seem to be passing through,” says Hersey.
Wolves are still considered endangered and, as such, under federal control everywhere in the state except the area north of I-80 and east of I-84 to the state lines. Wolves found in that area are captured and removed to protect livestock. The endangered listing is precisely what Hersey and her colleagues try to prevent, not only because of what it means for the animal but also for the state.
“That (endangered listing) takes management authority from the state and puts a lot of resources into recovering a single species,” says Hersey. “It also brings a lot of (federal) restrictions with it. For example, there is concern about the sage grouse being listed and all the economic harm it could do to the state with additional restrictions on oil and gas. The ideal is to get information that we can use to properly manage a species so they don’t need to be listed.”
Although the pika was denied official “endangered” status, there are concerns that climate changes are pushing the rodent in that direction. The pika, a cousin of the rabbit, collects straw to create “haystacks” under the snow, where it lives in the winter. Hersey has studied pikas in Salt Lake’s canyons.
“We wanted to see where they are and see if there have been any changes, based on historical records,” she says. “We’ve been able to find them in the mountain ranges where they were historically documented. I’ll be skiing at Alta and know there are pikas under my feet.”
Hersey has seen the successful revival of a species in Utah. She helped reintroduce river otters to the middle Provo River after they had been wiped out in much of the state decades ago.
“It’s a thrill seeing an animal run out of the trap into the river and to know they’ve established a population and expanded beyond there,” she says. “That’s really satisfying.”
Email: drob@deseretnews.com