ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 31, 1996 TAG: 9612310111
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: ASHLAND, ORE.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
MEMO: shorter in metro
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 thing 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 human beings. 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 poached deer to the international trade in bear gall bladders, 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 more than 63 years of jail sentences, said Tom Striegler, the agency's chief of law enforcement.
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, they found that while 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, no food was 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, was moved many yards away to another location, and 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.''
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