Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Researcher is the big cats' meow
Maurice Hornocker might never have turned his back on Iowa if he hadn't read a magazine article about a forester.
That article prompted him to choose life in the mountains rather than life on a farm. Because he did, cougars enjoy a better reputation. Moscow, Idaho, has become a center for wildlife research.
Siberian tigers are more likely to survive in the wild.
Now it's Hornocker who is featured in magazines and helps launch the careers of others.
"It was reading about Maurice and his work with cougars that inspired me to become a veterinarian," said Fred Runkel of Spokane, who has never met Hornocker. "I think he had that kind of effect on a lot of people who went into wildlife fields."
Hornocker edited and contributed to the 1997 Sierra Club book, "Track of the Tiger." Outside magazine included him in an article last year about people making a difference for nature. Hornocker and Howard Quigley, who directs the Hornocker Wildlife Institute in Moscow, were featured by the National Geographic Society in a 1997 magazine article and 1996 television special about their work in Siberia.
Most recently, Hornocker wrote the introduction and provided photographs for Peter Matthiessen's "Tigers in the Snow." Matthiessen calls Hornocker "probably the world's foremost authority on the great cats."
Matthiessen is one of the pre-eminent modern nature writers. His book has brought greater attention to the plight of tigers as well as to Hornocker, a 69-year-old wildlife biologist with eyes the color of faded denim and hair the color of brushed steel.
Not bad for a kid who had been groomed to stay on the family's 400 acres.
"My father had my life planned for me," said Hornocker, who grew up hunting and trapping on the farms and in the forests of southern Iowa. When the bookmobile came around, Hornocker checked out anything about birds.
Meanwhile, Paul Errington was studying wildlife for Iowa State University, 90 miles from the Hornocker farm. Iowa native Aldo Leopold was writing "Sand County Almanac," which introduced Americans to the field of ecology.
They were two of the most influential biologists of the 20th Century.
"But I didn't know anything about any of that," said Hornocker. "The only thing I knew about wildlife biology was there was a game warden and you wanted to watch out for him.
"I bought all my books and school supplies with furs I sold to Sears-Roebuck. ... More than once, I was sent home from school because I smelled of skunk."
Hornocker served four years in the Navy, including combat duty in Korea. Then he returned to the farm.
Sitting in a doctor's waiting room in 1956, he picked up a magazine and read about a ranger's life in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains. "What am I doing here?" Hornocker asked himself.
He called the University of Montana, because it was the school the ranger had attended, and asked to speak to Dean of Forestry Ross Williams.
"I told him about my interest, but I thought I was too old to go to school. I was 26, married and had a baby," with the second of his three daughters due soon, said Hornocker. "Ross said, `I've got a whole school full of people like you.'"
Hornocker's father didn't speak to him for two years after he moved to Missoula. His older brother eventually took over the farm. Hornocker likes to visit, partly to note the changes stemming from modern farming practices. There are fewer people and hardly any quail, but more whitetail deer and turkeys, the still-avid hunter said.
His first summer in Montana, Hornocker took a job running errands for John Craighead, who was studying wildlife in the Bitterroot Valley.
Craighead, and his brother, Frank Craighead, later gained fame for grizzly bear studies at Yellowstone National Park. The brothers radio- collared the bears, pioneering methods used today on a wide array of species.
Hornocker helped with the grizzly studies for five years starting in 1959. His farm-learned animal sense helped keep the scientists safe as they prodded grizzlies, John Craighead said. But at least twice, team members had to hole up in the Craigheads' car, as grizzlies that had awakened too soon from tranquilizer darts began battering their equipment and the car's exterior.
From Yellowstone bears, Hornocker shifted in 1964 to Idaho cougars, signing a state contract to determine whether the cats were decimating elk and deer herds, as game managers believed. Hornocker spent 10 years on the study, sometimes living in the Frank Church- River of No Return Wilderness. Early on, he concluded that cougars had little impact on game herds.
"He was instrumental to getting recognition that the cougar needed protection, it couldn't just be hunted at will, the way it had been," said John Craighead.
Not that Hornocker opposes regulated hunting or trapping. Neither does he oppose the use of hounds for cougar hunting, a practice Washington voters outlawed in 1996.
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