Game Day

The sun is coming up over the Badlands of North Dakota. A hundred feet below, atop one of the countless buttes dotting the rocky chasms and serrated ridges that disappear into the horizon, a herd of bighorn sheep look up from a breakfast of buffalo grass. From the front seat of the American Champion Scout, Paul Anderson, a North Dakota Game and Fish Department (NDG&F) pilot/biologist, looks back, checking his count on the return pass. "Three rams, five ewes, four lambs, and a yearling," he confirms, as he slides the plane over the rim of the butte, pulls back the throttle, and drops into the drainage below. In a moment the Scout is engulfed in shadow, the ridges high overhead, and Anderson is following the contours of the terrain, looking for more game to tabulate: mule deer, pronghorn antelope, white-tailed deer, elk, and an occasional buffalo.

This morning's visual roundup is an outgrowth of aerial game surveys that North Dakota pioneered in the early 1940s, the kind of surveys many states now conduct to keep tabs on their wildlife populations. Those who fly these missions, like Anderson, are members of a rare breed themselves — aviators who, for lack of better taxonomy, call themselves natural resource pilots. Most fly for state and federal agencies: the Department of the Interior (see " The Bird Counters: Migratory Pilots," February 1994 Pilot); state game and fish departments; departments of environmental conservation, of natural resources, of forestry.

Their missions have evolved beyond population counts. Natural resource pilots (NRPs) in New York are helping to reestablish ospreys within the state. Ohio pilots monitor the spread of gypsy moths and fly north to the Hudson Bay to inspect nesting areas of migratory wildfowl. California NRPs airdrop fingerlings into high mountain lakes from a specially rigged King Air. And in New Mexico they use a Bell JetRanger or Hughes 500 helicopter to round up antelope for a repopulation program. Natural resource pilots also patrol for poachers, search for pollution, track radio-tagged animals, and assist in search and rescue.

But for a natural resource pilot, it doesn't get any better than this: a week of dawn patrols over some of North America's most spectacular and unforgiving landscape, searching for majestic wildlife in its native habitat. But this is no sightseeing tour or skip through the park. Call it extreme flying — two hours or more of yanking and banking, up- and downhill, low and slow and on your wing tip inside yawning ditches and just over the top of steeply rising terrain — throttle constantly moving, eyes continually sweeping the ground and canyon walls, looking for animals.

Officially this is the Fall Mule Deer Reproduction Count — less formally, the mule deer survey — but the occupants of the Scout and three Super Cubs, each scouring his or her own assigned areas of the Badlands, are on the lookout for just about anything that moves. Coyote, fox, eagles, turkeys, and sage and sharp-tail grouse, along with mule deer and large game, are noted on the tabulation sheets maintained by the backseat observers.

Since North Dakota's first aerial surveys, a variety of airborne census methods have been tested from Alaska to Africa: various altitudes; with and without binoculars; infrared imaging; photo reconnaissance. Overall, the unaided human eye remains the best observation tool; and a low-flying, tandem two-place high-wing aircraft is the most efficient platform. And if the job calls for the cool nerves of a fighter jock combined with the warm heart of a naturalist, it's only fitting that the dean emeritus of the profession is Francis N. "Curly" Satterlee. A retired Air Force major, he flew combat in World War II and Korea before becoming Virginia's chief conservation pilot in the 1960s. Satterlee later founded the International Association of Natural Resource Pilots (IANRP), now numbering about 200 members.

"We call them pilot-scientists because that's what they are," Satterlee said at the organization's annual gathering, where some two dozen NRPs from around the country and Canada gathered for four days of workshops. "They're not only accomplished airmen, but accomplished biologists."

The techniques and tools of the trade discussed at the conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, attest to the sophistication of their jobs.

"I hate to use the word, but this is becoming a 'high-tech' business," Ohio's Jack Keaton said between seminars with titles like "Utilization of FLIR Technologies on Ungulate Population Surveys," "Cellular Phone Systems and the Natural Resource Aircraft," "Internet Applications for the Natural Resource Pilot," and "Bighorn Sheep Trap and Transplant." Safety is the subtext of all the seminars, and the profession has an admirable safety record.

There's no standard career path into the NRP ranks. Each agency has its own hiring criteria, some stressing piloting skills, others the biology credentials. The University of Alaska in Fairbanks and the University of North Dakota let students in their aviation programs who are interested in such careers take resource management and wildlife studies courses as part of their curriculum. Most NRPs, though a dedicated lot, say they stumbled into the profession.

Not Anderson, 39, of Faith, North Dakota. A soft-spoken bear of a bio-pilot, he literally "grew up in airplanes," traveling in the aft baggage well of his father's PA-12 Cub as a tot. "My mom said I liked to fly down low, looking the fox in the eyes," he recalled. Then there was television. "I used to watch Wild Kingdom, and when pilots were tracking animals, from eight years old on, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do. I just dreamed of that forever."

Anderson's father taught him to fly, and after earning a degree in biology from South Dakota State University, he attended an airframe and powerplant mechanic school, then did maintenance work and charter flying before joining NDG&F in 1988. Like many NRPs, he flies about 600 hours a year, most of them in N93GF.

A rugged STOL aircraft, the Scout is a metal-spar-and-rib derivative of Bellanca's wood-winged 8GCBC Scout. The constant-speed propeller on the 180-horsepower Lycoming O-360 relieves Anderson of having to swap props for specific operations, like hanging a climb blade when the Scout goes on skis in the winter. The oversize, low-pressure tires and sturdy airframe are more than tough enough for landing on dirt roads or atop expansive grass-covered buttes. And the IFR-certified AlliedSignal Bendix/King avionics package gets Anderson to and from survey areas when the weather goes down.

No such problem on this crisp morning. The mule deer survey is conducted in mid- to late October, after the leaves fall, and flown when the animals are most active — at sunrise. Mott, population 1,019 and elevation 2,241 feet, about an hour east of the Badlands, is headquarters for the operation. The town's motel is booked solid with pheasant hunters at this time of year. The crew bunks at a former nunnery.

Engine heaters are unplugged; airplanes are preflighted, wheeled from their hangars, and off Mott Municipal's 3,500-foot runway by 5:45. In the predawn darkness, Anderson steers by the dim outlines of distant buttes and the lights of a couple of towns. Radios are tuned to 122.75. The three Super Cubs are owned and flown by contract pilots; the observers are all NDG&F biologists. With the exception of a fill-in biologist aboard one of the Cubs, all the crews have been working the survey together for at least five years. Anderson's usual observer, Roger Johnson, has given up his seat to a novice.

"Are you navigating by GPS?" pilot Jeff Tachenko, his nav lights and strobe visible off to the right, asks Anderson over the radio, knowing full well that Anderson turns on the unit only when he's ready to head straight home.

"Darned kids and their newfangled gadgets!" Anderson laughs in reply.

In fact, GPS has revolutionized aerial wildlife surveys more than have FLIR (forward-looking infrared) technology, cellular telephones, and the Internet combined. Most population counts involve flying transects, a series of imaginary parallel lines, over the survey area. Before GPS, pilots had only a compass and pilotage for navigation. Now they not only have GPS, but laptop computers and off-the-shelf mapping software that displays and records their tracks. Anderson doesn't need the mapping software, but he relies on his Arnav FMS 5000 GPS for flying precise transects on the annual grouse and antelope counts.

But GPS doesn't help for toting up mule deer in the Badlands. The landscape has been carved into jagged shapes by the Little Missouri and its tributaries over the last 40 million to 50 million years. The crew has a week to 10 days to survey 28 areas covering about 328 square miles; and every gully, stand of cottonwoods, butte, and hillock must be combed. Anderson flies with two notches of flaps at about 70 mph, maintaining airspeed by sound, feel, and ground reference, devouring the land "like a Pac Man game." Teamwork between front and back seats is essential.

"You have to have a pilot and observer who understand each other and get along," Johnson had explained, noting how observers come to anticipate the pilot's actions. "You fly for awhile, you understand where he's going to go."

NRPs are trained to use their ears as well as eyes to locate wildlife. Tracking radio-tagged animals via telemetry is a staple of resource flying. In the Badlands, collars on bighorn sheep signal whether the animal is feeding, sleeping, moving, or dead, based on its neck motion. Ground-based researchers usually track these collared critters — but if, for example, they lose a signal, Anderson may be called in to find it. The Scout is hard-wired and ready, with mounts under each wing for antenna installation and a receiver interface in the cabin. Anderson demonstrated the technique one morning after the survey over a particularly rugged section of the Badlands, where radio-tagged bighorn range. Selecting from a list of transmitting sheep, he entered frequencies into a Telonics receiver, and was soon zeroing in on a "cheep ... cheep ... cheep" over the headsets. He switched back and forth from one antenna to the other to compare signal strength and turned the plane to identify the direction, but soon realized it was a phantom transmission, bouncing through the canyons from elsewhere. Trying again, in short order he had a strong signal; after a few moments of antenna toggling, he was dropping between sheer rocky faces as the signal grew louder.

"There he is! See?" Anderson said, pointing off the left wing tip, as canyon walls flew by.

Though a novice may not immediately sight quarry even when pointed out, the mule deer survey proves that an amateur can spot game before a pro sometimes. But identifying the sex, age, or even species, in some cases, is another matter. And a professional's trained eye clearly reveals its superiority in game spotting over the course of a morning. But even experts can't see everything, as they'll be the first to admit — a fact demonstrated when a white-tailed buck in an open field simply evaporates while Anderson makes a turn back for another look.

No one knows how many animals are in a survey area or what percentage avoid observation. Wildlife census results are considered trend indicators, and they are used in a variety of policy and planning decisions. In many states, North Dakota included, they're used to help set hunting quotas. The sale of hunting licenses, in turn, funds conservation programs, which have brought back native species to habitats around the country, like the bighorn here.

The sun is more than two hours over the horizon, and Anderson has finished making his last pass of the day. The count includes 14 mule deer, seven white tails, 19 bighorn sheep, a coyote, and a golden eagle. In another hour the crew will begin gathering for breakfast at the Pheasant Café back in Mott, comparing counts and swapping stories as they do every morning. But right now stretching the legs sounds pretty good. Anderson overflies a big grass-topped butte and checks for traffic. No grazing cows or pronghorn antelopes. It's the kind of remote, windswept spot where a youngster watching Wild Kingdom would dream of landing. In a moment the Scout is on base for the butte.

James Wynbrandt is a freelance writer based in New York City. A multiengine and instrument-rated pilot, he owns a 1965 Mooney M20E and has logged about 1,500 hours in 15 years of flying.