From a deer stand on his farm in Ellendale, North Dakota, 81-year-old Gary Krapu told a story.
In 1978, the now-retired waterfowl biologist took the witness stand as the lone expert for the Department of the Interior in a series of lawsuits opposing a critical habitat designation on the Platte River in central Nebraska. The species in question? Whooping cranes. The last wild migratory flock of them in the world, in fact — and a recipient of federal protection in 1967 under the Endangered Species Preservation Act.
For eight months, the lawsuits raged on. A lineup of plaintiffs — irrigation districts, hydropower companies, the city of Denver — were pissed about the designation, mainly for the red tape it would bring. They hired the best lawyers money could buy, Krapu recalled, ones that hurled question after question at him in attempts to trip him up. A crack in the armor of the DOI’s determination — that this particular stretch of the Platte mattered greatly to the future of the rarest crane in the world — could have toppled everything. But Krapu stayed strong, enduring sleep deprivation and PTSD as a result.
(Later in his career, Krapu would face interrogation by the KGB in northern Russia, an experience he describes as significantly less stressful.)
At the time of the lawsuit, Krapu was a waterfowl biologist at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota. His testimony would ultimately stand up to legal scrutiny, and the critical habitat designation remains in place today. Such is the caliber of work the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center has contributed to waterfowl conservation in North America since its founding in 1965. Data from the center informs season-setting, bag limits, wildlife refuge management, wetland protections, and a laundry list of other examples where science and duck hunting collide.
Originally run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Northern Prairie fell under the purview of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in the 1990s. The Jamestown campus is just one of a handful of science centers around the country producing applied wildlife research that informs management decisions made by both state agencies like the North Dakota Game and Fish Department and federal agencies like the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In fact, the federal resource management agencies are legally required to use the best available science to inform their decision-making. The USGS is their primary supplier.
But today, Krapu and others across the USGS network fret over the contents of a different lawsuit that landed the DOI and other federal agencies in the hot seat in October — not for a critical habitat designation, but for a reduction-in-force (RIF) proposal that would have eliminated all but a few of Northern Prairie’s current staff, along with over 14,200 other federal jobs across 89 “competitive areas.” Over 4,800 of those jobs are protected by federal workers’ unions like the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (both plaintiffs in the lawsuit), among others.
“This would, in effect, close the Center if [the federal government] went ahead with their plan,” Krapu says.
On October 15, Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order against the RIF, preventing layoffs for the duration of the shutdown. She also ordered the Office of Management and Budget to produce documentation of the positions on the chopping block. According to one such document produced by DOI chief human capital officer Rachel Borra, the RIF proposal in question would have eliminated 28 of Northern Prairie’s 40 positions, along with 108 of 137 positions at the Great Lakes Science Center, 39 of 69 positions at the Fort Collins Science Center, 56 of 75 positions in both national and regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers, and others.
But after probationary layoffs and offers of delayed resignation from earlier in the year, the number of employees actually working at Northern Prairie is lower than 40, according to Krapu and other sources employed by and familiar with the Center who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. In fact, according to the employee directory at the time of publication, only 29 people are listed as employees.
When people think of the USGS, they tend to think of earthquakes, volcanoes, and stream gauges. But the RIF is focused on the Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA) of the USGS, what the agency itself refers to as the “biological research arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior.” The USGS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the potential reduction in force.
The Trump administration targeted the EMA for defunding earlier this year, a policy goal that follows a directive in Chapter 16 of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to “abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey and obtain necessary scientific research about species of concern from universities via competitive requests for proposals.”
Now that the shutdown is over, it remains unclear what the Trump administration’s next attempt to dissolve the EMA will look like. But in Jamestown, a community of just under 16,000 people where Trump won over 70% of the vote in November 2024, those familiar with Northern Prairie’s contributions to some of their favorite outdoor pastimes are left with questions. Namely, what would happen to the future of waterfowl conservation and hunting opportunities if the facility conducting some of the most widely touted migratory waterfowl research on the continent closed up shop?
“This is a really important place,” Krapu says. “If Northern Prairie is closed, it will leave a major hole in the information needed to manage migratory birds.”
In the case of migratory waterfowl, the management burden falls on both federal agencies and state agencies like the North Dakota Game and Fish Department (NDGF). Without the research and analytical prowess of the staff at Northern Prairie, NDGF’s job in helping to administer its waterfowl seasons becomes much harder, NDGF migratory game bird management supervisor John Palarski tells MeatEater.
“We have ongoing projects with Northern Prairie,” Palarski says. “They have a lot of really bright scientists with the skills to analyze really large datasets that we collect in conjunction with them. It would be a huge hit if they were to face a significant reduction in workforce or go away…I’ve been surprised this issue has seemed to go so under the radar.”
Palarski references a joint pintail duck telemetry study NDGF conducted with Northern Prairie as an example of successful collaboration between the two agencies, referring to the USGS’ handling of the analytical component of the study as “seamless.”
“We’re fortunate to have these new techniques, like putting GPS transmitters on birds, that we didn’t have previously, so being able to track how these birds are responding to these changing landscapes is a really important component,” he says. “A lot of changes have happened over the last twenty years.”
The argument to dissolve the EMA branch of the USGS follows a similar line of logic as the argument to transfer federal public lands to state ownership; that state, local, and private entities can handle the job just as well without drawing on federal tax dollars to do so. But many in the research field feel strongly that this is not the case. They highlight the differences between the more generic research coming from university labs, where many of the participants are students still learning how to do basic field work, and the applied research compiled from long-term projects conducted by multi-decade USGS veterans and partnering agencies.
“A lot of data is being collected in the Prairie Pothole region, and to have such a phenomenal group of folks in Jamestown, to have that kind of knowledge of the region right here, you can’t replace that institutional knowledge with a bunch of university [researchers],” Palarski says.
Kate Kendall, a retired grizzly bear biologist from the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman, Montana, echoes this sentiment.
“Universities aren’t doing long-term research or long-term monitoring,” Kendall tells MeatEater. “The USGS was providing a unique function that universities don’t do, and that agencies themselves don’t do, because they’re focused on on-the-ground resource management.”
In Kendall’s case, the research she conducted with the USGS informed federal management of an endangered species on federal public lands, rather than joint management of a game species like migratory waterfowl in a state that is over 90% private land. This distinction proves the wide applicability of wildlife research projects coming from the USGS, where most U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service wildlife biologists were sent in the 1990s to create an unbiased wildlife research arm for the Department of the Interior.
“The thought was to separate the research from policy, to make the science completely objective and isolate it from any potential management influence,” Kendall explains of this switch. “At the time, the USGS [already did this] for geology, mapping, and water. The Ecosystems Missions Area was just another biological component. All of that was in support of what the various DOI agencies need to responsibly manage their resources.”
In the grand scheme of federal agencies, the USGS is small, Kendall says. That presents a problem in getting the importance of the agency on peoples’ radars, and on the whole, few people seem to grasp what purposes the EMA actually serves. Kendall rattled off a list of focal points just from her former workplace.
“The Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center is doing research on CWD, brucellosis, whirling disease, aquatic invasives, non-aquatic invasives, wildlife highway crossings, migration patterns…of course, large-scale migrations of elk, mule deer, and antelope all cross jurisdictional boundaries…genetic health of wildlife populations, population declines of mountain goats, bighorn sheep, black bears, grizzly bears, native pollinators, avian influenza…” Kendall trailed off.
“But the average person has absolutely no clue about most of this research, why it’s important, how it is used to guide resource management and conservation decisions.”
Dave Brandt, another retired waterfowl biologist and former employee of Krapu’s, had plans for his weekend that mirrored those of his old boss. Fresh from a stretch of elk and deer hunting in Idaho and Wyoming, he called from an afternoon of scouting ducks for an upcoming trip. After retiring from Northern Prairie in June 2024, Brandt considers guiding waterfowl hunts in eastern North Dakota as something of a second chapter.
“Anybody who has spent any time hunting up here can not help but notice the huge changes and pressures this land is under,” he says. “We know that habitat fragmentation causes higher nest loss. But we need new information to know how to move forward with waterfowl management, regulation setting, and population monitoring. Most duck hunters don’t seem to get that linkage, that things don’t stay static in wildlife management and biology, especially on a landscape that is undergoing huge changes.”
Brandt cites the rapid loss of waterfowl habitat to agriculture as one such change, arguably the most severe one for the area. He describes the mass deployment of Roundup Ready soybeans, which allow for monoculture producers to spray whole sections of native prairie with the herbicide before planting and growing the genetically modified crop. Monsanto first released the Roundup Ready soybean in 1996, and some estimates peg the current percentage of U.S. soybean farms using herbicide-tolerant varietals at 96%.
But the changes don’t stop there. Accordingly, neither does the demand for dynamic research on what has long been considered both the duck factory and the pollinator factory of North America.
“Over three million acres of land were enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program in the nineties, and we’re now down to under a million acres of CRP,” Brandt says. “We drain wetlands, we’ve got energy development on the landscape, we’re getting punched from every side. That changes things.”
The same holds true for all the other USGS research centers across the country, he continues. Science, as he says, is not about finding answers, but about the pursuit of further questions — and now is not the time to stop asking them.
“I don’t really know if the data we’ve relied on for the last three to four decades is one hundred percent relevant anymore.”
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