37 YEARS
IN THE WILD.
A BIOLOGIST SETS
THE RECORD STRAIGHT.

Martin Lowney is a wildlife biologist by training and a career civil servant by trade. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Massachusetts, then went looking for a different perspective and picked up a master of science in wildlife management at Mississippi State. His early work centered on waterfowl and game birds across the Northeast and Southeast before predator-prey work — coyotes, in particular — pulled him in a new direction.

He started his career with the National Park Service at Yellowstone, then spent 37 years with USDA Wildlife Services — 34 of them as a manager who built and ran programs. In Virginia he protected livestock from coyotes and worked the major airports and military bases, keeping deer, coyotes and birds off the runways before they could be struck by aircraft. A three- or four-pound osprey hit by a low-flying military jet, he notes, causes a tremendous amount of damage. Today he lives in Bailey, Colorado, and is a buckle recipient this year — already scouting a hunt in the Maroon Bells.

One of Lowney's clearest examples of fast evolution is the eastern coyote. Coyotes didn't reach Virginia until 1979, moving across the top of the Great Lakes, where some hybridized with wolves and filled a predator niche that had sat empty for roughly 200 years. In the West they evolved eating rodents and rabbits. In the East, they started pulling down deer.

The animals got big in the process — the average livestock-killing coyote his teams handled ran about 45 pounds for males and 40 for females, large enough to take down a 400-pound calf, plus sheep and goats. A deer flushed into a meadow, he says, makes it about a hundred yards before it runs out of gas; coyotes simply run them down. For a region that hadn't dealt with mountain lions, wolves or coyotes in two centuries, the arrival of 45-pound deer-killers was a genuine shock — and a new problem for livestock producers.

Ask Lowney what's been most detrimental to wildlife in his lifetime and he names two things: the wholesale changing of natural plant and animal communities, and people loving wildlife too much. Non-native ornamentals escape into the landscape. Landfills inflate gull populations. Shooting-club ducks interbreed with wild mallards until — by a recent study he cites — roughly 90% of eastern mallards are hybridized with domestics, many of them now begging for muffins in shopping-center water features rather than living as wild birds.

Raccoons and white-tailed deer thrived alongside people and became super-abundant. And public attitudes swung hard. Lowney grew up in 1970s Massachusetts as the "hunters are bad, gun owners are bad" era took hold and hunter numbers plummeted. Then Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses exploded, deer-vehicle accidents climbed, and the same neighbors who once harassed hunters started asking them to come shoot the deer in their yards.

Colorado, he says, is culturally different — hunting is woven into the place. At his gym, which is roughly 80% women, he was surprised to learn how many concealed-carry and how many want to be taken out to climb a mountain and watch the elk. The bigger lesson: the average person knows very little about how wildlife actually works.

The single biggest public misconception about predator management, Lowney says, is that nature balances or takes care of itself. It doesn't. Even before 1825, Native Americans were part of the ecosystem, and Lewis and Clark recorded the same swings we see today: some areas thick with elk and other ungulates, others hammered down by heavy predator loads. Populations rise, predators follow, disease or starvation knocks the predators back, and prey rebounds — a cycle, not an equilibrium.

The textbook example is the lynx and snowshoe hare on an 11-year cycle: hares boom, lynx boom a beat behind, hares crash, and it's a brutal year to be a lynx kitten. Coyotes and rabbits run a shorter version of the same thing. On islands like Isle Royale in Lake Superior, wolves can over-kill their prey, then crash from starvation and inbreeding — which is why the Park Service has had to bring in new wolves. On the mainland, wolves are adaptable enough to switch prey, and human-driven habitat change keeps tipping the scales — as when timber harvest in western Canada let whitetails expand and gave wolves a year-round food source that devastated woodland caribou.

Few topics are more misunderstood than the foot-hold trap. The jagged saw-teeth from cartoons, Lowney points out, don't exist in real trapping — a trapper who catches his own hand nearly every day is never going to set something designed to injure. Real foot traps catch an animal alive, which means it can be released, relocated, used in the fur trade, or studied. They're sized to the animal — fox-sized for fox, larger for wolves, whose powerful paws require rounded studs that grip without cutting.

Starting in the 1970s, the Association of Official Wildlife Agencies and Wildlife Services began systematically testing traps, partly in response to criticism from animal-welfare groups. The research transformed the tools. Moving the swivel to the center stopped the animal's foot from sliding and tearing; widening the jaws from under a quarter inch to three-eighths or a half inch spread the holding force and cut injury. Capture efficacy climbed from old rates of 40–60% to a modern range of 90–99% — better for the work and better for the animals. Foot traps even out-perform helicopters for capturing wolves in research: cheaper, more effective, and non-injurious.

Modern wildlife management, Lowney explains, was built between the 1940s and 1970s, when biologists learned the basics — how long a species lives, how often it reproduces, how many young it has, what its survival rate is — and then layered statistics and modeling on top. With ducks, a model can show that a species is declining because hen survival is too low, and dismiss a red herring like raccoons eating eggs once the math shows it isn't enough to move the population. That's how bag limits get set: one pintail, three male mallards, one wood duck.

The same approach drives deer seasons. Agencies know harvest rates and hunter effort precisely enough that a commissioner can ask, "Can we reduce deer-vehicle collisions?" and a biologist can answer with the daily mortality rate of adding two weeks in October versus January — and which one actually hits the goal. Lowney served 17 years on the Atlantic Flyway Council and another seven or eight on the Central Flyway, watching waterfowl populations recover under exactly this system. About the only thing that throws the predictions off, he says, is weather — a big snowstorm that shuts down five days of a nine-day season.

He's optimistic about Colorado's coming e-tagging system in 2027. Having used electronic tagging in New Mexico, he found the error rate far lower and reporting nearly effortless — a phone, a button, a confirmation number. Better harvest data, he argues, means better management, even if it takes hunters a season or two to adjust.

When environmental and animal-rights groups challenge a state or federal wildlife agency on the science, Lowney says, they lose almost every time — because courts and biology run on facts. So instead, he argues, they sell doubt. He points to the recent Colorado commission fight over bobcat data, where biologist Mark Vieira laid out survival, reproduction, harvest and population numbers showing the state takes roughly 24% of available harvest when it could take far more — and was met not with counter-data but with accusations designed to make the public distrust the biologist.

Roughly 3% of Americans are animal-rights activists, Lowney says — often well-educated, well-employed, with disposable income and a humanized view of animals that makes them easy to mobilize for donations. Look at who these organizations hire, he suggests: marketing specialists and lawyers, maybe one vet. His read is blunt — it's a sales operation built on emotional appeals, and under current law spreading misinformation is largely protected speech until someone is held accountable for fraud.

His proposed counterweight is Maine's model: a law requiring the state wildlife agency to provide biological information for every ballot referendum. Since Maine adopted it, he notes, no animal-rights or environmental ballot measure has passed. It raises a hard question he keeps returning to — wildlife is a public resource, so the public should have a say, but what does good public input look like when the public is so easily misled?

The social issue that lit a fire under Lowney came from Sportsman's Day at the Capitol: he learned that 30,000 to 40,000 Colorado hunters don't vote. If even half of them did, he argues, it would change the outcome of a lot of elections and the balance of power in the state. He's not interested in telling anyone how to vote — only in getting them registered and engaged. His plan starts small: roughly 25 hunters in his gym community, visited one by one, asked a single question — are you registered?

He's careful to defend the civil servants caught in the middle. People who go into wildlife work, he says, do it for love of wildlife, not money — and increasingly they're muzzled by political appointees who don't want them answering legislators' questions with plain facts. That breakdown, plus a collapse in public trust of government, media and the legislature, is why he wants balance and real debate at the Capitol rather than one side steamrolling the other. He'd rather hunters complain less about Colorado Parks and Wildlife — which he says is largely "along for the ride" implementing what politicians hand it — and instead show up, register, and make themselves accountable.

• Education — UMass & Mississippi State

  Earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Massachusetts, then a master of science in wildlife management at Mississippi State — pairing a Northeast and Southeast perspective on waterfowl and game birds.

• Early Career — NPS, Yellowstone

  Began with the National Park Service in Montana, working at Yellowstone and learning to read large, partially functioning ecosystems firsthand.

• 1990 — Virginia & USDA Wildlife Services

  Moved to Virginia and ran programs protecting livestock from the newly arrived eastern coyote, plus airport and military-base wildlife safety to prevent bird and animal strikes on aircraft.

• Atlantic & Central Flyway Councils

  Served 17 years on the Atlantic Flyway Council and another seven to eight on the Central Flyway, helping set the statistically modeled harvest regulations that restored waterfowl populations.

• 37-Year Career — 34 as a Manager

  Built and managed predator-control, livestock-protection and airport-safety programs across his career, while testifying through more than 25 lawsuits brought by animal-rights and environmental groups.

• Today — Bailey, Colorado

  Lives in Bailey, watching the West's tools and politics change rapidly. A buckle recipient this year, he's scouting a hunt in the Maroon Bells — and working to get fellow hunters registered to vote.