Working a story is sometimes like going on a hunt.
You find signs of something interesting. You follow the trail. If you are persistent and lucky, you eventually run down the truth.
Sometimes it presents itself in a surprising form, say, as an elephant, or a grizzly bear.
The U.S. Census Bureau maintains county-by-county breakdowns for how federal funds reach communities. I acquired data about federal spending in Snohomish County, planning to mine it for Need to Know stories.
At first look, the 2009 spending here seemed predictable: big money for Social Security, Medicare, flood insurance, mortgages and roads; $119.6 million in salary and wages for area military families; $11.5 million to help provide lunches for school kids.
Some of the programs were familiar, including the $394,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant that paid for DNA tests in Snohomish County cold-case murder investigations. Detectives say the work recently helped unmask a convicted sex offender as the likely killer of two women here in 1995.
But the federal data contained a surprise. When sorted alphabetically, the first entry was more than $76,000 for African elephant conservation in Snohomish County.That did not compute. We’ve done stories about people who care deeply for critters, including kangaroos, emus, even zebras, but pachyderms haven’t been part of the local landscape since the last ice age.
I began running down leads. Before long I was talking with Doug Zimmer, regional spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The federal agency is charged with enforcing laws aimed at curbing international poaching. A former journalist and law enforcement officer, Zimmer was curious. He called Washington, D.C. and confirmed our shared hypothesis that the grant was real and the Census database simply contained an error.
The elephant conservation grant money helped pay for work at the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Zimmer said. Researchers there, led by professor Sam Wasser, are developing new ways to monitor wildlife using techniques usually associated with fighting crime, including forensic DNA tests and the use of highly trained tracking dogs.
The elephant project involved DNA testing on seized ivory to rapidly pinpoint African elephant populations targeted by poachers. Closer to home, Wasser’s team has used related techniques to monitor stress levels in orca populations in Puget Sound, and to scour the North Cascades for signs of resident grizzly bears. The center’s site features a video with Wasser explaining similar grizzly research in Canada.
The importance of local mountains to grizzlies and some of Wasser’s work are described in David Knibb’s thought-provoking book, “Grizzly Wars: The public fight over the Great Bear.” It is available at Sno-Isle Regional Library.
Didn’t know grizzlies call the area home, too? They are one reason Everett’s hockey team is called the Silvertips. The remnant population is believed to number under 30 individuals, and so small and isolated that scientists believe they may soon disappear altogether.
That’s something you need to know.
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