By Rene Romo / Journal South Reporter
TRUTH or CONSEQUENCES – In the latest chapter of his wild life – adventurer, cable television pioneer, United Nations benefactor – billionaire Ted Turner has focused his energy and money on conservation and promoting the survival of threatened and endangered species.
“It’s motivated just by common sense,” Turner, 73, said during a gathering last week at the Ladder Ranch. With three New Mexico properties covering 1.1 million acres, Turner is the biggest private property owner in the state. “I’m just doing it because I think it’s the right thing to do.”
Turner and the Turner Endangered Species Fund, which he founded in 1997, were honored Tuesday with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2011 Recovery Champion Award. The award recognized Turner’s efforts on behalf of species from the red-cockaded woodpecker in Florida to the threatened Chiricahua leopard frog in New Mexico.
“I don’t exaggerate when I say your collective efforts have gone far beyond any other organization or any other citizen in the United States,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, who traveled from Washington, D.C., to present Turner the award at a dinner party at the ranch.
At a time when critics of the Endangered Species Act chafe at its restrictions on human activities that could harm federally designated habitat, Ashe praised Turner for pioneering a “21st century model of conservation” by enthusiastically partnering with the federal government on efforts to promote the future of vulnerable creatures.
“Without the ability to work with our (private sector) neighbors . . . those conservation objectives could not be met,” said Benjamin Tuggle, the Service’s Albuquerque-based Southwest regional director, noting that the habitat of many species crosses a checkerboard of federal, state and private land.
Ashe, accompanied by his wife, joined Turner’s family, including three grandchildren, in getting a first-hand look at some of that work on the Ladder Ranch.
During a hushed, pre-dawn operation, the group joined federal biologists and members of the Atlanta-based Turner Foundation, which largely funds the Turner Endangered Species Fund, in rounding up two Mexican gray wolves housed in a pre-release pen on the Ladder.
The wolves were weighed, examined and administered vaccines by a Service veterinarian before being placed in carriers to be driven to the Living Desert Zoo in Carlsbad so the Ladder Ranch pens could undergo maintenance work. During the brief operation, some of Turner’s children stood within a few feet of the muzzled wolves. The wolves’ eyes were covered to lessen the stress of the event.
“It’s deep in our heart,” Turner’s son Rhett, a conservation activist and documentary filmmaker said later, of the close encounter. “We love it. . . . To be able to see and be a part of it . . . is a spectacular moment for all of us.”
Later, Ashe and others were given presentations on the status of other Turner projects. One was the planned reintroduction of the endangered Bolson tortoise, which survives in the wild only in a small section of northern Mexico, via a captive breeding program on Turner’s 358,643-acre Armendaris Ranch on the east side of Elephant Butte Lake.
The Ladder Ranch is also home to the state’s last large population of Chiricahua leopard frogs, listed as a threatened species in 2002 after they disappeared from about 80 percent of their historic range in New Mexico and Arizona. Turner-funded biologists have built a ranarium, or frog-holding facility, with eight tanks where tadpoles grow, and in June released frogs to a creek on the ranch.
Mike Phillips, executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, said the organization’s formal adoption of a Chiricahua leopard frog management plan in March was a critical step in getting Fish and Wildlife to exempt the Ladder Ranch from critical habitat designation for the frog. The Turner outfit sought the exemption because it believed the species could be restored more quickly without the extra layer of time-consuming regulation, Phillips said.
“We weren’t trying to get out of anything,” Phillips said. “We were just trying to advance efficient government.”
Turner, since 2006, has welcomed restoration of the aplomado falcon on the Armendaris Ranch, where nest platforms were built. The falcon was federally listed as an endangered species in 1986.
For more than a decade, Turner has promoted recovery of the black-footed ferret, once thought to be functionally extinct, on his Bad River Ranch in South Dakota and on the 590,823-acre Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico.
Turner’s 156,439-acre Ladder Ranch has housed Mexican gray wolves on behalf of Fish and Wildlife since 1997, the year before the lobos were first reintroduced to a national forest in southeast Arizona after being hunted and poisoned to near extinction. Today, Turner’s Flying D Ranch outside of Bozeman, Mont., is home to one of North America’s largest wolf packs, with about two dozen lobos.
Turner said while some ranchers “feel like one (wolf) is too many,” he would welcome the presence of free-roaming wolves on the Ladder and Vermejo Park ranches, where he grazes bison, but not cattle, in a for-profit, commercial operation. “We’ve got to give them (wolves) a little something,” Turner said.
Ted Turner’s daughter, Laura Turner Seydel, a board member of Defenders of Wildlife, noted that, along with grazing 55,000 head of bison to sell lean meat to a chain of restaurants, Turner ranches permit hunting and allow timber harvesting, natural gas wells and solar energy projects. “These are working ranches,” Seydel said, “but it works for the environment, the ecosystem and the animals, all combined together. So it’s a great model.”
Phillips added: “We’re not just tree-hugging, gorp-eating, ecofreaks. Mr. Turner’s ranches are serious ranching endeavors, and we recognize that in many situations wildlife need to be managed. . . . We’re not opposed to wolf management. We recognize they sometimes create problems, real problems that need to be resolved. But we don’t believe that the mere presence of a wolf is a problem.”
Turner has long been concerned about explosive human population growth, the depletion of ocean fisheries and global warming. “The environment is under pressure all over the world and in many places it’s on the verge of collapse or collapsing,” Turner said. “So we have a lot of work to do.”
Asked if he grows discouraged by the enormity of the challenges, Turner said no. He recounted a conversation with the late French marine conservationist and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau while on a trip in the Amazon. Turner had told Cousteau he was discouraged about heightened tensions with the Soviet Union after President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 remark calling the Cold War rival the “evil empire.”
“And (Cousteau) said, ‘Ted, even if we knew for sure that we were going to lose, which we don’t, what could a man of good conscience do but keep fighting to the very end?’
“And that’s what I do – I’m going to keep fighting to the very end.”