Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks, welcome to The Roundup! We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast that focuses on interesting people in the Cowboy State. And I just really am so excited about this interview today.
I don't know how many of you have been to or have heard of the Draper Museum of Natural History at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. Well, it's a big deal, it’s truly the Smithsonian of the West. It's a gigantic, huge, nationally recognized Museum in the little town of Cody, Wyoming.
If you've been to the Draper Museum of Natural History, today is a really great treat for you, because you get to meet the person whose brain that whole thing came out of. This is Dr. Charles Preston, and sorry, I'm gonna have to call you Chuck. Because Chuck, you're my friend, and I have known Chuck and his wife, Penny, she's the one who dragged me kicking and screaming and twisted my arm into broadcasting.
But Chuck's, literally, list of accomplishments is so long and so impactful on the world, particularly of raptors, and of golden eagles, but his legacy lives on at the Draper Museum of Natural History, even though he's retired. We're going to talk about that, too. Chuck is not slowing down.
And so I am really excited today to bring you the story of Dr. Charles Preston and how he has just made his career and become the expert on Golden Eagles from growing up in Arkansas. Chuck, you made it to Wyoming from Arkansas. Hello, I'm so glad to have you on the show.
Dr. Charles Preston:
Oh, thank you, Wendy. It's a pleasure to be here.
Wendy Corr:
Well, it's great to see you - I've spent so many wonderful times with you and Penny, and so it's really fun to be able to see you there in your cabin up the North Fork, and living your best life after such an amazing career.
But your career - you weren't supposed to start out being a biologist and being somebody who's the foremost expert on raptors. You started out, you were going to play baseball. Tell us about Arkansas.
Dr. Charles Preston:
Well, I was born in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. My dad was stationed at Fort Chaffee. It's an army base in Fort Smith, which is a town with really more Western flair than the southern flair. It was always known as hell on the border, because it's right next to what was Indian territory back in the day.
So Bass Reeves, the marshal, and the hanging judge Isaac Parker, and if you've seen Hang ‘em High, and Rooster Cogburn, that whole bit that was based out of Fort Smith, actually, so I was born into that environment.
Like I say, born in Fort Chaffee, that was sort of a de facto Wildlife Refuge out there, my dad was stationed there, so he knew that place very well. And I remember just as a young boy, getting excited about wildlife by these afternoon drives with my dad.
And I remember one particular time seeing a great horned owl just at dusk. And I, I didn't know these things really existed, I'd seen them in storybooks and, and Disney films, but to see a live great horned owl stuck with me. And yeah, so I was always interested in wildlife.
But I, you know, my parents weren't particularly financially well off. And I didn't know that I would be able to go to college. But I had several baseball scholarship offers. And so that's how I went to college. Went to a community college first, it was number - I think we were number two in the nation at the end of one season. Anyway, it was one of the better programs in the country.
And yeah, I had my eyes set on a professional baseball career. I was a shortstop and second base occasionally, but I broke my leg as a freshman coming across on a double play, kind of a freak accident. But I was able to play the next three years without any trouble, but I didn't have quite the scholarship offers after that.
I mean, moving on, I had some, and so I was able to play and complete my college years. But as I went through college, I became more and more interested in wildlife and more excited about the possibilities in that so yeah, it was a crooked road, but I think sometimes those are the best roads.
Wendy Corr:
I will agree with you 100%. I can attest to that. So when you were kind of switching your focus, what direction did you decide you wanted to go for wildlife, and how did you want to pursue that? And what kind of a career were you thinking of at that point? Getting out here to Cody, right?
Dr. Charles Preston:
I was so bloody naive, I really didn't - I had grown up watching, like so many of my generation, watching Wild Kingdom on television, and shows like that, American Sportsman was another one, but Wild Kingdom was really a driver. I didn't know how to get to do any of that sort of thing.
So I thought, well, maybe - the only biology job I knew was maybe working for, at that time, the Arkansas Game and Fish Department, or Commission. And so when I had my little undergraduate degree in wildlife management and biology in hand, I ran down to the Game and Fish office and said, Here's my resume, I'm ready for a job.
And this wonderful woman, I still remember her face, her name was Gladys. And she opened this huge file drawer. And it just kept opening, and opening and opening. And she put my resume at the end of that long file cabinet with more than 100 other files in it, and smiled and said, ‘Okay, well, wait to hear from us.’
And I said, ‘Well, is this an alphabetical order?’ She said, ‘No, this is in the order of applications. And you are at the end.’ ‘Great, how many do you hire a year?’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, we may this year be able to hire as many as five people.’ There were more than 120 applicants in there.
I mean, it was a sign of the times, you know, I'm the baby boom generation. So typical. And from day one, we were - for all of our foibles and flaws in my generation, we had to be very competitive, because it was a competitive world. For every job available, there were sometimes dozens, sometimes even hundreds of applicants.
So I didn't know what else to do. You know, this is a true story. It should be in a book somewhere. So I was a little despondent about everything. I had been looking for a job for quite some time, I'd worked for the Forest Service in seasonal - in fact, that's where I met Penny, my wife, and we'll talk about that later.
But Penny and I were watching television, actually, in the afternoon - like I say I was a little bit despondent. In those days, you had three channels, if you were lucky. And on an afternoon show, like in many local television stations in those days, there was a Bozo show, it was a cartoon show, but it also had guests and everything. And I was too lazy to get up and change the channel. And you didn't have remotes back then. This was 1974 or 1975.
And so we watched, and all of a sudden, Bozo introduced to the six and eight year old kids that were screaming, running all over the place in the studio, and Bozo announced that there was Mr. Preston, coming on.
Well, that got my attention. I know that name. And sure enough, the director of the Arkansas Museum of Science and History came on and he had a couple of live animals. He had a snake and he had a screech owl, I remember, and talked about predator prey dynamics to this six to eight year old audience.
And they were absolutely mesmerized. He did such a wonderful job. I mean, he was, he was absolutely an amazing educator. And so Penny said, ‘Hey, why don't you go down, see if you can get a job at that museum.’ And I said, ‘I don't know anything about museums. And that's not the way you get a job, Penny.’
And so to prove her wrong, I went down the next day. Secretary let me in, probably because my name was Preston, because this guy was very busy. I went in, found out we weren't related at all. And he interviewed me and talked with me, it was very generous, about an hour of his time, telling me that there were no jobs available.
Short story is, I came back home that night, he called and said, ‘You know, maybe we can find a place for you. But you'll have to - you can work in our education department, learn curatorial techniques, but also, I want you to take care of our live animal collection.’
It was an education collection with raptors and snakes and a skunk as I recall, and then a few possums and turtles and alligators and everything. So, so I did that. I took that job. $500 a month, I remember, and I'm thrilled to have it.
And during the two years there, I had the opportunity to partake in so many different things and find out what a curator can do in a museum. I'd never thought about that. So that inspired me to go back to graduate school.
So I went to graduate - I'd never thought of it before - went to graduate school, and majored, or my masters degree is in zoology and ecology, and my PhD is in ecology, wildlife ecology.
And so it was time to graduate. Now, Penny and I were still together, we were dating. She was in Little Rock, Arkansas, as a reporter and weekend anchor at a television station there. I was lucky enough, I had an offer of a postdoc in Scotland.
But I also - there's a long story to this, but I'll make it short. Also, there was an opportunity there at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, because they were growing so rapidly, they'd gone from 8000 students to about 14,000 students in just a couple of years.
It's Vietnam era. So many folks were coming back on the GI Bill, going to college, and they had too many students for too few professors, and one professor was on sabbatical. And so after some discussion with the department chair, I was hired as a visiting assistant professor.
Within a couple of years, they actually created a new position for me, because they wanted to develop a brand new wildlife curriculum. So that really started me on a path of getting in on the ground floor of something and really being able to help create something - which will bring us to the Draper here before too long.
But yeah, so I did that. Loved that position. I was tenured, I received tenure, in 1988-89, promoted, had a big national science foundation grant, loved my students, loved the faculty there. Loved being a university professor. It was great. And I was able to do everything. And I was conducting research, and I was teaching and just all the things I love to do.
But in the meantime, Penny had been moving around, she left because she had a wonderful job offer in Nashville, and with her career, you know, you have to go where the jobs are. She landed in Dallas as a news director and an anchor of a superstation there, KTVT, that went all over the country. So I'd be sitting in Little Rock, and I mean, go out and oh, you know, maybe have a beer at some local bar. And there she was on television up there. And I'd hear all these comments about Whoa, who's that up there?
Wendy Corr:
“That’s my wife!”
Dr. Charles Preston:
They had no idea. She was my wife at that time, at any rate, but we had a commuter marriage at that point. We were actually married in 1983, just after my PhD, when I just started University of Arkansas at Little Rock, by then Governor Bill Clinton. And so that was exciting, too. There's long story with that, that I won't go into.
Really, we were tired of commuting back and forth and just seeing each other on weekends and a few vacations. And that's what brought us to the west. And here's how we, I finally talked her into a summer vacation for a week and a half and Yellowstone. This was 1988, just before the fires here in Yellowstone, as a matter of fact. We visited, she fell in love with it when she saw her first moose. That's what did it for her, just flipped a switch.
And so she said, “Okay.” And we talked about it, we loved this country, and especially getting out of the south, both Dallas and little rock in the summer was a good thing with a heat and humidity. And so we said, well, all right, let's make a pact. The first one of us to get a really good professional job in the Rockies - we couldn't guarantee Yellowstone - we said we would take it, and then the other one follow. And come what may, trust ourselves, in being able to work that out.
So sure enough, and again, I had just gotten tenure, but the Rockies called, and so Penny and I decided that you know, the first one of us that really got a good professional job would would move and the other one would follow and you know, we had faith that the other one would be able to get fine, good work.
And it turned out that the Denver Museum of Natural History, now Denver Museum of Nature and Science, but then Denver Museum of Natural History, was looking for a new curator of ornithology, and a department head for the zoology department. I applied - and they really recruited me. They were looking again, it was one of those ground floor kinds of situations where they were really, although it was a well established institution, they had a new director, a new chief curator there. “We're sort of heading in a new direction and we're looking for very specific kinds of people to head up each one of their departments.”
So in January of 1990. I had resigned - it was bittersweet because I did love the university so much. And I loved the colleagues and they had been so good to me. So when I wrote my letter of resignation to the university, I said, “Well, I'm 37 years old. I've lived in Arkansas most of my life. I've traveled a bit into tropical countries and others, but you know, if I'm not used to the heat and humidity of Arkansas in the summer yet, it's not going to happen for me. So I'm heading to the Rockies.” And they understood that.
Wendy Corr:
Great, that's great. So you made it out west, which is where you guys have been wanting to go.
Dr. Charles Preston:
We made it to Denver and finally to the Rockies. And Penny came a few months later. And I wrote a big grant early on, a grant proposal that was funded to more than a million dollars, to conduct research at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which then was a federal Superfund site.
And it was one of the plans, or at least one of the potential uses of that area was to turn it into a national wildlife refuge. But there were many people that wanted to turn it into a residential area, which would mean a whole other level of cleanup, and environmental issues. There was lots of litigation.
So I wrote a grant proposal to study the effects of various cleanup activities on the wildlife there in the wildlife communities. I got my curators involved at the Denver Museum, working under me, and graduate students - I had an adjunct appointment at several universities then, at Denver University and University of Colorado Boulder and University of Colorado, Denver.
And we conducted four years worth of research out there - again, really ground floor kind of stuff. It was exciting to do, and it brought the Denver Museum to a different level in terms of the research level there.
So, loved it in Denver, I got to do so many different things. But Denver kept growing, and growing, and growing. And Penny and I felt less and less comfortable. And Penny at the time had worked on a few jobs there in Denver, she came up from Dallas, left her job there, came up, she worked for television stations in Denver, and in Colorado Springs for a bit and even worked at the Denver Museum of Natural History as media relations manager for a while.
But we both said this is just getting too crowded, too crazy, the commute’s too long. What are we going to do?
So out of the blue, I was leading a field trip for our museum members down in southern Colorado, and I got a call at the hotel from some guy at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. And I said “Well, I know Cody, and I love Yellowstone.” We had just been up to Yellowstone to see wolves, soon after the reintroduction here.
The caller was the director, Byron Price, at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, and he said, ‘We'd like you to come up and interview for a position here. We want to create a brand new natural history museum. We have four world class humanities museums, but we want to create a new natural history museum, and there's money. Nancy Carrol Draper has committed at least $10 million toward that.”
I said, “Well, that sounds pretty exciting. But Buffalo Bill Historical Center?” And I was still happy with my job down there. So I said, “Well, I just don't know.”
Well, I got another call a couple of days later. And it was Byron Price and Al Simpson, Senator Simpson was the chairman of the board. And he said, “You know, we really think you ought to come up here and just interview, just take a look and, and see, we'd love to talk to you.”
Anyway, I'd written articles about the role of, and again, this is the late 90s. I had written articles about the role of natural history museums in the 21st century, and how they might be different, and how relevant they still were, and in fact, more relevant than ever with biodiversity issues.
And somebody had read a few of those. You never know who's going to read your articles. And I'd given a talk at the Smithsonian, I think somebody, one of the board members had heard that.
So I came to Cody thinking, well, I'll be polite, these people are so nice to me on the phone. I'll be polite, and I'll come up and I'll tell them, “Gee, you know, maybe I can recommend somebody for this job.” I walked in the door and was blown away. I mean, who isn't? Who isn't? I mean, Cody, Wyoming. 10,000 people or so, and this world class, truly world class. It's overused, but it fits with the Buffalo Bill, now Center of the West.
And I just fell in love with the people. I met Nancy Carrol Draper, of course, during my interview, Byron Price and Al Simpson and Willis McDonald, who endowed my chair later, as a matter of fact. And some other folks there, Wally Reber was a wonderful man that I met at the time, he was assistant director at the museum at the time and a brilliant guy in his own right.
And, well, I said, Yes, I'll do this, if you really want me, and they did offer me the job. I even took a little bit of a pay cut to come up here. And Penny was ready to come. She was excited about it.
The first question she asked was, “Well, are there mountains around like there are here in Denver?” And I was taken aback by her question a bit, I think. And I said, “Well, yeah, you know, there's some mountains.” She came in and said, “There are mountains all over the place here! Why didn't you tell me that?” I said, “Well, I guess I just didn't understand your question very well.”
Anyway, so we both came up here and just fell in love with Cody, the town. Certainly the environment here. I mean, we both had imprinted a bit on Yellowstone National Park. And I thought I'd probably be doing a lot of work in Yellowstone National Park. And I have done quite a bit and certainly got to know all the folks there.
But that was the opportunity, and they told me, “Well, it's up to you - this museum that we're going to create, it's got to come from you. You're not just the curator, you're going to be essentially directing the operations of that. But you're going to design the exhibits.”
Now, they already had exhibit designers. I mean, the folks who really put the nuts and bolts together, the specific sketches. And you know, they’d take my ideas and make them real, essentially. But I had some really firm ideas.
I'd been thinking about this since I'd worked at that Arkansas museum, after my undergraduate degree. If I ever had the chance to create a museum, what would it be like? And I'm an ecologist, I'm not, you know, I've worked with birds. But I've also worked with mammals and reptiles and amphibians and forests and plains and grasslands and everything.
But I consider myself an ecologist. That's really my training. And so I tried to take a holistic view. And so many museums, even great natural history museums, are broken up into a Bird Hall and a Mammal Hall and a Big Mammal Hall. And, you know, which is wonderful, in its own right. But I always wanted to create a museum that was about the environment itself.
And so we developed the idea and the only thing I told them was, we want you to focus on this greater Yellowstone Area. And so, got together with the exhibit designers, who was a group called DMCD out of New York, Manhattan, actually, and the architects from Denver, wonderful group of folks.
And, you know, it's such a treat to be able to work with architects and exhibit designers at the same time. So you can create the space around the exhibits, not just try to fit exhibits into an existing space. And so these were 18 hour days, for really, almost four years, and very few weekends, even, that I took off but it was worth it.
Someone had to go out into each one of these biomes because I decided early on, well let's look at this from an altitude or elevation standpoint. And look at Alpine, down the mountain forests to meadow and down to plains, the basin, and the sagebrush steppe - and someone had to go out there and really get the lowdown on what was going on there.
So I camped in each one of those areas, again and again, many visits, I got to know the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from the ground floor, really, up, and created the exhibits. And of course, I pulled together an advisory committee with folks like Dave Love, the world famous geologist from Wyoming, and so many people - Dennis Knight from the University of Wyoming and, and Steve Buskirk, and so many different people - George Frizzen, of course, the world renowned anthropologist, archaeologists, and they were on my advisory committee. So it wasn't all out of my brain.
And I had assistants at the museum that were just fantastic - and you know, you don't do something like this, you don't do anything in life, I think, without a team of people who are, as far as I'm concerned, better than I am.
You know, you want to get people around you of all sorts who are better - assistants and advisors and everything else. So I was very lucky in that, and people, and it really became a passion.
So, it was four years in the making, and it wasn't easy. Because, you know, the board - and they had legitimate concerns - the board of the museum, whom I thought when I was hired, had universally accepted the idea of a Natural History Museum, about half, about a third of the board was really kind of dead set against the Natural History Museum, adding another museum, they were looking at financial issues, but also, you know, they were humanities, they were art collectors and gun collectors and, and his historians, and in, that's their interest.
And natural history, science, they didn't know how that would blend well with humanities. There were about a third of the board that were, they could take it or leave it, I think. I mean, they were open to the idea. And there were about a third that were really gung ho for it.
So it was a matter of really working with all of those trustees and the staff, too, to get their input on things, as well.
But I always had this idea of this winding trail through the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, essentially, starting in Alpine and going down through all the levels with the ambient sounds. Exhibit designers thought I was nuts for a lot of these things. But I would have wanted to incorporate video, and audio, ambient sounds, interactive things, more traditional, even, taxidermy and other things and blend them all together in a way - but not have everything behind glass, like so many museums.
And so that's why you see in the Draper, you're actually - hopefully you have that sense of walking through the environment. And that's what I love so much about it.
And I think that that has taken off in other museums - we've had many museums, from the French National Museum to the Utah Museum of Natural History, and others that have come - the Wild Center or Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks came and consulted with us, and I went up and talked to them about how we did this. And they've taken the same theme now at their museum.
It's a bit like, you know, the zoos many years ago, began getting animals away from out of cages and into natural habitats. Well, that's in a sense, what we were doing with the exhibits here.
And I wanted to create a lab where people could actually see what we were doing behind the scenes. I’ve got a story about that, by the way - as you might imagine, some of the other curators at the Museum and the board members and others weren't excited when I said, “Yeah, we can create this open lab and people can actually see us preparing specimens.” They said, “You mean blood and guts and we’re skinning things and doing it?” “Yeah, absolutely! It's gonna be, they'll love it.”
And they said, “Oh, you'll drive people away. This is a terrible idea.” But they gave me my head on that one, and that's exactly what we created. And people on a given day, in the summer, especially, we have big audiences. We can have 60 or 70 people just outside the lab on a Tuesday morning when we're preparing specimens. And now my successor, Corey Anko, who's now the curator there, now that I'm away from the day to day operations, he’s has installed an audio, a two way audio microphone there where the people outside can ask questions, and we can answer those questions and tell them what's going on there.
So it's - one of the most exciting things is seeing how you create a platform, and it grows from that. Other people take it, you know, they're smarter than I am anyway, and they take it farther. But again, you know, it takes a team to do anything, and so, very lucky.
But you know, with the grand opening we had, gosh, Richard Leakey came to speak, we invited him, he came to speak and gave a wonderful talk to the community. And then the next day, the grand opening, he said some wonderful things and said, “The Draper should be the envy of this and any other city.”
Clint Eastwood dropped by on that opening day as well. It was a big day, we had the biggest crowd that the center I think has ever had - more than 7000, 7500 people in a single day had visited, and we got wonderful reviews worldwide, really, on the Draper.
So, very proud, I’m very proud of the Center for what it is. And always just hoped that the Draper would be up with the rest. And then we created a live raptor education program in 2011, I guess. It was something that was on my mind from that first museum that I worked in, where I was working with live animal collections, and saw, you know - when you see people eye to eye with a live wild animal, really, that can't be released. I mean, that's how we are, that's the birds that we have. There is a light bulb that goes on that is brighter than anything. It's this, “Wow.” And so we wanted to incorporate a lot of “wow” factor in the museum.
Wendy Corr:
It is a WOW factor museum. I mean, one of the things, where you're talking about the Draper, and if you haven't been, folks, if you haven't been to the Draper Museum of Natural History in Cody, it is worth the drive from anywhere to go.
People come from all around the country, from all around the world, to visit the Buffalo Bill Center of the West - and the Draper Museum, to me, is the most memorable, because it's for all ages. You walk into that Draper, and like you said, you're winding down the ecosystems. What catches me is, you get to the exhibit about fire, and you smell the smoke. And you're walking over the roots of the trees. And it's so immersive and interactive in that way.
And I love being able to point somebody to this stuff, and talk to people about the Draper, and “Isn't that museum amazing?” And I say, “Yeah, I know the guy who made it.” So yeah.
Dr. Charles Preston:
Oh, that's great, Wendy.
Wendy Corr:
There's so many things that we need to, that we still want to talk about, I’m having a wonderful time listening about the Draper! But I want to spend just a few minutes, Chuck, talking about what you've been really focusing on the last few years, which is golden eagles. And that Golden Eagle project. And there's been a beautiful documentary made out of it, you've had so many volunteers, you've got a golden eagle, kind of a watch program going with volunteers. Tell me, and tell us, about what you're doing right now with golden eagles.
Dr. Charles Preston:
Well, when I was exploring all of these biomes in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, I hadn't expected to be so excited, enthusiastic about the sagebrush steppe. You know, it's right there. It just looks flat and everything, and dry. But I became fascinated with the ecology of that area.
And the apex predator in that area is Golden Eagle. And I checked in with the agencies, and they didn't know much about the population here at all. They thought they may have eight or nine nests within this area that I sort of delineated as a potential study area.
And I said, “Well, you know, I think there may be more than that.” And so sure enough, we began a study just to look at, first of all, the status - who was there, I mean, how many, what was the density of the population. And then we found out in the first year, we had 35 territories with nests. And by the third year, we had more than 80, we identified from the air and from the ground.
And you're right, I had what I call the “Golden Eagle P” of volunteers that helped monitor nests. And we decided to do something really pretty simple - because I'm a full time administrator and curator here, I don't have as much time as I'd like to just do research. But I thought, well, one of the things we can do is monitor reproductive performance with golden eagles, and see how stable the population is, because golden eagles are beginning to decline in some areas of the West. They're stable at best and others. And so we wanted to know what was going on here in this population.
So this is the 16th year of our study, where each year, we assess the number of fledglings produced per territory, how many territories are occupied, and then how many fledglings are produced for occupied territory.
And we realized early on that it's tied, I mean, no big surprise, but tied to prey and prey abundance. What we found was that cottontails are the primary prey. In other areas, whether you go in Europe or other places in the United States, there is a diversity of prey. They may be hitting, you know, four or five different species equally.
In our case, there's not much more than cottontails. jackrabbits have been low, the population, for decades now. They used to be really cyclic and high and low, but they've been fairly low population, so not enough to support an eagle population.
Prairie dogs, well, you know, they're persecuted, whitetail prairie dogs, the ones that we have here in the basin, are not terribly prolific, and there's plague that comes through. So they're not abundant enough. But cottontails are the one right-sized animal.
When you think about size you think, well, energy return for energy spent. And so, sure, Golden Eagles can eat mice all day, but they're going to waste too much energy and getting not enough. So rabbits are about the right size, cottontails. And we found cottontails a primary prey.
The big thing that we discovered was that, in our area in the Bighorn basin - other people call it fluctuating, I'll call it cycles. We've watched it enough to say that our cottontails cycle on about a six year basis - that is that about every five to six years, we have a peak in the population, and then it goes down to a trough and then another six years, you're up at the top again.
So not surprisingly, I suppose, we found and we modeled it, we found that Golden Eagle reproduction follows it exactly. So they are linked. Where cottontails increase, Golden Eagle reproduction increases. Other years, when the population is low, you'll always have some Eagles reproducing, but many of them will occupy their territory, but choose not to breed. Or if they do, they're not successful.
And so we found that, we've documented that and published it. I'm working on a book now to really cover this first 15 years of our work.
When I retired in 2018, I said, Gee, I don't want to just drop this, this a platform. And what I always wanted to do is create a real research platform for others to follow and expand to other things based on what we've already learned, because we know so much about this system now. And that's exactly what's happened.
The Teton Raptor Center, and now University of Wyoming this year, are sending professors and students and researchers up to expand, put transmitters on many of our eagles, to find out a little bit more about survivorship and things that we weren't able to really spend the time doing. And many of my volunteers are still working as the Golden Eagle posse and providing good information.
So yeah, this has been a busy field season this year. Something happened in 2020. The emergence of something called Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus came to the Bighorn Basin - to Wyoming in general, but to the Bighorn basin. And even though the rabbit populations generally cycle, we were expecting an upturn in about 2021 from a low before, but it didn't happen.
With rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease, this cycle was broken, and the population just continued to crash. And Golden Eagle reproduction crashed as well. This year, we're starting, finally, to see a little bit of a rebound. I think that our eagle reproduction will go up.
We haven't done our rabbit surveys, we do rabbit surveys every year. We haven't done those yet. We'll do those in July. So I'm hoping that we're on an upturn, but it's tough - the same disease, a different strain of it, hit Europe back in the 80s and 90s and created real problems for two species that prey on rabbits - those were European hares, Iberian lynx, and Spanish Imperial Eagles, crashed to the point of becoming endangered in those areas. They were low populations anyway, but they really crashed for more than 10 years.
So hopefully, we'll have a better rebound from that. But that's what we're studying now. So I can't retire, exactly. I just don't go to meetings anymore, and I don't come into the office anymore. So I've got the best of all worlds, as long as I'm physically capable. And it's pretty physically demanding out there because we're - the Bighorn Basin is not flat. People think, “Oh, basin, flat.” No, there are Canyon lands and there's rappelling to do off of cliffs, and so at 71, it keeps me - at least keeps me ambulatory.
Wendy Corr:
Yes, it does. Chuck, we are out of time. And you've answered all my questions! All the topics that we talked about before, we tried to work it in, you got them all in.
I just am so proud to have someone who's so passionate, and so focused on the well being, and on the ecology, and on really supporting the species, but educating people about them. And I'm just so proud of the work that you've done, and proud to call you my friend - and I'm just really tickled that I got to introduce people to you, if they haven't already met you and know your work. You've got books out there? You've written a couple of books already.
Dr. Charles Preston:
Yeah, I think I've got six books on various topics that I’ve either edited or authored or co authored. My co author, Dr. Jeremy Johnston, the environmental historian that was at the Center of the West, just passed, and only 53 years old, with a long bout of illness. And he and I wrote a book really on about Wab,, the Ernest Thompson Seaton book, we included that, but we wrote a beginning and ending chapter, and some other things with it, and won a National Book Award for that.
So I miss Jeremy very much. But again, yeah, it's never about me or you. It's about us, you know, and that's how I look at it. But you said it - passion is, I think passion is a key to not necessarily a longer life, you never can tell. But it's certainly a key to a happy life. And what I always wish people are health and joy, and passion, and purpose.
So, yeah, I feel very lucky. Penny and I are celebrating our 50th year together. We started dating when we were 21 years old, way back when we worked for the Forest Service as a summer job. And we only have been married 41 years, she wouldn't marry me right away, because she said, “You sir, are not ready to settle down.” And she was right. But anyway, we've stayed together and I, I feel so so lucky.
Wendy Corr:
Well, I feel blessed to know you both, and to count you as my friends. And so I'm just tickled that we were able to get you on the podcast today. And it worked with your schedule, and Chuck, good luck with your future research and education, and bringing us all into this world of golden eagles and of ecology, and really understanding our place in the world. So thank you.
Dr. Charles Preston:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Wendy. You're right. My passion has been, from the time I really started this career, was exploring nature and sharing it with people. That's what's exciting to me. And hopefully, it makes a difference out there.
Wendy Corr:
You've done a good job on all accounts. The Draper Museum is your legacy. So folks, if you haven't been, you've got to make the trip to see the Draper Museum of Natural History in Cody!
And thank you all for tuning into this podcast. Because for me, this has been a great conversation and education, and I hope that you have found the same thing. And I hope that you find that with all of our guests here on The Roundup!
And thanks for tuning in. If you want to check out any of our previous podcasts, you can go to any of the podcast platforms, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, you can get on our website, cowboystatedaily.com. And stay tuned, because next week we're going to have another great guest as well. But thank you, Chuck, very much. Thank you all for tuning in today. Have a great week.
