George Gress


© Joshua Paul
 

Up Close with George Gress

Page 2

Despite the Conservancy’s habitat work, the turtle is federally listed as threatened, partly because of the black market pet trade. Besides keeping the animals’ locations secret, what are you doing to help prevent poaching?
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is going to start “pit tagging” turtles in Pennsylvania, and we’re going to help. The tag is the size of a grain of rice that is injected under the skin. Each tag has a unique number that can be read by a bar-code scanner.

How will that help?  It’s already illegal to take the turtles from the wild, right?
Yes, but it’s tough to prove. Someone could say the turtle was raised in captivity.

In the fall, you also do volunteer work tagging northern saw-whet owls—the smallest owl in eastern North America—as well as monarch butterflies, another little species. Isn’t working with such little critters more challenging given your size? 
I’m 6 feet 4 inches and 234 pounds, so I guess I would call myself big. But I’m not sure that makes it more challenging. With the owls, my hands are big enough to hold them with one hand and band with the other. But pulling one out of the mist net is kind of scary, because you don’t want to hurt the bird.
How long does it take to get one untangled? A minute to three minutes. It’s kind of surprising—they’re very docile and, as a rule, they just hang there and let you take them out of the net. Sometimes they clack their bills as a sign of aggression or clamp on with a talon. They’re tiny and cute, but when they grab you with their talons, you’re reminded that they’re predators.

Ouch. Does that happen often?
As I’ve gotten more experience, I’ve learned how to hold them and handle them so that it doesn’t. One of the incentives to learn how to do that is to get clawed every now and then.

And how does one tag a butterfly? Very carefully, no doubt.
It’s a little sticky tag about as big as a pencil eraser and you press it on the bottom of the hind wing, hold the butterfly a couple of minutes and then release it.

Doesn’t that weigh them down?
Well, they’re pretty strong fliers, and the tag itself is pretty light, so it doesn’t seem to affect them. About two years ago, a butterfly I tagged in southeastern Pennsylvania was later found in El Rosario, Mexico, at the bottom end of the Baja Peninsula. That’s more than 2,000 miles, so those tags must not weigh them down too much.

It seems that much of what you do—from your job overseeing prescribed burns to your hobby carving wooden songbirds—requires a delicate touch.
My wife calls me a perfectionist, which is why I guess I don’t mind doing some of the detail work.

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