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WILLIAM WILCOXEN: From Minnesota Public radio, I'm William Wilcoxen. A new state job survey says the first half of 2003 has been the worst time in more than two years to look for a job in Minnesota. The Minnesota Workforce Center compiled the new survey. It says the number of job openings fell 22% from last year. State officials say there are now only four openings for every 10 Minnesotans who are looking for work. Minnesota's rate of unemployment still remains well below the national average.

The Twin Cities real estate market is still booming, with the median price for a home now topping $200,000. Local Realtor Association president Mike Heinzerling says a 20% increase in closed sales last month over June of 2002 was one of the highest on record, and new listings were up 28% in the 13 county metro area. He says the market should remain strong for the foreseeable future.

MIKE HEINZERLING: There was a lot of people that, you know, have been sitting on the fence as far as doing something. And with the market being so good with the interest rate, I think they finally decided it's been time for them to move up. And also, it actually helps the first time home buyers move into their first home.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Ramsey County saw the biggest increase in sales, followed by Anoka, Dakota, and Hennepin Counties. Work on a $5 million expansion and remodeling of the Fargo Civic Center is wrapping up. Construction started about 17 months ago. The project includes city hall, the Fargo Civic Memorial Auditorium, Centennial Hall, and a downtown skyway.

Partly cloudy skies over Minnesota today. Showers and thunderstorms are scattered across the north. There's a chance of a shower in the south as well. High temperatures mostly in the 80s, upper 70s near Lake Superior. Tonight, partly cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms, lows from the lower 50s on the Iron Range to the upper 60s in the southwest.

Right now in Duluth, it's cloudy and 71 degrees. In the Twin Cities, partly sunny, 75. I'm William Wilcoxen, Minnesota Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: All right, thanks, William. It's six minutes past 12:00.

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And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. Well, this hour on Midday, a walk on the wild side, if you will. We're going to hear from northern Minnesota wildlife biologist Bill Berg. He'll be talking about critters here in Minnesota. And we'll hear from University of Minnesota Professor Anne Pusey about her work with Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees in Africa. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson with the latest edition of our Voices of Minnesota interviews.

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DAN OLSON: Biologist Bill Berg played a role in helping save Minnesota's timber wolf population. He says the experience taught him that in the world of wildlife politics, those big, furry, charismatic megafauna often steal the show from lower profile critters.

BILL BERG: People don't seem to really care about little birds, you know, like the piping plover that probably, in our lifetime, is going to be down to just a few birds or maybe none whatsoever.

DAN OLSON: University of Minnesota Professor Anne Pusey has devoted much of her professional life to studying a charismatic megafauna, the chimpanzee. She says they can be cute and cuddly, but also cold and calculating.

ANNE PUSEY: Despotic alpha males, there are those who are more political and kind of form alliances with other males to gain political advantage.

DAN OLSON: This hour, Voices of Minnesota conversations with Bill Berg and Anne Pusey. In the world of Minnesota outdoor enthusiasts, Bill Berg is a living legend. Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Julin in Duluth visited him at his northern Minnesota home.

CHRIS JULIN: Bill Berg lives with his wife on a lake out in the boondocks. Their place is a 20 minute drive from Grand Rapids. The last stretch of road is a single lane dirt track through thick forest. Outside the house, there's a vegetable garden and a big shed. It's so big could park a semi truck in it.

BILL BERG: This is kind of-- this is a huge old Menard building full of old mechanical things, and duck decoys, and historical stuff. And I wish it was bigger because I don't have enough place to store all this old neat stuff I just love to tinker with.

CHRIS JULIN: What's the vehicle?

BILL BERG: The vehicle is a 1950 Willys four wheel drive Jeep wagon, and it was the Jeep Grand Cherokee or the Ford Explorer of the 1950s. It was back then, there was no other vehicle like that, like a five or six passenger vehicle. It has 47,000 actual miles on it and runs like a clock. And it's a 1950.

CHRIS JULIN: It looks like a hand done camouflage job.

BILL BERG: Yeah. When you have a bunch of old spray paint, you know, you might as well just use it all at once. So just camo it up a little bit. And some really interesting old snowshoes that I keep, and we still use them every year. And the oldest pair of snowshoes goes back to the middle 1930s. And they're still in original condition and they're still usable. And I just love love, love that early, early 1900s stuff.

I have a crystal radio that my dad listened to back when he was a teenager, or just a young lad around 1920. It still works. It's a 1909 crystal set that he and his brothers and sisters would listen to, and that's before they had any tube radios.

The crystal sets used no electricity, just worked on a crystal and had a big wire for an antenna. And I still have that. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, but I still have it.

CHRIS JULIN: You're kind of a pack rat.

BILL BERG: Yeah, I love it. I have a hard time throwing that stuff away.

CHRIS JULIN: History is a serious hobby for Bill Berg. That's why he hangs on to the wooden runners for an old logging sled and the eating utensils from logging camps. He says an untrained eye might see junk, but he sees nothing but treasures. He's a biologist by training, so he's collected biological treasures, too. He has skulls from a deer and a beaver on the picnic table in the screen porch. He's collected hundreds of skulls over the years. He uses them when he gives talks at schools.

He's officially retired, but he still gives talks. And he still gets regular phone calls from reporters who want some perspective on the latest news about wolves or lynx or grouse. And he still does population studies for the DNR as a contractor. There's nothing he loves more than being outside in the wild, whether he's hunting or fishing, or gathering data. But he didn't grow up in the north woods.

BILL BERG: I'm a south Minneapolis kid, even though I've never lived farther south than where I am right now since I graduated from college. But I grew up in south Minneapolis, but close to Minnehaha Creek, close to the Mississippi River, close to the Ford plant. And so I could go down there and I literally lived on the river. I was a river rat city kid who, after high school, would grab the fishing rod and a can of worms, and go down and fish, maybe even go down there and trap a little bit, even though it wasn't totally legal back then right in the city.

And I was fortunate to have a dad and a couple of uncles who would just take me fishing or hunting wherever they went. And I really had a good start there. And I felt that they prepared me for the job that I ended up with for my entire career.

I was a wildlife biologist for a little over 30 years with Minnesota DNR, Bureau of Wildlife Research populations group. And I had just the privilege to work, and I guess maybe the luck to work with so many different species, all of the grouse species from spruce grouse, down to rough grouse and sharptails and prairie chickens. And then the other part of my job was working with furbearers and predators.

And, you know, all the way down from the big guys, timber wolves and bobcats and lynx and coyotes, you know, down to the small ones, the martens and the fishers, and the weasels and the mink.

CHRIS JULIN: What did you actually do day to day?

BILL BERG: A lot of people think that a wildlife biologist is outside all the time and having fun, you know. And I think a lot of people go into the wildlife profession because of that. But there's really a lot less being outside and having fun outside than there is working, inside on reports and data analysis, and preparing for presentations and so forth.

But my job basically, through the entire career, was researching working on coyotes and wolves and bobcats and fisher and sharptails. But then I headed up a lot of population surveys statewide. Early in my career, I headed up the moose surveys for DNR.

We had radio transmitters on a lot of moose and a couple hundred coyotes, and several dozen Bobcats, and several dozen wolves.

CHRIS JULIN: You spent 30 years following the population of a lot of different animals. What did you see?

BILL BERG: There have been some tremendous changes in populations, in range expansions, and in range contractions. And it was just amazing. So now, a lot of the presentations that I give have to do with wildlife range and population changes related to climate change, or at least what we think is related to climate change.

The old timers talk about the tough winters, and I remember as I'm kind of an old timer too. But I remember even in south Minneapolis, there were some really, really tough winters. And we're still going to see some tough winters. But there's no question that there's a warmer climate scenario happening in at least central and northern Minnesota, to say nothing of the Canadian provinces. The northern latitudes are going to see much more of a climate change.

So in response to warmer winters and generally warmer summers, a lot of wildlife species have expanded their ranges. And a couple of these involve critters that we take for granted, like raccoons and striped skunks that, up until just even 30 years ago or so, they were still fairly rare in far northern Minnesota.

But then they started moving farther north into the Canadian provinces, up through Ontario and Manitoba. And now there are raccoons as far north as Flin Flon in northwestern Manitoba, roughly 400 miles north of Winnipeg, northwest of Winnipeg. There are skunks in Churchill, and we were up to Churchill just four years ago and took the train. It's a trip that I'd encourage anybody to do, the old Hudson's Bay train-- took that up there. There were striped skunks that far north.

Then there's an animal called the Virginia opossum that's named the Virginia opossum for obvious reasons. It's a southern US animal. north America's only marsupial, carries its young around in a pouch. And I remember taking a mammalogy course back in 1958 from a fellow named Dr. Jim Beer, who talked about possums possibly moving north into northern Illinois and Iowa.

Well, by golly, it was about 40 years ago when they started coming into the southern part of Minnesota. And I'm sure a lot of listeners from southern Minnesota can really relate to this. Long about in the 1980s, they reached the southern suburbs of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

And we biologists continued to learn from wildlife. They teach us a lot. We didn't think they'd even get across the Mississippi or the Minnesota Rivers, but they fooled us as well. And possums continued to move north of the Twin Cities through the suburbs. And now possums live on a line in northern Minnesota from north of Duluth by Two Harbors, all the way to the northwest, up to where north Dakota and Manitoba and Minnesota meet.

You know, these animals are adaptable as well. During cold winters, they freeze their ears and their tails off, but they can still hear through those holes in their heads, even though their ears are gone. They have a tremendous reproductive capacity. When you look at this, this has introduced a whole new predator in Minnesota that wasn't here 40 or 50 years ago.

And as a consequence, birds that nest on the ground or even in trees, they're exposed to a whole new predator that they haven't been used to, haven't adapted to. And there are wealth of bird species that are changing their ranges with regard to just gradual, gradual winters.

northern Minnesota has robins at stay all winter. Cardinals stay all winter in certain areas. People in the Twin Cities can probably relate to all the crows that spend the winter now in the Twin Cities area. And when I was a kid, back when we burned coal and so forth, a few crows would spend the winter huddled up around the tops of chimneys just to stay warm. But now there are crows that stay all winter in northern Minnesota. They don't even go south anymore.

But there are dozens and dozens of bird species that are moving north, and some mammals as well. And in turn, there are some far northern species-- and this is really a great concern-- some northern species, both birds and mammals, that are receding farther north, animals and birds that are accustomed to really cold winters and cool summers.

One is certainly the moose that we take for granted in Minnesota. Back when I did my master's work at Agassi Refuge in the late '60s and '70s in northwestern Minnesota, Minnesota had on the order of 4,000 to 5,000 moose in the northwest and 4,000 to 5,000 moose in the northeast.

Now there are on the order of perhaps 500 moose in the northwest, maybe a couple hundred more, maybe a couple hundred less. So the population has gone down tremendously. There are a lot of reasons for that that are not all linked to climate change, more diseases and parasites and so forth. And the wolf has moved to the northwest now. But the northeastern population of moose is pretty stable.

But when you look at the climate change predictions and models for even northeastern Minnesota, we're probably the last generation that is going to really experience northeastern Minnesota as the pristine northern boreal forest on the Canadian shield that were used to. The boreal forest that we think of in the northeast as being northern conifers, pine, spruce, and balsam, lakes that freeze up early and thaw late, in just a very short time, probably on the order of 30 or 40 years, there will be more and more of a change, and a gradual change throughout the century to probably less spruce and less conifers, and more of a hardwood forest, maybe even maples and oaks taking over more of northern Minnesota.

CHRIS JULIN: How does that make you feel?

BILL BERG: Well, I'm a stout Scandinavian stock and part Norwegian and Sweden. I love cold, cold weather. So personally, I don't like it hot. You know, that's one reason I go north into northern Manitoba every year, and I love it where it's cool. But there are going to be a lot of changes.

People are going to be used-- they're going to see a lot of changes in not only northern Minnesota but all over the state as far as different wildlife, many species of which are not going to be very desirable, More insects and diseases, insect-borne and various plant type and forest type diseases. Generally, the changes are going to be far less favorable than the benefits.

CHRIS JULIN: This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. We're talking with Bill Berg. He was a wildlife biologist with the Department of natural resources for 30 years. He says the most controversial animal he worked with was probably the timber wolf.

BILL BERG: We put radios on timber wolves, and with DNR, the first ones were in the early '70s. And we still do. And I count we as I'm not with DNR anymore, but I still say we. But radios are still put on wolves by DNR in the Remer and southwest of Grand Rapids area. But that was a real challenge. You know, I was able, through my career, to see the bounty ending in 1965.

I was able to see the wolf get full Federal Endangered Species protection in '74, and watched that population respond. And you talk about biologists learning something from the animals. The wolf population in Minnesota expanded its range and expanded its numbers far beyond what biologists ever thought that it would. And it's still happening.

But there are a lot of challenges there when it's listed as a state-- now it's a state-threatened animal that was endangered until 1978. And it's an animal that's involved with tremendous bio-politics. Think of the social pressures, the political pressures, the biological pressures, the extremes on both sides of the entire wolf management issue, you know.

And biology kind of takes a backseat to social pressure sometimes. We probably have, in the northern half of the state, twice the number of wolves that we had before European settlement. Because back then, the forest was old and supported hardly any deer. And wolves had to kill moose and caribou and sometimes elk in order to survive. And they didn't have very high densities.

So we have this wolf population that's really twice as high as what even the federal timber wolf recovery plan says we're supposed to. But it's one of these charismatic megafauna that people just get attached to, you know. And it's a species that's very adaptable. It's defied all of the biologists' predictions about how many we could have. It's defied the predictions of how close they would live to humans and what kind of road density they would live in, and how much disturbance they would have, and how far they would travel.

And it's an animal that biologically, it could support easily a trapping and a hunting harvest of several hundred animals a year. And yet, it doesn't. It's the prime example of, I think, social pressures really having a little bit more influence than good, sound wildlife science and biology.

CHRIS JULIN: You say the biology sometimes takes a backseat, especially when talking about wolves. How are we doing with other species?

BILL BERG: Last summer, I had a chance to work on the piping plover on Lake of the Woods. And this summer, I have that same DNR summer job. The piping plover is a little shorebird that's the color of sand. And it kind of looks like a killdeer in a way, but it has different behavior.

And last summer, Minnesota had four birds, a total of four birds. And they had zero reproduction last year, and they had zero reproduction two years ago in Minnesota. And there are just not that many birds left in North America, piping plovers. The Fish and Wildlife service, because the piping plover's a federally endangered species and the timber wolf is endangered and threatened all over the northern US as well, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they just had two comment periods that ended.

And these are the Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal people solicit comments among the public and natural resources agencies, anybody who wants to comment whenever there's a change in classification like from endangered to threatened, or going the other way. The timber wolf attracted over 40,000 public comments to the Fish and Wildlife Service over the Fish and Wildlife service's most recent decision to delist or downlist in certain areas of the US.

The piping plover, this little endangered shorebird that's not fuzzy and you can't pet it-- and it's not charismatic, but it's very beautiful-- attracted somewhere between 15 and 20 comments to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It just shows you where people's priorities are. And sometimes, they might care about the wrong species and maybe put their emphasis on the wrong species. They care so much about the wolf and the wolf is going to do extremely well whether it's declared endangered or threatened or special concern or whatever, especially in the northern tier of states and the northern Rockies.

But yet, people don't seem to really care about little birds, you know, like the piping plover that probably in our lifetime, is going to be down to just a few birds or maybe none whatsoever.

CHRIS JULIN: I get the impression that some people think you just sort of walk out in the woods and it's watching a nature program. You know, animals are just going to come walking out of the forest right up to you. And it doesn't quite work that way, really, does it?

BILL BERG: You really have to work at catching these interesting critters out in their natural environment. And you have to be darn lucky as well. And you have to be prepared for some surprises. Nature is kind of ugly, kind of cruel, and kind of bloody. And so sometimes, people really feel bad for a deer that got killed by a predator or maybe by a bird that got nailed by a hawk or an owl.

But when you think of the miracles of nature and how reproduction is timed, and all of the predators out there that are after basically the same prey species-- the same batch of prey species-- it's really incredible. Think of the number of the millions of wildlife births every year and the millions of wildlife deaths every year. And the wildlife programs and nature programs really don't like to portray that. But it's life and death out there, and a lot of injury and a lot of suffering and a lot of diseases, and so forth, that you really have to understand and watch and see to really understand it.

CHRIS JULIN: And a lot of quiet hours of watching without seeing too.

BILL BERG: Yeah, it just doesn't happen. You have to work at it. Sometimes it happens, but generally, you really have to work at it.

CHRIS JULIN: You've spent decades as a wildlife biologist. What was your best day in the field?

BILL BERG: Well, probably, the best day in the field was just this past spring, spring 2003, after I retired. But I'm an early morning person and I like to go out and count sharptails and do rough grouse drumming counts and so forth. And I've seen so many tremendous wildlife things that just some wildlife photographer or the average listener would just drool over seening.

But this past spring, I was watching on a sharptailed grouse dancing ground in Aiken County, two sandhill cranes. Sandhill cranes are a close relative to the whooping crane, and they're 4 and 1/2 or 5 feet tall and a magnificent bird that has a loud, echoing kind of call.

But looking through the binoculars, there were two other things out there that were not sandhill cranes. And I got a little closer and I was able to watch a coyote stalking these sandhill cranes coming from the south, trying to get a sausage and egg breakfast or something for breakfast.

And from the north, laying in the long grass was a bobcat. So coyotes and bobcats hate each other. They would kill each other if they have the chance. They're both independently and simultaneously hunting the same breakfast, a pair of sandhill cranes.

And of course, the sandhills kind of made idiots out of both of these predators. But I just get goosebumps talking about it. I was just on such a high, being able to watch this. And it probably superseded all of the other wildlife observations like wolves or coyotes, you know, chasing deer or seeing a litter of bobcat kittens. Or, watching a sharp tail grouse get hit on the dancing ground by a red tailed hawk where it literally explodes in a batch of feathers.

But watching that experience or just having that experience this spring of two magnificent predators hunting two magnificent prey, just absolutely incredible.

CHRIS JULIN: This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. We're talking with Bill Berg. He spent 30 years as a wildlife biologist with the Department of Natural Resources. One of his duties over the years was tranquilizing animals with darts if, for example, a moose wandered into town and couldn't find its way out.

BILL BERG: One time, I got a call that there was a moose in the Moorhead City. And this was right after there had been a moose in White Bear Lake. And it was kind of a sad incident, but a couple of conservation officers, not really knowing what to do, shot that moose in White Bear Lake and injured it. And it died, of course. But the TV networks were there taking pictures of this and stumbling over its entrails. And it was a bad, bad scene.

And so, just a short while later, we got this call that there was a moose in Moorhead. And they said, Berg, don't screw this one up. Use drugs if you can and immobilize it, and move it. We don't want another blood incident. And so I went out there with some drug called M99. And it's a drug that's really-- you really have to have a lot of care to use it.

And in fact, we carry an antidote where if you happen to get that drug in your system, you give this antidote to yourself on your tongue. You pierce your tongue and put it in. Otherwise, you die.

Anyhow, we got to Moorhead and I was by myself, but I met a couple of wildlife people there. And the TV networks were there. But the football team, Moorhead State football team, had kind of cornered this moose in the football stadium right on campus. And I'm really fortunate that I have good night vision. But we didn't want to blow another one for the TV networks.

So we just made ourselves inconspicuous, and it got dark and the TV networks left. And the moose was still in the stadium. And so we got the moose under the bleachers and I had the dart gun, and a local Sheriff held the flashlight behind me. And I shot at the moose with the dart gun. And it just fires kind of a crude dart and on impact, the drug goes in the animal. I really missed the first time, and so I could hear this dart twanging around and under the metal bleachers, not knowing where it would end up, if it would get one of us.

But the second shot really did the job well. But the coach kept the football team on-hand. And they were there and just, you know, a few bruiser college football players just loaded that into the U-Haul trailer and dragged it out of the city of Moorhead for several miles, back up north to where we thought it belonged. And we let it out of the trailer and we gave it the antidote, and got up and walked away. And it was just fine and we were fine.

CHRIS JULIN: Bill Berg and his wife, Terry, raised four kids in the north woods of Minnesota.

BILL BERG: We had two biological kids back when we were going to college. And I don't know how we made it back then, just living on the little bit that we did after the service and being able to afford college, working enough just to get through, you know. And we had two of our own kids.

And then, when we were up working on the Manitoba border, right after I finished the moose work with the US Fish and Wildlife service, I worked out of a place called Norris Camp, the headquarters for the Red Lake Wildlife Management Area, a wonderful place in history that was an old WPA Works Progress Administration camp back in the depression. And a couple of hundred people worked there.

But we would get-- it was such a remote area of Minnesota and we got no American TV up there, and just Canadian TV. And we kind of wanted to adopt back then. We were really big on zero population growth and just wanted to have our own two kids. So we had our two sons already. But on Canadian TV, we would see ads for children up for adoption.

And so we inquired. We had our adoption agent from the Twin Cities look into these kids that were available for adoption. And back then, on Winnipeg TV, these kids would be-- they'd have their picture on TV and sell them like used cars. And it was kind of sad. But the end result is we adopted two Indian children up there, a Sayisi Dene girl from Churchill, and a Ojibwe boy from Jackhead. And so we have four, four kids out of that.

CHRIS JULIN: And are they outdoors people?

BILL BERG: Yeah, the entire family is really outdoors. here, again, old Dad would drag them out in the boat lot and take them up trapping and deer hunting, you know. And they really got to be really hardy people.

CHRIS JULIN: I know in some families, it happens that kids kind of go the other direction from their parents. But it sounds like on this subject at least, your children are with you. They're in agreement.

BILL BERG: Yeah. The kids are certainly with me in that they all love the outdoors. Last fall, I picked wild rice with my Indian daughter for the first time. And we have a total of nine grandchildren now. And all of them just love the outdoors and love to come up and fish with Grandpa.

But none of the kids-- it's interesting-- wanted to follow in dad's footsteps as far as a profession. There were a lot of days when we were working long days. And in DNR, very seldom do you really get-- there's no such thing as overtime. You're supposed to claim it, but you donate a lot of hours. And there are special projects that consume a whale of a lot of time.

And once in a while, if somebody retires or passes away, you do double dirty-- double dirty. That's a Freudian slip. But you do double duty and you do two jobs at one time for one salary. And so the kids would very often see old Dad come home late for supper. And none of them even had the closest desire to follow in dad's footsteps. And I hope I wasn't that bad when I came home, but I would come home kind of worn out and kind of grouchy sometimes, you know.

And in fact, in the Division of Wildlife, there's never been a son or daughter who was followed in their parents' footsteps. There have been progeny, like DNR progeny that have worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service or some other agency. But nobody in DNR Wildlife has really done that. And that's not true with DNR Fisheries.

There are several conservation officer families where not only has a father and a son or daughter followed in the same profession, but sometimes, brothers are conservation officers. And a lot of foresters, DNR, family professions, but really nobody in Wildlife. And it's kind of interesting and it's kind of sad.

CHRIS JULIN: How is Wildlife different from the other divisions?

BILL BERG: I think that the people who work for Division of Wildlife, the old section of Wildlife, there's a profound dedication, a kind of a very close feeling to the resource, and a very close feeling to the clientele. And I think sometimes, the pressures, maybe the pressures of the job or just the kids at the supper table seeing old dad or mom coming home kind of worn out. And well, you know, they probably think this isn't really what I want to do in life.

CHRIS JULIN: Bill Berg spent 30 years as a wildlife biologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. He retired last year, but he still does population studies for the DNR. He lives on a lake outside Grand Rapids. This is Chris Julin, Minnesota Public Radio.

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DAN OLSON: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

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Anne Pusey had just finished her undergraduate studies at Oxford University in England, her homeland, when the telephone rang. It was Dr. Jane Goodall asking if Pusey would come to work for her, studying chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Later, Pusey studied Japanese monkeys, then lions in the Serengeti.

Pusey is back with the chimps. She's director of the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota. The Institute is located there in large measure because that's where Pusey, Goodall's protege, is a McKnight distinguished professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior. I talked with her at her office on the University Saint Paul campus about the significance of Goodall's work.

Goodall has written more than a dozen books about her work with chimpanzees. She's credited with illuminating their lives and the threats they face. What is her legacy, do you think?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, I think it's many faceted, but the part that I'm most involved in is Jane made just key discoveries about chimpanzees when she started her studies, and continued to do so. And, you know, we're still learning really new things about chimps. A major one that she discovered early on was that they not only use tools, but they make tools. And until she discovered that was a hallmark of humans that set them apart from all other animals, the making of tools.

DAN OLSON: Tools like sticks, or what other?

ANNE PUSEY: The tools that she described early on were tools to fish for termites out of mounds that the termites make. And so a chimp will pick a branch and strip all the leaves off it, and maybe strip a piece of thin bark off it and then use that to push into the termite mound. Then the soldier termites bite onto it, they pull them out, and that way, get a very rich protein meal.

DAN OLSON: I talked with Anne Pusey just before she left on a month long trip to Tanzania's Gombe National Park. Tanzania is in East Africa. The 21 square mile Gombe National Park is less than half the size of Minnesota's Itasca State Park. Pusey says the park and the chimps in it are protected.

All around, she says, people have cut the forest. They're farming, and they've cleared the trees for farming?

ANNE PUSEY: Yes, they farm. It's not terribly good land, really, because it really should be covered in forest. Once you chop the forest on these steep slopes, then the topsoil washes down fairly quickly. They farm cassava and they fish in the lake. And the fish, you know, are declining in number, and the topsoil is washing off the mountain tops.

And so it is a very dire situation. It's a very poor part of Tanzania.

DAN OLSON: What is the park like? How many chimpanzees live there?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, the park is very small. It's only 35 square kilometers, really tiny. And we estimate that only about 100 chimps live there. Those are in three different social groups. And the middle social group is the one that Jane Goodall has always studied.

The two on the outside, which are butting up against the edges of the park, are declining in number now.

DAN OLSON: I had imagined many more chimpanzees living in this park. Has it always been about 100?

ANNE PUSEY: It's probably not been that much more in the park. But of course, they used to be able to go outside and there were continuous populations north and south, and east to some extent.

DAN OLSON: How adaptable are chimpanzees? Can they live in a variety of environments? They apparently haven't done well in the areas that have been forested and where people are trying to farm now. But if they were protected, if they weren't hunted, could they survive?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, chimpanzees need forest. They need ripe fruit. That's the major part of their diet. They do live-- people have studied them in parts of West Africa where they live in quite arid areas, and also other parts of western Tanzania. They can live in woodland with isolated stands of riverine forest. And in those areas, they travel long distances every day and it's quite hard. But once you've chopped down all the trees, they can't survive.

DAN OLSON: Is the population-- generally, in parts of Africa where chimpanzees live, is it endangered or is it still a healthy population?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, we're now thinking that chimps are endangered everywhere because even in the western part of Africa, western central Africa, even when there's still forest, there's been just a huge increase in commercial hunting, not just for chimps, but for anything that really lives in the forest, for bushmeat in general. The whole bushmeat trade, as it's called, has become an enormous problem for all of the animals living in the forests.

And it's not for subsistence hunting anymore. These are people who are drying the meat, taking it out to the cities and towns and selling it. And sometimes, it's sold for less than cow meat. Sometimes, it's sold for more because it's actually a preferred part of the diet for some of the people, because it's the traditional thing to eat.

So it's an enormous problem. And what's changed is that before, people were in the forest with their bows and arrows and other ways of hunting them. Now they have guns. There are roads for logging and mining that makes it easier for them to transport the meat. So that's become a huge problem for the forest animals.

DAN OLSON: What about the trade in exotic species? What happens to the young chimpanzees? Where do they end up?

ANNE PUSEY: I'm not an expert on this. I mean, there is still poaching to get young chimps and for the entertainment industry. One hopes not so much for scientific research anymore. That used to be one reason they were captured. I think many countries, most countries have very strict regulations now about importing chimpanzees. But of course, those regulations are sometimes flouted.

DAN OLSON: Yes. Give us a little bit of a history lesson there. That's how Dr. Goodall made part of her name in science was exposing the medical experimentation done on chimpanzees. How widespread was that? Is it still a factor?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, going back to the fact that chimps are our closest living relatives, in some ways, that could make them very good models for testing drugs, for understanding human diseases. Chimps can get just about every human disease. And of course, it can go the other way, too. And we can get diseases from chimps. And, you know, the most famous of those right now is HIV, which pretty clearly came from butchering chimps in West Africa.

DAN OLSON: So has the campaign to stop medical experimentation on chimps for human medical purposes, has that greatly abated? Is it gone altogether, or is it still happening?

ANNE PUSEY: I think it's fair to say it's greatly abated. And there are some countries which have a total ban on any kind of use of apes in medical research. That's not true here yet, but it's very strenuously controlled these days. And a very good case has to be made for using chimps.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Anne Pusey, director of the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Pusey says chimpanzees live in as many as 21 African countries. She's studied the relationship between chimpanzee mothers and their children.

So these creatures that we see in pictures are very adorable in the extreme. They have very compelling, interesting faces. What are they really like?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, I think you've summed it up quite well. They're not cute. Of course, the babies look cute and cuddly, which they are. But you don't often see-- except in wildlife films, you don't often see adult chimps on television, if you see these chimps in advertisements, they're generally young. They've been trained in probably a fairly unpleasant way to make them do the funny antics they do.

But adult chimps are not cute and cuddly. They have tremendously distinct personalities. They have distinct appearance. And, you know, once you get your eye in, it's as easy to recognize different individuals as it is humans. And they have really distinct personalities and differences.

You know, there are despotic alpha males. There are those who are more political and kind of form alliances with other males to gain political advantage.

DAN OLSON: Here, we're holding a picture of Frodo, King of the Forest, taken off the internet, an advertising photograph. Is this fellow still around?

ANNE PUSEY: He is. And actually, his fortunes have reversed quite a bit in the last year. He was a very strong, completely despotic alpha male. He was one of the largest, probably the largest chimp we've seen at Gombe. So big in strength and stature, aggressive, able to just intimidate all the other chimps.

The sort of path to success in the animal kingdom for a male is to father a lot of kids. He seemed to get total access to the females, keep other males away from them. So he seemed just all powerful. But then, early this year, he disappeared for a little while. Then, next time he was seen, he was very skinny.

He'd obviously been sick. We're still not entirely sure what he had. You know, we could screen his feces and found parasites, found bacteria. And he's now on the road to recovery, but during this time, he totally lost his position. All of the other males turned on him, attacked him. He keeps a distance mostly from the group now. And so he's lost his position.

And right now, there isn't a clear alpha male. And there are a number of males vying for that position, so it's a very volatile time at the moment.

DAN OLSON: Wow. You're really going back into a boiling cauldron here, aren't you?

ANNE PUSEY: It'll be interesting. He has an older brother, Freud, who's also quite well-known through Jane's writings, who used to be alpha male before Frodo took over from him. And actually, Freud lost his position when he succumbed to an epidemic of mange. His hair fell out and he kind of lost weight.

He gained it back but in the meantime, Frodo took advantage of him and took his position. Now, Freud is looking pretty good, and we're wondering if he might make a comeback. And it's interesting. They were so different. Freud was rather a laid back male, and still is, but could assert authority when necessary. He spent a lot of time grooming the other males and looking quite relaxed about life. But he would do a display when necessary, take a female from another male.

But Frodo is quite different, very aggressive, never groomed other males, just took the meat for himself and so on.

DAN OLSON: There's nothing funny about this because this is life or death for these fellows in the forest here. But yet, one can't help but make Hollywood comparisons about who's up, who's out, who's in.

ANNE PUSEY: That's exactly right. Recently, there's been a student from Harvard who's been looking at hormone levels. And that's pretty interesting. You know, who's most stressed out? Is it the alpha male or is it the guy at the bottom of the heap? And you might think it's the guy at the bottom of the heap, but in some cases, it's actually the alpha male is under a lot of stress, as well as having high testosterone. And then, when their position changes, those hormone levels change.

DAN OLSON: How intelligent are chimpanzees? Do they rank with dolphins? Do they rank with dogs? How intelligent are they?

ANNE PUSEY: Yeah, intelligence is also a hard thing to measure because you have to get a test that is relevant to the animal. But chimps certainly can solve a lot of problems. They do seem to show considerable intelligence. So I think among primates, people would probably rate them as the most intelligent besides humans.

Comparisons with dolphins are a bit harder. Dolphins are so different, but they certainly seem to be capable of a lot of intelligent behavior, too. And they can do a number of intelligence tests which have been devised for them.

DAN OLSON: What's the formula for survival of chimpanzees? I mean, is it zoological gardens where their eggs and sperm are preserved? Is it human intervention like that, where we simply take parts of the population and take them to safe places and preserve them? What's the equation?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, of course, the best thing is to preserve the habitat they're in so that they can go on living there. And there certainly are some large preserve-- there are some large protected areas in different parts of Africa with pretty good sized populations of chimps.

But most of those African countries, especially in central west Africa, are politically at risk. And so we wonder how long those protected areas will last. In Tanzania, Gombe is rather small. We're going to be working very hard to try to increase the sort of buffer zones around this park and maybe make corridors to areas where there are still other populations.

South of Gombe, just about 100 miles, is a place called Mahale Mountains, also on the Coast of Lake Tanganyika, which is quite a bit bigger, has probably several hundred chimps and is well-protected. It's a National Park. So our hopes certainly, of course, is to keep those parks in perpetuity so that those populations of chimps can survive.

But then, there are captive chimps and there are now-- you know, in the zoo world and captive world in general-- people are very aware of genetic diversity and maintaining that. And so they have breeding programs. They keep track of all the chimps in captivity here in the US. They draw up pedigrees. They figure out who's related to who. They decide who should breed to maintain genetic diversity.

And so that's something that the zoos really have worked on lately. So there's a good chance that the captive chimp population will remain healthy and diverse for a long time to come.

DAN OLSON: Are we talking about dozens or hundreds of chimpanzees in captivity in the United States or around the world?

ANNE PUSEY: I think low thousands.

DAN OLSON: Anne Pusey, director of the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota. While chimps are our closest animal relative, Pusey says there's still a lot not known about the animals. What happens to their mental capacities, for example, as they age?

How has your work changed your attitude about the relationship between humans and animals?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, if you spend any time watching chimps, you see these thoughtful, sensitive beings there. And certainly, I'm extremely uncomfortable at the idea of-- they should not be kept in solitary confinement. I mean, solitary confinement to a chimp is as bad as solitary confinement to a person, I think.

DAN OLSON: It destroys them psychologically?

ANNE PUSEY: Yes. I mean, you see these classic sort of postures of depression when chimps are kept alone. So I certainly think we have to pay careful attention to how they're housed, what they have to do there. They get bored, so you have to keep them occupied.

DAN OLSON: A lot is made of ecotourism and how that will save certain areas by interested people just coming to see it. And is that a factor? Is that a part of the future for saving the ecology that the chimpanzees need?

ANNE PUSEY: I think it can be. And there's pretty successful ecotourism in some countries like Uganda, for example. Uganda has a fairly good population of chimpanzees. They have a number of places where tourists can come and see them. And that does help. You know, it brings income to the area.

One of the problems, a special problem with ape ecotourism is, as I said before, that they are so susceptible to human disease. We have to be very careful not to have sick tourists coming and coughing and spitting around the chimps. And so that's a kind of issue that doesn't come into play with elephants and lions.

DAN OLSON: They could get SARS. The chimps could get SARS.

ANNE PUSEY: Absolutely. And we're actually very concerned about SARS now because, yes, anything like that. And the chimps at Gombe and other parts, other places, have sometimes had epidemics of respiratory disease, which probably does come from people. And not just maybe tourists, but researchers. We have to be careful too, you know.

DAN OLSON: What, if anything, would the loss of the chimpanzee population, its extinction or near extinction, tell us about anything about human survival on the planet?

ANNE PUSEY: Well, I think it will impoverish our lives. You know, every time a species goes extinct, I think we're losing the diversity of the planet, and especially these kinds of very complex animals that live in complex social groups. Chimps even use medicine. They medicate themselves for certain kinds of diseases they have.

There's a plant they eat when they have diarrhea. There are so many things that we don't yet know. And if they go extinct, we'll never know them. And that's a huge loss.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Anne Pusey, thank you so much for your time. A pleasure talking to you.

ANNE PUSEY: Well, it's been a pleasure.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Anne Pusey is the director of the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota. She says there are lots of interesting websites to learn more about chimpanzees. One she recommends is discoverchimpanzees-- all one word-- .org.

You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olsen.

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GARY EICHTEN: And that does it for our Midday program today, Gary Eichten here. Thanks for joining us, and we hope you'll be able to join us tomorrow on our Midday program. Just a reminder, all of our Midday programs are available on our website, MinnesotaPublicRadio.org. Click the Program tab and listen to your heart's content.

SPEAKER: --is supported by the Bemis company foundation, manufacturer of flexible packaging products.

GARY EICHTEN: And today's programming is also sponsored in part by Shirley Engelmayer, celebrating nine wonderful years with her husband, Russ.

SPEAKER: Programming is supported by Ruminator Books. Olimpia Dukakis, film and stage actress, will read from her new memoir, Ask Me Again Tomorrow, A Life in Progress, published by HarperCollins, Wednesday, July 16, at 7:30 PM. More info at ruminator.com.

GARY EICHTEN: You're tuned to 91.1 KNOW FM Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Partly cloudy sky, currently 75 degrees in the Twin Cities Metropolitan area. Partly cloudy skies are forecast for the rest of this afternoon, though there is a slight chance that a shower or thunder shower will develop yet today.

High temperature is forecast to hit 85 degrees. Tonight, better chance for rain, 30% chance for a thunderstorm in the Twin Cities, with a low in the middle 60s. And then tomorrow, a chance, slight chance, for a shower or thunder shower tomorrow morning. Otherwise, partly cloudy, and nice day with a high temperature in the low 80s. As for Friday and Saturday, partly cloudy both days, maybe some rain on Sunday.