Welcome to my interview series, The Sunflower Seven, highlighting Kansans who have made exceptional strides in their chosen vocations and avocations. Since there are so many talented Kansans and there is so little time, I am limiting our talks to seven questions.

Today’s profile features Matt Peek, a Wildlife Research Biologist with more than two decades working for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks. He oversees the Furbearer, Pronghorn and Elk Programs for our state and also coordinates the Department’s Investigation and Response to Large Carnivores. Matt is a widely respected scientist in his field (on local, state and national levels.)

Gaille: What are your earliest memories of our state’s wildlife? Matt: Like a lot of people in the wildlife field, I grew up living in the country on a farm, so I’ve been around animals and wildlife my whole life. My parents tell me that from the time I was really young, I gravitated to the toys and books that related to animals. And I was very interested at an early age when it was birthing season (for sheep and calves and pigs.) As I got a little older, my dad exposed my brothers and I to hunting and fishing. Early on I considered pursuing a career as a veterinarian, but my interest in wild animals is what led me down this path.

Gaille: What do Wildlife Research Biologists do, particularly in Kansas? Are you guys game wardens?

Matt: Game wardens are the law enforcement branch of the of the Department of Wildlife and Parks. I’m a wildlife biologist and there are different kinds of wildlife biologists as well as fisheries biologists and public and private lands biologists. In the research office we’re primarily responsible for coming up with population and harvest estimates. So if you hear an estimate that there are 650,000 deer in the state, that’s an estimate that came out of the population surveys we conduct, or if you hear a harvest estimate of 40,000 raccoons a year, that’s based on the furbearer harvest surveys we conduct. We also oversee any research that goes on in the state and regulations that are related to our species of oversight.

Gaille: Tell us more about the Kansas programs you coordinate— The Furbearer, Pronghorn and Elk Programs and the one that sounds scary, The Investigation and Response to Large Carnivores— and how long have these programs been in place?

Matt: A lot of the biologists were hired back in the 70s in a specific program to hire new employees to the Department. Prior to that, these duties fell to Game Wardens. So the history of Fish and Wildlife Management originated, in most cases, with Game Wardens being hired to enforce laws. But there was also a need to obtain more information about the wildlife themselves, how they relate to habitat and how harvest affects them as well as obtaining basic information about species biology. So that’s where the need for biologists came in and since then it’s been a multifaceted approach. The biologists are dedicated to collect that additional information to help better manage wildlife.

For example, we have a deer biologist, we have a waterfowl biologist, and a couple of upland game biologists who oversee turkeys and pheasants and quail and doves. So how did I get to be the furbearer, pronghorn, elk biologist? Furbearer management and trapping has always been my niche more than anything else and the elk and pronghorn programs were added to the furbearer position when I took the job.

Large carnivores are bears, wolves and mountain lions that historically did exist in Kansas. During settlement of the state there were a lot of pressures on wildlife and those species were removed for many decades, or in some cases, maybe even a century or more, not just in Kansas but in a lot of Midwestern states. In Western states where large carnivores continued to exist, those species fell under the umbrella of modern wildlife management and those species began to thrive. And in the early 2000s, mountain lions started reoccurring throughout the Midwest, and the writing was on the wall that they would reoccur in Kansas. At that point they had not been documented in Kansas for almost 100 years.

They were showing up in some of the states around us just as individuals passing through and we knew that we would start getting some of them. In anticipation of that, we started talking about what we would do when they did show up. There was a need to go back and look at our existing laws and what type of management could be undertaken. Most of us state coordinators work very closely with our counterparts throughout the Midwest, and really throughout the country at times, to manage not just the large carnivores but all these species to the best of our ability. Many furbearer biologists also became responsible for large carnivores as they started moving back into the Midwest because we were the ones with the program that most closely fit large carnivore management. so we work closely together to address this issue.

The first question is— what do the laws allow? And are the laws adequate for the situations that are occurring? Everything we do is following what’s legally allowed. But it depends on each situation. None of those species can just be shot on site if you just see them. If they are involved in some type of damage for example like livestock predation, then there’s a state law that allows them to be taken if there are not reasonable alternatives. More specifically, what are we going to do if one of them winds up in somebody’s cage trap, or foot trap? What are we going to do if one of them winds up in a city? What do we do when someone calls us and says they saw one walking across their property? What can that person do? Are they a threat to people that warrants some type of extreme reaction? Or how do people live with them in all the states that have what we would call resident populations? We look at the big picture and also what the people of Kansas might be willing to tolerate and what the public wants with the species. People have pretty strong opinions about them.

Gaille: You have collected and published analyses of our wildlife for more than two decades. Has the data ever surprised you?

Matt: I can’t really think of anything real surprising, I guess, off the top of my head. I try not to go into a project with a lot of biases or preconceived notions. And I think that’s how you come to good results, to good conclusions.

Gaille: As a Kansas Wildlife Research Biologist, you are in a unique position to comment on behavior changes we have all witnessed or read about in the news. What kind of changes have you seen over the years and how do you respond to speculation on possible causes? Matt: The one thing that never changes is that things are always changing. Some urban wildlife situations are pretty easy to explain. Many of these species live in urban areas because there’s great habitat in urban areas, and people are not allowed to harvest these animals in most cases. Canada geese and even deer thrive in urban areas without natural predators. Without regulated harvest there, they thrive. Red foxes thrive in cities and towns because coyotes will kill them in the country. The towns and people generally provide a refuge where coyotes didn’t used to be tolerated or haven’t existed. More recently, even coyotes have learned to live in the cities and are becoming more prevalent, which changes things because whereas a fox might get your young house cat, coyotes might get your small dog. All these species have learned to take advantage of the resources that are provided in urban areas. Think of all the rabbits and squirrels that exist in urban areas. Now even bobcats are getting more common.

The climate is also definitely changing. That’s changed distributions. Quail in Central and Western Kansas used to be limited by harsh winters. And now some of our best quail populations are in North Central Kansas, where they’re not so much limited by winter. Another example: armadillos in the last 20 or 30 years have moved from the southern border of Kansas. to the northern part of the state and up into Nebraska. That’s a species that doesn’t do well in harsh winters. And the lack of winter severity has allowed them to expand northward. There are a lot of species whose ranges have changed or expanded or even retracted. There used to be jack rabbits in Eastern Kansas. There used to be mule deer much farther east than they are now.

Animals adapt and take advantage of the resources that are available. In the case of elk, we have very liberal harvest seasons because they’re not often very compatible with agriculture. But the harvest opportunity is also what allows them to persist in some areas. Some bigger landowners like seeing them and they can protect them and perpetuate them on certain properties. We have the one big herd on Fort Riley. The remainder of the smaller herds exist on private lands where some groups of landowners, or maybe even an individual landowner, have enough interest in them to protect them. And while they may harvest a few, they’re primarily interested in conserving them and making sure that they don’t get eliminated. And so that’s a great success.

Gaille: Are there any big misconceptions you feel the public may hold about Kansas wildlife? About the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks? Matt: I think generally the public has a very good understanding of what’s going on. You talk to rural people, and avid hunters and trappers, people out there on the land and they generally have a pretty good idea. Mountain lion issues have always been controversial. Everybody’s got a mountain lion story, I think. But we’ve always relied only on evidence based information. When people find evidence of them, we verify it and publicize it in most cases. We simply base what we do and what we say on science. If we can see it, and it’s verifiable, then there’s no debate about that. When things are not scientifically verifiable, we would call that “hearsay.” There’s not nearly as much we can base on that. I think that’s the key to our approach with large carnivores, but it really applies to everything else too.

The big thing is that people often view an issue only from their perspective. We relate with a lot of different people and so a lot of times what one person thinks is an obvious solution to a problem is not very palatable to another user group. Our job is to balance the public interest. A good example might be when a certain group of hunters want one thing but that may not be palatable to farmers. And so our job is to balance a lot of different public interests for the for the good of the whole, without giving one group the whole pie, so to speak.

Gaille: What would you most like the public to know about the present and future of Kansas Wildlife? Matt: What a great treasure it is here. Kansas has a lot to offer that many other states don’t. Part of that is because we have the largest contiguous tract of tall grass prairie left in existence. We do have a lot of rare habitats in Kansas. We have tall grass prairie here that’s more endangered than the rain forest. We’re lucky that we have the habitat we have. That’s what allows us to have the wildlife that we have. The other thing that’s good here is that our human population isn’t excessive. So there’s not great human pressure on a lot of species, either from a from a habitat development or a harvest perspective. We’re in a good situation here that a lot of other states aren’t, mainly because of the habitat that exists on the ground. Wildlife biologists might like to take credit at times for some of the stuff that goes on out there, but really it comes back to the habitat that’s on the ground. And if you don’t have prairie, you don’t have prairie chickens. It’s all about the species that exist on those habitats.

Thank you Matt Peek for sharing your insights and thank you Cherry-Road Media for the opportunity to provide you with this interview.

Full Audio of The Sunflower Seven Interview Series is available at pikex.substack.com