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[logo dinging]
[ravens cawing] [wind howling]
Here’s that one.
Let’s do the oldest towards you.
And what about that?
That’s the highest resolution one, right?
Yeah, I mean, this takes significantly longer
but it’s worth it.
It’s no longer basic plastic filament.
The idea is, create a perfect fake tortoise.
This is sort of what we’re aiming for.
This level of gloss.
It’s a little bit maddening to try to replicate that detail
but we’re getting there and we can booby trap them.
[guitar music]
I think there’s a thing that runs in us
which is the critic, the critic of our thoughts.
There’s a little voice in there saying, That’s absurd,
and the little voice in me said, That’s absurd,
and I just turned to the little voice and I said, Shut up.
I’m just gonna see where this leads
because I don’t have anything else.
A raven won’t be able to tell the difference.
I’m trying to keep tortoises from going extinct
’cause they’re being eaten by ravens.
[Techno-Tort hissing] [drone whirring]
I almost feel like a SWAT team guy.
It’s like we just come in with the toolkit
and start trying stuff.
Lasers, [electronic tone]
terrestrial rovers, drones, [machinery whirring]
3D printed fake tortoises
and I’m having a hell of a good time.
These have a spacer built in on both sides.
Gotcha, to hold it at a distance.
Exactly.
You thought this through. For once.
Circle back the other way. [motor whirring]
[both laughing] [guitar music continues]
Conservation biology can be really depressing.
You’re the scientist.
The objective observer.
You don’t get involved.
You’re just taking notes on the catastrophe
and I came to a breaking moment.
For me it was just like,
what the hell is all this knowledge good for
if I don’t do something?
There he is.
Oh, you’re a little fart.
Look at that little guy.
So gorgeous.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in love with reptiles.
Little dragons.
I look at it on the sand and it’s just incredible.
[ethereal music]
His shell is beautiful.
That’s a 275 million year old pattern.
Looking back on my entire youth,
time in the classroom, it sort of a black and white,
it’s kind of a Wizard of Oz thing,
but in the field everything came alive.
The Mojave Desert.
Hot, dry, and nasty
and yet,
in certain places,
the wonder of tadpoles.
I’m kind of in the middle of this wildlife documentary
that’s unfolding in real time.
There’s a bobcat staring at me.
Hey kitty.
[insects trilling] [opera music]
Right as I got my masters a project was announced
by the local BLM office in Riverside
that this woman, Dr. Kristin Berry, was starting
a desert tortoise population monitoring project.
I was the one that set up the studies
and laid out these plots
so that they could be revisited over time.
Tim Fields, he would make himself a long gown
but he had no shorts on underneath. [laughs]
He was one of the field people and he was one of the best
and he is above even the best in finding babies.
[Tim] They genuinely have a joie de vivre.
They live life passionately. [opera music continues]
They’re thought of as gentle, slow moving,
kind of dumb creatures.
They’re not dumb.
They can’t be dumb and make it where they make it.
[Kristin] The desert tortoise has been in trouble
since the 1930s. [guitar music]
So we’ll do north south.
That’ll establish the two corners
and then it’s just up and down like that.
We have loss of habitat,
the deaths of animals from roads and vehicles, disease,
and then of course there’s climate change.
[Tim] Every time we came back,
every four years it was a 50% decline in numbers.
It bottomed out at 35 tortoises, something like that,
40 tortoises, it was terrible.
Oh buddy.
That’s not so good.
It was really hard as a human being
who also loved these creatures
to go out and spend months just picking up dead tortoises.
95.
I could no longer be passive about this
and simply watch the end of the show.
I focused on the raven as an idea
simply because it seemed like a manageable threat.
[guitar music continues]
As human population has risen in the desert
there’s a fairly simple mathematical relationship.
More humans equals more ravens equals fewer tortoises.
There aren’t that many tortoises left.
They’re like caviar for ravens.
That’s another day in raven town.
There was a group of about five ravens right here.
There’s one right there. Yeah.
Oh, there’s a whole shitload in there
and here comes another one in here.
These ravens will know which restaurants
are sloppy about closing the dumpster,
which dumpsters are more likely to be opened up by the wind,
all of these sorts of patterns.
So you’re dealing with a genius animal
that is also an omnivore.
I’m starting to see ’em come in
in this alley right in front of us.
[counter clicking]
The lowest count I’ve ever had, I think, is 1500.
So what we’ve done is we’ve imported ravens
right through excellent tortoise habitat.
Yeah, here’s a good one.
This is very typical,
which is punching through the plastron,
which is the underside of the shell,
to remove the internal organs
and maybe eat the meat, or not.
It takes ’em five to 10 years minimum
to get to the point where they can resist
the attack of a raven but during that time
the odds of them avoiding detection by a raven
are functionally zero.
All right, Frank.
It’s not ready for prime time
but it certainly is ready for testing.
The antithesis of the depressed conservation biologist
is the engineer because now they have
all these new tools and they’re going,
We can do anything. [rock music]
Savvy technologists are expensive, frankly,
and I meet this crazy kid, Frank Guercio,
a high school kid who turns out to be
kind of a genius. [spy music]
You grow up, you watch James Bond
and you watch all these tech guys
build tools for spies, and now I’m Q.
This is our prototype laser.
We call this the Blast-o-lux.
For whatever reason, ravens hate green.
Someone may as well have started a bar fight amongst them.
Many times they disperse and don’t come back.
Ravens are arguably
the most intelligent birds on the planet
and arguably more intelligent
than we are in certain respects.
They operate on a lot of the same circuits that we do
in terms of our opportunism, our ability to innovate.
We just have to change the cost benefit ratio
inside the bird’s head [ravens squawking]
so that it chooses somewhere different
away from tortoise habitat.
We can do it without killing the birds.
The way I think about it is,
a bird educated by Hardshell Labs
is more valuable than a dead bird
because they are very social creatures
and because they watch each other.
[upbeat music]
There you got ’em. There they went.
[both laughing] It’s so clear when you hit ’em
and then there’s the social effect of like,
Oh, everybody’s panicking. I better panic too.
It’s so wonderful.
The laser worked really well. That fired me up.
I parked here and I just had this feeling going in,
there’s a raven nest in here.
[Tim] Welcome to the millennial starter home boys.
[Frank laughing] It’s a bit of a fixer upper.
There it is. That’s a raven nest.
This is that borescope we were talking about.
Raise it somewhat there
and there’s the nest cup right there.
[oil squelching]
Remote egg oiling is a way of changing their numbers.
If their babies don’t hatch they don’t have as many babies.
Already we have evidence
that they’re abandoning those areas.
[traffic noises]
This will be so thrilling
if there are a good number of eggs in there.
I’ve been wanting this nest for a long time.
[Assistant] Yep, four eggs.
[Tim] Ah, the din of the 21st century.
What a setting to oil eggs.
Can we alter their numbers? [ethereal music]
Can we alter their distribution
or can we alter their behavior?
And they’ll probably all come into play.
The driving force behind this project is aversive training.
The raven comes in, flips it over,
for whatever reason artificial grape flavoring
drives birds crazy, including ravens.
On the inside we have a bladder
which acts like a pepper spray.
That means it’s going to arm. [Techno-Tort beeping]
That one’s primed and ready to go.
So if you turned it on right now and waited to three
it would explode all over us.
If a certain number of ravens have the bad experience
with the Techno-Tort we should see a reduction
in the frequency of attacks.
Three, don’t touch it [electronic beeping]
’cause it’ll go off. [upbeat music]
The idea is just to make the haunted landscape
where there’s just no relief [Techno-Tort hissing]
from the surprises and all the surprises are bad.
[Techno-Tort hissing]
They’re such funny animals.
[Frank] The look, straight back at the camera is great.
It’s like, do you get this?
I don’t get this.
This was the guy who just was like, would not give it up.
Maybe they’re a mated pair and she’s just going,
Charlie, you’re a fool. [both laughing]
It ain’t worth it.
I’m going off to the McDonald’s dumpster.
[both laughing]
We’re sitting in a space [serene music]
that three months from now is gonna have 100 printers,
filament production lines, resin printers,
CNC machines, laser cutters, anything and everything
that can be used to solve the problem.
[serene music continues]
Do these things work? Can we do this?
We already think we’re having a positive effect.
The attack rate is significantly lower
that you can pick it up in the data.
Very cautious optimism is how I feel.
After a lifetime of observing this thing
that was falling apart,
the work we’re doing has injected an element of hope.
The Promised Land, my baby tortoises,
may you grow and prosper.
My heart is beating fast for this little tortoise.
I love finding little turtles.
All of these tortoises have huge growth rings this year.
It’s been a very productive year.
I like humans well enough but we have flaws [laughs]
and I don’t learn as much from other human beings
as I do from tortoises, they’re just my best teachers.
The desert tortoise is one example of a species
that are suffering from the way humans
are doing business in the world
but this is a global phenomenon.
We have thrown the world ecosystem so far outta whack
that if we don’t put our hands on those ecological levers,
letting nature take its course
is gonna be really bad for us as well.
Look at that face.
He’s slightly awake but very sleepy.
If we don’t want a really lonely planet,
that’s just us and ravens and rats and cockroaches,
we have a whole ton of work to do.
[wings flapping] [ladder clacking]
Oh, it’s gonna be great.
Ah, it’s just spectacular.
Hi cows.
Look at all these birds eating the grain.
I have this little human life.
I’m just one of these human sparks.
We’re all just like, [whoosh] we’re gone like that.
This seems like a reasonable way to spend my golden years.
[cows lowing] Three, two, one.
[ravens squawking] Ta-da
People started building cathedrals
knowing this thing isn’t gonna be done for 200 years.
[serene music continues]
I’m laying bricks here.
I’m never gonna see the finished product.
I’m gonna be recycled into creosote bush
by the time any of this pays off.
So I kind of feel like one of those cathedral builders
that’s just like, Lay some bricks.
But it’s all right being a brick layer.
[ethereal music]
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