Matthew Strausser was called to Ellington Field after a Texas rat snake slithered inside one of NASA’s T-38 jets.
He sometimes coaxes alligators from beneath vehicles, routinely counts the local deer population – 268 this year – and once spent a week trying to capture skunks that tripped security alarms and sprayed their musk inside Building 1.
The main campus of NASA’s Johnson Space Center sits on 1,620 acres. This largely undeveloped land houses mission control, astronaut training facilities, a Saturn V rocket and 169 recorded species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles.
Strausser has spent the past 13 years helping the two worlds coexist.
“I do not have a typical day. It varies wildly – no pun intended,” said Strausser, the center’s senior biologist for wildlife management. “We always have interesting and bizarre circumstances.”
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“This land played a role in the development of Texas as a nation, as a state, and Houston as a city,” Strausser said. “All the big industries and stuff that happened in Houston, it happened here. It’s a microcosm of that larger story.”
It’s also home to a disappearing ecosystem called the Texas coastal prairie. It’s estimated that less than 5% of this prairie remains in Texas and Louisiana, Strausser said.
The loss of this habitat has decimated one species in particular: the critically endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken, which the Houston Zoo is breeding at the Johnson Space Center.
There used to be about a million of these birds in Texas and Louisiana, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Today, there are roughly 260 in the wild and another 160 in human care, said Kyle McAuliffe, the Attwater’s prairie chicken recovery program coordinator for the Houston Zoo.
The Houston Zoo has been conserving this species since 1994. It began working with NASA in 2005
“It was projected that, if this breeding program wasn’t started in the early 1990s, this species would have gone extinct by the year 2000,” McAuliffe said. “This program in place has allowed them to continue to grow.”
That’s an Attwater’s prairie chicken in the embedded image. I knew about them but not that they were that endangered, and I didn’t know any of the rest of this. I’d bet Matthew Strausser would be an interesting guy to have lunch with. It’s a gift link, so read the rest. I’m just glad to know this program exists.