She’s up to the task
Sandra Jonker once climbed a tree to escape an angry African rhinoceros. She has helped return pet Indonesian orangutans to the wilds and managed endangered bears in Florida.
Her newest challenge may seem tame by comparison. Jonker, 40, is the new Southwest Washington regional wildlife manager for the Department of Fish and Wildlife in Vancouver.
But Jonker has quickly been tossed into one of the region’s hottest wildlife debates – whether or not to feed elk in the Toutle River Valley.
She’s up to the task. The elk controversy is a textbook example of her Ph.D topic, the human dimension of managing wildlife. “It’s not just about the biology and it’s not just about the people,” she said. “You have to understand the human component and incorporate that into wildlife management.”
Jonker is a native of the Netherlands. Her father’s work as a banker took the family to Indonesia and South Africa. When flying back to the Netherlands for visits, the family would make a point of visiting countries on the way.
She’s fluent in Dutch, French and English and has a working knowledge of Spanish and Indonesian.
“I had the opportunity to be exposed to different cultures” and the way they interact with wildlife, Jonker said. She decided she wanted a career working with wildlife at the age of 9. “It’s been a lifetime passion of mine.”
When Jonker was a teenager living in Indonesia, she volunteered on a project to urge people to relinquish their captive orangutans. “It used to be a status symbol to have an orangutan as a pet” in that Southeast Asian country, she said. “They would be there in cages outside.” Orangs that were released as pets were rehabilitated and returned to the wild.
When Jonker finished high school in France (specializing in English, biology and philosophy), European universities didn’t offer the kind of wildlife courses she wanted. So she came to the United States and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in wildlife and fisheries biology at the University of Massachusetts.
Her best stories come from a project to increase the population of roan antelope, an endangered species in South Africa. She counted animals, noted what they were eating and observed the social structure of male and female groups.
“I would often go for weeks without seeing anybody,” she said. “You meet yourself.” She didn’t carry a firearm. “I had my feet and my binoculars.”
In her new position based out of Longview, Jonkers called the controversy over Toutle elk “a classic example of when you have people on different sides of an issue. You have to understand who your public is and what they can tolerate.”
WDFW biologists had hesitated to feed the animals, saying some winter mortality is natural and that feeding contributes to disease. But faced with an outcry over last winter’s scenes of starving elk, the DFW relented and started a feeding program in January.
Another controversy Jonker will deal with is sea lions that prey on salmon in the Columbia River. Though fishermen complain vehemently about the sea lions, proposals to loosen their federal protection haven’t made it far in Congress. “You try to find the balance, which is hard,” Jonker said.
Her years of academia done, Jonker got a job with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, as assistant leader for the state’s bear management program.
The Florida black bear is listed as threatened in that state, with about 2,500 animals split into eight populations. Jonker would set barbed-wire hair snares and extract DNA from the hair tufts to get a population estimate.
She found that the percentage of road-killed bears in Florida, where bears aren’t legal to hunt, was as high as that for legal bear hunts in other Eastern states.
After two years in Florida, Jonker jumped at the chance to come to Washington, where her annual salary will be about $65,000. She oversees four other biologists who work from Lewis to Klickitat counties, and three managers of state wildlife areas.