Riding Shotgun

Here's Maya flying over Cache Creek in Northern California. The team is using radio telemetry to search for elk with radio collars and/or ear tags; once located, Maya and her coworkers plot the GPS coordinates on a map to track the animals' range.

When Steve saw this photo, he said the plane looked like a Cessna 185 taildragger, the aircraft he flew in to count waterfowl as a wildlife biologist in Oregon in the late 1970s. He says he put in 100-150 hours a year at roughly 150 feet and 20 percent flaps. "We went as slow as we could go without stalling." Oh. Well. That's reassuring.