By Ronica Stromberg
While others envision wildlife careers involving quiet communes with nature, Ryan Powers' wildlife work involves propane cannons, unmanned aircraft systems and pyrotechnics.
The district supervisor for the USDA Wildlife Services in McCook, Nebraska, Powers started working in wildlife damage management shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a fisheries and wildlife degree in 1996. He has worked in eight states, responding to calls from farmers, ranchers, agencies, airports, cities and others for help dealing with wildlife wreaking damage or disease.
Whether its birds flying in the paths of planes at airports or airbases, coyotes preying on cattle, beavers undermining a railroad embankment, migrating blackbirds decimating a farmer's sunflower fields or a slew of other wildlife problems, Wildlife Services is the one to call for a solution.
Powers had wanted to be on the receiving end of that call even back in college, but when he graduated, Wildlife Services had more applicants than positions. He took work on a whitetail deer project with South Dakota State University, worked for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks on a wild turkey project, helped the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with elk research in the Pine Ridge and did fisheries work with the Department of Environmental Quality in Lincoln.
He persisted in applying for Wildlife Services positions, and in 1998, landed one with the USDA Wildlife Services at Whiteman Air Force Base near Warrensburg, Missouri. The work he did for this joint program of Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota mainly involved scaring birds and other wildlife off the airfield to reduce hazards to the B-2 Stealth Bomber.
"It's kind of ironic in the sense that, when you go to college for wildlife biology, your goal is usually to enhance wildlife habitat to support wildlife populations," Powers said. "But in this sense, we're making recommendations to make airports and airbases less attractive to wildlife so that you don't have them utilizing the airfield. The goal is to reduce wildlife-aircraft hazards."
Within a year, he transferred to a Wildlife Services office in Iowa and worked five years on issues like livestock predation, wildlife damage at grain facilities and beaver damage.
When Wildlife Services started the National Wildlife Disease Program in 2003, he headed to North Dakota as a wildlife disease biologist. He worked there for 13 years, helping deter wildlife diseases and foreign animal diseases from spreading to U.S. livestock and wildlife.
He eventually became a district supervisor in the Dakotas and, in 2024, applied for and received a district supervisor position in Nebraska not far from his hometown of Trenton. He now supervises all the Wildlife Services field personnel in Nebraska. The move to administration pulled him away from doing as much fieldwork, which he noted as a natural progression for some in the wildlife field.
"In most entry-level positions, you're the boots on the ground, you're doing a lot of field-related projects, you're working outside, you're directly involved with cooperators, and you’re using all the wildlife management tools and techniques you learned in college," he said. "But then, at least for some of us, there comes a point in your career that you want more responsibility and are ready to accept new challenges, so you enter into a supervisory position, which pulls you away from getting to do the fieldwork, and now you're doing more administrative work."
Follow the rest of Ryan's story at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1332