Clint Turnage of Saltillo is an expert in many things, including Arkansas hogs.
That’s feral hogs — not the Razorbacks.
The 41-year-old also knows a heck of a lot about ducks, geese, coyotes, deer, bears — just about any kind of wildlife you can name — especially what makes them sick.
Turnage is the state’s first and only wildlife disease biologist, one of 23 in the nation. He’s also the best one this year, having been honored in June in Colorado as the 2016 wildlife disease biologist of the year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
He is an employee of USDA’s wildlife services. He conducts disease surveillance, collecting samples from all kinds of wildlife to detect diseases that could be devastating to animals, people and the economy. He’s lived in Saltillo for 12 years, and his office is in Sherwood.
Not that he’s in it much.
Turnage said he had two “hopes” for a profession: “I wanted to regularly handle wildlife; I wanted to be outside a lot,” he said.
The North Little Rock native was a kid who grew up hunting and fishing — he got his hunter-education card at age 10. He majored in biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with an emphasis in fisheries and wildlife management. He really didn’t know what jobs were out there.
He said he had a “dream situation” with his first job in 1999 after graduation — literally handling bears. Turnage volunteered first in 1998 for the project and was hired in the summer of 1999 as part of a University of Tennessee
population-dynamics project on black bears at the White River National Wildlife Refuge near St. Charles.
He and his wife, Amber, moved to south Arkansas for him to take the job.
“We were catching bears almost immediately,” he said. The adults would be snared and anesthetized with a 6-foot-long jab stick, then weighed, measured, a tooth pulled to determine age, lips tattooed (in case the ear tags came out), and the females got radio collars. Later, the technicians created hair traps, which were traps with bait to lure the bears, which would leave behind their hair that could be analyzed.
Turnage has several photographs on his Facebook page of him holding bear cubs. The older ones could claw and bite — he lost a fingernail once — and he has faded scars on his arms.
“Catching cubs when the mom’s not caught could be an exciting experience,” he said. One technician’s job was to handle the cub; another would be “throwing logs, yelling to get the mama bear to stay back. It got very tense sometimes,” he said.
With only six months of experience, Turnage became the field-operations supervisor for the bear project in 2000, and he and his family moved to an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission home in the Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area, where he hired, supervised and trained technicians.
The project expanded to include relocating native
Arkansas bears, which had been protected, to the Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge west of Crossett, where the bears historically had lived.
“Man, it was fun there,” he said.
Turnage worked for the University of Tennessee for five years, but the project funding was dwindling, he said, and he decided to leave.
He got a USDA Veterinary Services job in a Little Rock lab testing for brucellosis, mainly in cattle. It was an inside job, where he put on headphones and did repetitive work putting vials of blood in a machine and pushing buttons.
Although he was thankful for the job, he said, it was hard for him to be cooped up inside.
“For people who are into that sort of thing, it’s great, but for somebody who loves being out in the woods and handling wildlife … it was kind of depressing to think, ‘I’m young, and the best days of my life are gone,’” he said.
Nothing measured up to the bear project, he said.
He wanted a government job, preferably working with wildlife, in driving proximity to Little Rock — where his wife works for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Landing the job as a disease biologist is “nothing short of a miracle,” he said.
He applied for a biologist job with USDA Wildlife Services in Little Rock.
“I had never heard of wildlife services before I worked on the bear project,” he said. Turnage didn’t get the job, but when the person called to tell him, he mentioned that the first wildlife disease biologist in Arkansas was going to be hired, along with about 20 others in the nation, because the avian flu in Asia was a great concern.
Turnage was hired nine years ago, and he said his passion is like it was when he was trapping bears.
“I really got into it not knowing what to expect; it has turned out to be just as good as the bears,” he said. “There’s a fine line between work and just full-blown recreational pleasure. Some of the things I get paid to do I would do just for fun in my free time, given the opportunity.”
Every day is different. He works all over the state with multiple agencies, from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and sometimes has special out-of-state projects. The majority of his time is spent sampling ducks and feral hogs.
Just this month, he has been to Alaska to help sample ducks. He got a call that a mallard tested positive for a highly pathogenic avian-influenza virus that hadn’t been seen in over a year.
“I got a call, ‘Can you be here in two days?’ Alaska? You betcha,” he said.
He wasn’t the only wildlife disease biologist who could do the job, but he knew his
biologist counterpart there, and Turnage had traveled to that exact area of Alaska a year ago. And he has lots of experience.
“I probably swab more duck butts than most of my counterparts,” he said.
While he was there, Turnage sat on a boat ramp and waited for duck hunters to bring in what they’d harvested. He and a cohort took 100 environmental, or fecal, samples from the ducks just the first day.
Turnage also went to New Mexico once when authorities were setting up a statewide hog-management plan. The top five or six “hog people in the nation” were brought in, and he was among them. Turnage said he had lots of experience trapping and snaring feral hogs to find disease.
“That was an honor; I went to help them initiate a hog-management program,” he said.
Wildlife disease biologists are also emergency responders, he said.
He was called to Iowa in May 2015 when the avian flu was winding down. He showed a photograph on his cellphone of him covered head to toe in a hazardous-materials suit.
“It’s like zombie apocalypse,” he said, joking.
“I was responsible as a case manager for six laying-hen facilities,” he said. The chicken houses were massive — the largest was a two-story facility containing 3.7 million laying hens, he said, adding that the effects of wildlife diseases can be devastating economically.
He said the main diseases for which he is testing now are avian influenza and
feral-swine diseases.
“Being here in Arkansas, it’s like I’m the heart of it,” he said. “I know I’m part of a national team, but at our annual meetings when they run those national reports, national disease surveillance — in the back of my mind, I want Arkansas to look good. We always come out really, really high on productivity, and that kind of keeps me going.”
Turnage said he’s not sure what made him stand out to be named wildlife disease
biologist of the year. He exceeds all his sampling objectives, but he said others do, too. He cited the “deep involvement” he has working with agencies throughout the state.
His supervisor, USDA Wildlife Services State Director Thurman Booth, said in a UALR publication about
Turnage that during his 50-year career in wildlife services,”
I have never encountered or supervised an employee that had more positive enthusiasm about his work.”
Turnage said he doesn’t set a lot of goals for his career beyond what he is doing now.
“My goal in life is happiness, and I’m happy now,” he said. “I want to enjoy the moment. If I could be this happy next week, next month, next year, I could retire in this position.”
He hopes for the same joy in a career for his two daughters, Haley, 22, and Aspen, 13.
Turnage said he also likes to hunt — deer, turkey, squirrels and ducks. He can’t sit still to watch much football on TV, though.
“I’d rather be doing something than watching something,” he said. “I don’t like being a spectator in life.”
But if you want to talk hogs, he’s your man.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.