Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

It won't be science fiction, but there will be robots and lasers in a forthcoming documentary film about Haines resident and biologist Tim Shields, whose tech-based approach to conservation has helped save desert tortoises from extinction.

Shields' technological innovations originated in former Haines High School teacher Mark Fontenot's classroom about 10 years ago. Since then, Shields' company, Hardshell Labs, has developed novel conservation-geared gizmos like "techno-tortoises"-robotic tortoise decoys-and remotely-fired lasers to deter tortoise-eating ravens.

"He's making fake tortoise shells that explode, and he's shooting ravens with lasers," said Josh Izenberg, co-producer of the film. "It seemed like a no-brainer in terms of something that would be fun to film."

San Francisco-based Speculative Films is producing the documentary about Shields not only because his inventions and eccentric personality are fit for the big screen, but because the biologist's work is shaping the future of a conservation movement that for many years insisted on limiting human intervention, not leveraging it. "It's a very new approach to conservation," said Brett Marty, who is directing the film with Izenberg.

Growing up in Texas and southern California, Shields often wandered around the desert. He grew to love it-and the critters that inhabit it-and studied tortoises for 35 years. "The bottom line is tortoise numbers declined about 95 percent over the course of my career," Shields said. Frustrated by the decline, Shields pivoted from "field grunt" to problem solver. "I finally got fed up with a passive observer role," Shields said. "I thought, if I don't do something about predation on desert tortoises, I will watch them hurtle toward extinction."

Many factors contributed to the decline of tortoises, Shields said. Raven predation was a major one. In the field, Shields noticed ravens targeting babies. He thought he could change that.

"I absolutely bear no ill will against ravens," Shields said. "I love ravens." But in the Mojave Desert, Shields said, the birds pose an "existential threat" to the desert ecosystem where their numbers have exploded, unlike in Haines.

As human use of the desert expanded in the last several decades, so too did raven "subsidies" - resources made available by humans, like water from agricultural irrigation; food from roadkill and landfills; shade from trees and buildings; and nesting structures from electrical transmission towers and cell towers. "Humans have made life easy for [ravens] and they have responded by having more babies and those babies have had a higher survival rate," Shields wrote in an email to the CVN. Shields said he seeks not to kill or harm ravens, which hardly can be blamed for the situation humans have created for them, only to alter their food choices.

"I don't know if it was luck, or fate, or what, but right out of the blocks I heard about a guy who was using lasers to steer flocks of birds," Shields said. Most birds don't like lasers. Ravens especially don't.

Eager to use lasers to deter ravens from eating tortoises, but not sure how to do that, Shields approached Haines High School's science and engineering teacher Mark Fontenot in 2012 at Mountain Market with "some wild ideas," Fontenot recalled. "He was interested in high-tech or out-of-the-box deterrents."

Fontenot put the students in his small engineering elective to the task. "My engineering class decided we could build a robo-tort. So we did," Fontenot said.

The "robo-tort" was a 3-D printed tortoise decoy that Shields could use to train ravens not to eat tortoises. Fontenot's class built a prototype, which Shields' company developed into a weaponized "techno-tortoise," as Shields calls it, that sprays a non-toxic irritant into ravens' faces when they attack. The goal is to alter raven food choices. Shields said his company has already produced hundreds of techno-tortoises, with thousands to come. And the tortoise-raven pairing is the first of many possible pairs to change how predators behave.

Key to the project was Haines High student Eli White, who now works as a software engineer at Microsoft. Everyone in Fontenot's class contributed, but White went above and beyond.

While Fontenot was in charge of the hardware, White designed the software.

In addition to the robotic tortoise, Fontenot and White helped Shields develop a remote-controlled rover, like NASA's. White designed a program that allowed the rover to be controlled over the internet, enabling a user to tour tortoise habitat from their living room couch.

Hardshell Labs and their partners have developed Fontenot and White's prototype into a "semi-autonomous" data collector and mapper of critical tortoise habitat. It can operate independently in the desert for three weeks at a time while detecting and transmitting signals of tortoise presence.

"It was super cool and exciting that we built it from scratch and that we were able to make it work," White said. Fontenot described White as "an absolute computer genius," who taught Fontenot how to do 3-D computer modeling for the project.

"Eli and I spent hundreds of hours of our own time outside of class," Fontenot said. "It was a really, really fun thing for me to work with such a brilliant kid."

Adding to its arsenal, Hardshell Labs has developed drones that spray oil on raven eggs, causing the birds to leave critical tortoise habitat. "It has become a standard technique now," Shields said. "We've oiled thousands of eggs down here, and we're starting to see ravens abandon certain areas."

Speculative Films' documentary doesn't have an official release date, but producers Marty and Izenberg hope to finish it by the end of 2021 and distribute it at film festivals in 2022.

The film will focus on Shields' work in the desert. Marty and Izenberg said they don't have plans to shoot in Haines.

Shields credited the Haines community, in addition to Fontenot's class at Haines High, for his success. "I developed a way of thinking there. There's a freedom in Haines that just doesn't exist anywhere else."