Southern California Careers / Dream Jobs : Sequoia Naturalists Share Their Office Space With Frogs, Turtles

Annie Esperanza’s “office” is a pine forest deep in the high country, and she often has to strap on skis or a backpack to reach it. Harold Werner’s favorite way to earn his paycheck is to bask in the soothing pools of a mountain-fed river and catch turtles.

As naturalists, their laboratory is the Sierra Nevada, which to many nature lovers is unparalleled for its rugged beauty and untamed wilderness.

“Sometimes I think I’m the luckiest person in the world,” said Esperanza, an ecologist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “Living here, working here, being near the people I deal with here, is all positive. That sort of puts me in a little bit of a utopia.”

Werner, a fish and wildlife biologist overseeing the parks’ wildlife management, and aquatic and geologic resources, is one of the chief caretakers of its menagerie of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, including its often stubborn black bear.

“I’m sitting at a spot where I don’t see any greener grass,” Werner said. “I’m so happy here that I might find another spot a disappointment. I don’t even look at the vacancy announcements now.”

Both Werner and Esperanza find their work as exhilarating as their surroundings. One of the most intriguing problems Werner faces is the mystifying disappearance of many of the Sierra’s frogs. Theories abound about a link to acid rain, pesticides, exotic fish or ultraviolet radiation, but scientists remain puzzled.

During summer, most of Werner’s time is spent dealing with the parks’ bears. He agonizes over his occasional decisions to kill a troublesome bear that poses a threat to park visitors or their property.

“Those are the days you wish you were doing something else,” Werner said, “especially if it’s a bear you’ve been working with a long, long time.”

For most of Esperanza’s 12 years at Sequoia, she has studied damage to the Sierra Nevada’s forests and lakes inflicted by air pollution rising from the San Joaquin Valley. Now, she works mostly on a global climate change project, and spends about three of every five days out in the field in summer and about one day per week in winter.

“For the lack of better words, it’s very ooh-ah stuff,” she said. “I think of parks as being pretty pristine, and they become natural laboratories. If there is any way to find out the general health of the planet, it will be the parks.”

After earning a bachelor of science degree in resource management from Humboldt State University, Esperanza worked as a ranger for four years at California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. From that job--part firefighter / part cop / part resource manager--she learned she liked the scientific aspects, and jumped at the chance to join an acid-rain project at Sequoia in 1983.

Like Werner, she has no interest in a change of scenery.

“It’s not that I got stuck,” she said, “as much as I got intrigued.”

The daughter of San Joaquin Valley farmers who immigrated from the Philippines, she calls herself a “typical Valley kid” who “grew up in the foothills of the Sierra without really knowing what was in my own back yard.”

Now Esperanza, 38, lives in a two-bedroom home inside the park, with a spectacular view of 11,000-foot peaks, that she rents from the Park Service for $360 per month out of her $35,000-per-year salary.

Werner, 48, the son of a machinist and a homemaker, was raised in rural Florida surrounded by orange groves, but he never even saw a national park until 1965, when he was a high school senior and went on a whirlwind tour of the Northwest and Southwest, including Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. That’s when he decided he wanted to become a naturalist.

“I was astounded. I never realized we had such resources,” said Werner, who still has his Florida drawl. “It’s one thing to see something in books, but it’s something else entirely to see it in person.”

After earning degrees in zoology at University of South Florida in Tampa, he was drafted into the Army, and spent six months in Vietnam. Upon returning, he started a seasonal job in the Everglades and was soon assigned full-time to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.

In 1979, a job opened in Sequoia / Kings Canyon, where he has stayed since. Werner owns a home in Three Rivers, barely outside the park, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Each park employee has his or her favorite place, usually one untrampled by the masses. One of Esperanza’s special spots is the Siberian Outpost, in a high-elevation, tundra-like southern area of the park.

“Because we’re off-trail when we do our research work, we get to see things the average visitor doesn’t get to experience,” she said.

Recently, Esperanza helped gather data in an unusual cave--closed to the public--that only a handful of people on Earth have seen. She once faced off with a bear, who tried to “bluff charge” her to get her to drop her pack, and has watched deer chased by coyotes, golden eagles grab squirrels, and bear cubs trail alongside their mothers.

“Most people never see those things,” she said. “I’m seeing bears as they are naturally, not just in a campground raiding someone’s ice chest.”

Werner’s favorite task is to catch, measure and release Western pond turtles--which are under consideration for endangered species protection--because it means snorkeling in deep pools along the north fork of the Kaweah River. Surrounded by alders and teeming with waterfowl, the spot offers a refreshing respite on a hot summer day.

The scenery at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, ever-changing, never gets old to either of them. When Esperanza stands amid the famous giant, centuries-old sequoias, “I’m still in awe of them, no matter how much I see them.”

The major shortcoming of the job is that the Park Service is short on money, long on needs, Werner and Esperanza say.

“A lot of people think the parks can just run themselves,” Esperanza said. “We’re really low funded and the way the government is generally going, we’re being asked to do even more with less. It’s hard to recruit the new wave of idealism. Cynicism runs high.”

To their caretakers, national parks are little pockets of sanity, although they still face serious environmental pressures, especially water and air pollution.

“We’re trying to be a living museum,” Werner said, “where you try to let nature function as if you weren’t interfering. But of course we aren’t living in a world where that is possible anymore.”