Philip Nyhus has dedicated his scholarship to understanding interactions between humans and wildlife
Recently returned from Nepal, Philip Nyhus slides through photos on his phone, looking for one in particular.
“Ah, here it is. These cubs are about 18 months old. The photo is a bit misleading, as they’re actually much farther away than it looks,” he said as he enlarged the photo, which shows animals that might be as close as a neighbor’s backyard.
The snow leopard cubs lounge and stretch in the sun, knowing their watchful mother, just out of the frame, is snacking on a recent kill. It is a remarkable photograph—there are just an estimated 7,500 to 8,000 snow leopards left in the wild, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Cat Specialist Group, and here’s a family of them, as calm and unconcerned as harbor seals sleeping on a sunny dock. You can almost hear the warm, comforting voice of Sir David Attenborough, full of amazement, describing the scene.
Nyhus, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Professor of Environmental Studies, was in Nepal earlier this year scouting locations and facilities for a tentative Jan Plan trip scheduled for 2026. He has led students on previous Jan Plan expeditions to Namibia and Sri Lanka. This would be his first time teaching a Jan Plan course in a region sometimes called “the roof of the world.”
An authority on some of Earth’s most spectacular large animals—elephants, tigers, and other species—Nyhus’s special interest lies in the interface of human interactions with wild animal populations, and he enjoys passing along his passion to students.
Helping students navigate complex challenges
The trip to Nepal will explore how local communities live with wild snow leopards that roam the Himalayan foothills and alpine elevations, as well as tigers, elephants, and rhinos at lower elevations. “We will learn how communities manage conflicts and relationships with wildlife. I want to be able to help students meet and experience these complex challenges,” he said, “to see and learn how community-based natural resource management works.”
Paras Singh, director of Biocos Nepal in Kathmandu and Nyhus’s collaborator on the planned trip, noted that seasonally in January, “snow leopards often move closer to villages, highlighting the challenges of human-wildlife conflict.” Students will explore practical, compassionate strategies for reducing conflict, including “Buddhist perspectives that emphasize respect for all life as a positive approach. In contrast, livestock depredation and retaliatory killings create conflict and strain human-wildlife relationships. These approaches can later be applied in the region as key steps toward ensuring the long-term survival of snow leopards in harmony with local communities,” according to Singh.
In Namibia, Africa, in 2024, working with prominent conservation biologist Jeffrey Muntifering, Nyhus took students deep into the Namib Desert, one of the driest places on earth and the world’s oldest desert. Despite the severe climate, it is home to the largest population of free-roaming black rhinos in the world, as well as populations of desert-adapted lions and elephants.
“One third of the world’s cheetahs and black rhinos are in Namibia. The Indigenous communities that live there were given a mandate to manage these wildlife populations and also to manage their own communities,” Nyhus said. “Students got firsthand experience seeing black rhinos, an incredibly sensitive species. They also saw the passion and care of community members and were exposed to complex questions of human-wildlife interactions, such as trophy hunting.”
The challenge of how to best manage those interactions isn’t limited to tropical or remote areas. In Maine, communities, local industries, and agriculture have had to learn how to coexist with black bears, coyotes, Canadian lynx, bobcats, and, historically, mountain lions and wolves. It’s been a long learning curve: while the bear population is healthy, mountain lions have been gone for 100 years.
Learning to coexist
According to Nyhus, learning to coexist with wild animal populations and their environments—he called coexistence “the goal”—is critical to maintaining a balanced, healthy ecosystem for wildlife and people as well as a healthy planet. News headlines tend to focus on failures and disappointments when it comes to wildlife management, especially of large predators such as tigers and apex species such as elephants, and Nyhus admitted that “one of the things that makes me sad is what’s happening to this planet. Sometimes conservation feels like just putting your finger in the dike.”
Yet he remains optimistic. He observed that over the past couple of decades, there’s been what he calls an “explosion of interest” in human-wildlife interactions and an effort to systematically evaluate solutions. “There are an enormous number of journals, programs, and organizations dedicated to this, and the global community has made a lot of progress recently in recognizing the problem,” he said. “There’s so much to learn from traditional cultures—a lot of Indigenous communities, for example, have lived with predators like tigers for a long time. And in Nepal, there’s a relationship between Buddhism and Hindu beliefs and coexistence with snow leopards.”
He noted that just as there are failures, there are successes. There has been an expansion in Europe of populations of the Eurasian lynx and wolves, for example. In India and Nepal, tiger populations are also increasing.
His journey to Colby
Nyhus came to his interest in human-wildlife interaction naturally. He spent many years in Indonesia, where his father taught at multiple universities for nearly 30 years.
“Growing up in Asia, I became interested in the environment, especially the challenges of people living in rural communities,” he said. After graduating from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., he did graduate work on soil erosion in Java for his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then studied how people interact with Sumatran tigers and Asian elephants for his doctoral thesis, also at UW-Madison.
Following a stint at the Minnesota Zoo that involved him with the Sumatran Tiger Project, where he gained experience in Sumatra working with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing, he came to Colby in 1999 as a post-doctoral fellow in environmental science, a position he held for two years.
The College had just received a major grant from the National Science Foundation called the Award for the Integration of Research and Education. As part of this grant, the College was hiring multiple postdoctoral fellows for two-year hitches; Nyhus’s experience with GIS helped him win one of the positions. After co-chairing the environmental studies program at Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pa., for two years, he returned to Colby in 2004 as an assistant professor in environmental studies on a tenure track.
He and his family “were eager to return to Colby for several reasons,” he said. “We loved Maine, we enjoyed our time in Waterville, and most importantly, we really enjoyed our time at Colby,” he said. He’s married to Gail Carlson, assistant professor of environmental studies and director of the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment at Colby.
‘Giants’ of the department
He taught with three “giants” in the history of the modern Environmental Studies Department at Colby: F. Russell Cole, Oak Professor of Biological Sciences and Environmental Studies, Emeritus; the late David Firmage, the Clara C. Piper Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, Emeritus; and Thomas Tietenberg, Mitchell Family Professor of Economics, Emeritus.
“I was excited by the vision of Russ, David, and Tom to build one of the nation’s premier environmental studies programs,” he noted. “It has been extraordinarily rewarding to contribute to the growth of the ES Department over these years and to work with our amazing students.”
Nyhus became an associate professor in 2010 and a full professor in 2020.
In recent years he has taught ES212 Introduction to Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing with laboratory, ES233 Environmental Policy (a course on U.S. environmental policy–required for ES policy majors, an elective for the other ES majors, minors, and taken by students from some other majors also), ES319 Conservation Biology, and the Jan Plan experiences. He has also co-taught ES118 Environment and Society, the gateway course for environmental studies majors and minors, and ES493 Environmental Policy Practicum, the capstone course for environmental studies policy majors.
Madison Lin ’25, who was a student on the Jan Plan trip to Namibia, is now working with Nyhus on her honors thesis, which focuses on attitudes toward the Formosan black bear, an endangered species in Taiwan, and the potential impacts of those attitudes on conservation outcomes.
“Philip is not only a great resource in terms of technical knowledge and expertise, but he is also so incredibly enthusiastic and supportive. He is always sharing great ideas, showing me new opportunities, and pushing me to go further with my work while simultaneously giving me a lot of flexibility to ultimately choose my own path,” she responded by email. “It’s a nice mixture of guidance and freedom that I want in a mentor, and it really works well for me. Honestly, there are many times when he just absolutely shocks me with his wealth of experiences.”
Student testimonial
Vivian Hawkinson ’18 had planned to major in math or physics, but working on a research project with Nyhus that was focused on human-felid interactions (the family of wild cats) changed her mind. “I found both the research project with Philip and the world of environmental science fascinating, and by spring semester of my first year had declared a major in environmental policy,” she said.
Since graduating from Colby, she has completed a master’s degree in environmental science and is currently working on a Ph.D. in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. “I’m not sure I would be where I am now if Philip hadn’t opened my eyes to the world of conservation biology, wildlife ecology, and human-wildlife interactions. He showed me what a career in this field could look like and helped me believe it was feasible, when I had grown up imagining it was the sort of work reserved for people on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet,” she commented.
She added that when she was a Colby undergraduate, “He encouraged me to develop my own research questions and ideas, and we had many meetings—particularly my senior year when I was writing my honors thesis—where we would brainstorm ideas together. I would print off the latest draft I had written, and we would sit down and walk through it together.”
Her thesis examined spatial patterns in human-wildlife conflict near protected areas around the world: instances of livestock predation by large carnivores and crop raiding by elephants or baboons, among other examples.
“I think the professor-student power dynamic can be intimidating at times, but Philip enabled me to ask questions and develop hypotheses without fear of appearing foolish,” she noted. “As I’ve begun to mentor undergraduate and master’s students myself, I’ve tried to apply this approach as well. Cultivating a warm, welcoming work environment for early career scientists, particularly those who may be first-generation, historically underrepresented in the field, or come from a family where no one else works on similar topics, is a simple act that can have far-reaching consequences. … I feel fortunate to have had such a wonderful mentor and role model so early on. The work I did at Colby, and in particular the projects I did with Philip, laid the foundation for all of the research I have done since.”
Author and expert
With renowned tiger conservationist Ronald Tilson, Nyhus co-edited the book Tigers of the World (Academic Press, 2010), which included contributions from many of the world’s leading tiger experts; Nyhus’s review paper in the book, “Panthera tigris vs Homo sapiens: conflict, coexistence, or extinction,” has been widely cited. As an expert himself, he has been interviewed by a range of media, including Animal Planet Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Nature, the New York Times, Time magazine, the Washington Post, and others.
Another inspiration for Nyhus is Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of modern wildlife ecology and the author of the classic book A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, published in 1949. Leopold had an important impact on modern conservation with his concept of “land ethic,” which recognizes that the relationships between people and land are connected and that care for people cannot be separated from care for the land.
‘I feel fortunate to have had such a wonderful mentor and role model so early on. The work I did at Colby, and in particular the projects I did with Philip, laid the foundation for all of the research I have done since.’
Vivian Hawkinson ’18