In March 2013, according to Tom Stephenson, the program director, a fixed-wing aircraft circled above an established herd on Mount Langley, a 14,026-foot peak. Technicians onboard that airplane used radio telemetry to guide a low-flying Hughes 500 helicopter toward five pregnant female sheep known from previous DNA testing to carry diverse genetics. The helicopter herded the pregnant sheep up a mountainside. A man leaned from the helicopter and fired a net gun that tangled up one female after another. Another man, known as a “mugger,” jumped out and tackled the netted females, hobbled and blindfolded them, and then wrapped them in bags that dangled from the underside of the helicopter.

The sheep were flown to a parking lot for blood draws that allowed disease testing and more DNA-sequencing, as well as ultrasound testing for body-fat analysis and skeletal measurements of their fetuses. Next, they were trucked some 100 miles north, transferred into bags hanging below another helicopter, flown up near Mount Gibbs and freed to give birth among sheep they’d never met.

The view through those binoculars, in other words, lovely as it might be, will also be a deeply human cultural product. People have always manipulated the natural world. The most primitive farms are human-managed ecosystems; European aristocrats fenced off game reserves in the Middle Ages; Western American land managers have argued for more than a century over how to protect livestock from predators; and government agencies have long dumped hatchery-raised trout into streams so that we can have fun catching them. Radio collars and species-recovery projects have been around for a while, too: In California alone, starting back in the 1980s, biologists saved both the peregrine falcon and the California condor from extinction.

More and more, though, as we humans devour habitat, and as hardworking biologists — thank heaven — use the best tools available to protect whatever wild creatures remain, we approach that perhaps inevitable time when every predator-prey interaction, every live birth and every death in every species supported by the terrestrial biosphere, will be monitored and manipulated by the human hive mind.

Conservation Metrics, for example, a California technology start-up, is developing software to process immense data sets — from remote camera traps or, say, DNA samplers that might one day sit in wilderness streams and filter DNA fragments as a way of counting species in a given watershed. Mark Hebblewhite, a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana, integrates real-time moisture and temperature data from satellites with data from accelerometers attached to birds’ wings to keep tabs on bird flocks in migration. Drone aircraft allow Tim Boucher, a Nature Conservancy scientist, to map wilderness terrain down to an astonishing five-centimeter resolution.

As for manipulation, African game managers use similar drones to herd wild elephants away from farms where they might get shot. A still more intriguing example comes from Western Europe, where large predators were mostly killed off by the Renaissance. Fifteen years ago, biologists in Trentino, Italy, traveled to Slovenia to capture 10 European brown bears, smaller cousins of grizzlies. These bears were released into the Italian Alps with extraordinary success; 10 bears are now 50.

“It’s exciting to have these large, iconic carnivores roaming Central Europe where they were extirpated centuries ago,” said Francesca Cagnacci, a researcher on a follow-up project.