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When I was a boy, my family and I visited Yellowstone National Park. It was an amazing trip (especially as a child) and while we were in the park, I saw a wide array of amazing wildlife. But I noticed, even then, that some species of wildlife were more willing to be observed than others. Some were rarer and thus, harder to find. And some, it seemed, didn't want to be found at all.
One vivid memory I have of this trip is when we briefly glimpsed a moose from across a valley. My father and his brother quickly set off to get a better picture of the majestic animal. As they approached, the moose quickly took its leave (it vamoosed as they say) and made its way up a ridge at the edge of the valley. My father and his brother scampered after it, crashing recklessly through brush and vegetation so that even a practically deaf rattlesnake would have heard them coming. As they approached the top of ridge, they felt confident they would finally get an up close look at the elusive creature. But as their eyes got above the treeline, they were met with disappointment. There was the moose, high on the next ridge, tauntingly looking back at them, from a distance of more than half a mile.
If one were to have cataloged the moose's behavior from such an encounter, they would conclude that moose spend most of their day sprinting through the forests and valleys of the rocky mountains (a clear example of a biological "observer effect"). This would be an inaccurate depiction of their behavior of course, which begs the question, how can one best study elusive wildlife?
One method than quickly comes to mind is to use remotely triggered cameras or trail cameras (referred to as camera traps in the field of wildlife biology). This approach allows researchers to simply hike into a species' habitat, place a camera, and wait for that animal to walk by the camera. Sounds easy, right? Well, as with most things in ecology, it's a bit more complicated than that.
While I was in graduate school in Pennsylvania, I became very interested in this topic and decided to focus my graduate research on testing and refining the best method to observe rare and elusive wildlife. For my thesis project, I choose to focus on mesopredators (i.e. medium-sized carnivores), largely because many of them were often secretive and evasive animals.
After four seasons of fieldwork, I made an interesting discovery. Some of these species were even camera shy and that the presence of people, even remotely, was enough to deter some species of wildlife from walking in front of these cameras. This was especially true of coyotes, fisher, mink, and bobcats. Indeed, during the course of my research, I would often observe footprints made by these species at my study sites, footprints that would often stop just short of walking in front of my cameras. Many of these animals were selectively moving around these cameras, possibly because they recognized them as an extension of mankind.
My results showed that while camera traps are a promising new wildlife observation technique, they may not be an adequate method of observation for some species and that more research and testing is required to make these scientific instruments truly invisible to the species we hope to observe.
Assortment of snapshots from my master's thesis study.
If you would like to know more about the results of my graduate research, I have shared a PowerPoint Presentation outlining my study results that can be found by clicking here, in addition to a poster of my thesis research that can be accessed here.
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