4N

Rigby and I are back in Santa Cruz, adjusting to things we haven't seen in a while-- stoplights, traffic, and sunshine, just to name a few. We've finally managed to get internet up and running in our new place, so it's back to blogging!

Today's entry focuses on one of the more frustrating aspects of working with wild animals: data loss. So far, we've been getting pretty reliable information from the GPS tags on our eagles, but the data are not without problems. Since the tags are solar powered, they need to have reliable sunshine to keep the battery charged and the device functioning. In southeast Alaska, where snow is a daily occurrence and daylight hours are rapidly diminishing, it's tough for the tags to get the juice they need. This is complicated by the fact that the Chilkat River is surrounded on both sides by relatively steep mountain ranges. Even when the sun does come out, much of the river is still in shadow.

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Trivia Question of the Week, and what's up next

This week's trivia question is paired with statistics for this season's fieldwork. What is the animal we saw most frequently on our trail cameras this summer?

Hint #1: This contest was pretty close, with a couple hundred pictures or so separating the first and second most frequently sighted animals.

Hint #2: In broad terms, the second most frequently sighted type of animal actually beats out the first, but in terms of species, there is one clear winner.

Hint #3: Their name starts with "B"

Hint #4: They're furry

Hint #5: If you anger them, they'll eat your face off. :)

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If you guessed Brown Bear, you're correct! You've obviously been following along with us this season. Or you know that bears will eat your face off. Either way, congratulations!

"Bears" as a broad category, was actually beat out by "birds"-- we saw more birds overall on our trail cameras than bears. Whereas the "bird" category is composed of eagles, raven, magpies, crows, mergansers, blue-winged teals, varied thrushes, and others, however, the "bears" category is all brown bears. We didn't see a single black bear on our trail cameras this season.

For our trail camera work this summer and fall, we captured:

• 24,767 photographs, total
• 6,605 images of bears
• 7,841 photos of birds
• 71 photos of canids (wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs)
• 332 mustelid photos (mink and marten)
• 59 photos of rodents (mice and red squirrels)
• 94 photos of humans (not including ourselves)
• 0 photos of lynx, wolverine, black bear, or lagamorphs (hares or rabbits), although these species all live in the area

 

Now that I'm headed back to Santa Cruz and our field season is over for the year, you may be wondering what's in store for the blog. Will I keep updating? What can you expect to see?

Well, by my calculations I've shared around 60 of our trail camera photos here on the blog. That means there are an additional 24,707 photos I could post! :)  I'll continue to post trail camera photos from time to time, in addition to videos I'm currently working on putting together that detail sequences of trail camera photographs, like bears or eagles feeding on the salmon carcasses.

And don't forget about our eagles! We'll continue to follow the movements of the five eagles we tagged with GPS/satellite transmitters, and we'll post these locations for you as we go along.

There are several other stories from the field that I haven't yet had time to put together into blog entries that I'm hoping to work in within the next couple of months. We're also working on putting together a fully-fledged website for Ecology Alaska. So among trail camera photos, eagle movement data, stories from our fieldwork in Haines, and perhaps a few entries detailing the life of a wildlife biologist outside of the field season, there should be plenty going on here on the blog. I imagine that the rate of posting will decrease come the beginning of the year, but I will attempt to continue posting at least one entry and one trivia question each week.

Stay tuned, and as always, feel free to let us know what you think, by leaving us a message in the comments or sending us an email at ecologyalaska [at] gmail (dot) com.

Southward Bound

It's hard to believe, but it's been exactly four months since Rigby and I arrived in Haines on the ferry from Prince Rupert. From the Southeastern Alaska State Fair, to hiking Mt. Ripinsky and the trails in Chilkat State Park, to learning about spawning salmon, subsistence fishing and canning, to setting out trail cameras and finally, trapping and tagging bald eagles, the last four months have been filled with a host of new experiences and opportunities. And bears.

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Meet the eagles!

Get ready to meet our eagles! We captured five eagles on the Chilkat River this year, and we'll be tracking their movements from now until the transmitters fail (or fall off, or the eagle... dare I say it?... dies)(Which is not going to happen. I hope.). If all goes as planned, we'll see the daily movement patterns of these eagles for at least the next three years! We can't wait to see where they spend their time during different parts of the year.

We captured our first eagle late morning on Saturday, November 3rd, using the ballistic net. A sick juvenile eagle couldn't resist the free food in front of our net launcher, and began to feed. An adult eagle came and roused the juvenile off the bait, and fed in its place. The result? We netted our first bird, a healthy, hefty adult female!

4N, just after being freed from the net

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To Catch a Predator (Part 2)

Our snares are set, our net is at the ready, and we've been standing around in the snow since dawn, waiting for the eagles to come in. We keep a close eye on our snares and bait with binoculars and spotting scopes.

Each time an eagle nears a perch we've erected, or flies over the bait in front of our net launcher, we hold our breaths. Typically, the eagle moves on, or perches nearby. We sigh, and wait for the next close encounter.

Then, unexpectedly, an eagle flies down and lands next to the chum carcass set out in front of our ballistic net. It looks around, cautiously, before beginning to feed. We wait until the eagle has its head down, focused on tearing a nice, juicy bit of chum off the carcass, and then-- "Fire!" We trigger the ballistic net remotely, and the .22 gauge blanks power three padded projectiles, launching the net from its housing out and over the bird.

"We got it!"

Everything is a rush. We sprint from the roadside, where we've been watching, down the river embankment to our freshly-netted eagle. We must move quickly, to ensure that the eagle doesn't escape from the net, or get too tangled. Immediately, we secure the talons of the eagle in our hands, and place a hood over its eyes. Eagles receive most of their sensory information visually, so when they can see what we're doing, they get stressed. With the hood on, however, they immediately calm down, and are relatively docile in the hand. Unlike many mammals, birds do not need to be anesthetized during handling. The hood keeps the eagles calm enough.

We then begin the process of extracting the eagle from the net. Here, Steve Lewis and Dr. Scott Ford work the netting off the eagle's wings.

Steve and Scott work the netting off the eagle

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To Catch a Predator (Part 1)

We just finished six intense days of eagle captures! In the coming week, we'll be posting several entries and many photos of our adventures, so check back often. Aided greatly by raptor biologist Steve Lewis of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Dr. Scott Ford, an avian veterinarian, our efforts netted five total eagles, so we were able to deploy all of our satellite tags!

Eagles surveying the Chilkat River

As the weather turns chillier and the rivers begin to freeze, more and more eagles are congregating along a small stretch of the Chilkat River that hosts open, flowing water. This two- to three-mile stretch of river stays unfrozen year-round as a result of unique geology-- groundwater percolating upward from natural springs near the confluence of the Tsirku, Klehini, and Chilkat Rivers maintains water temperatures just above freezing. Eagles come to this area to access chum and coho salmon. When rivers freeze elsewhere, this spot is one of the only places eagles can find a meal!

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Coming soon...!

Things have been quiet here on the blog lately, but don't worry. There's a reason. A very good reason, in fact.

We've been out. Working from dawn to dusk. Trapping bald eagles.

Yep.

More soon- with plenty of pictures!

More Trail Camera Photos!

This latest series of trail camera photos comes to you courtesy of the Herman Creek Chum salmon run. Coho and Chum are pretty much the only salmon running this time of year. Coho are a little harder to come by, so anything that's eating salmon is probably going to be eating Chum.

Like these bears:

Or these. How many bears do you see in this photo?

Did you count four? There are the two obvious ones, then part of a third on the right edge of the frame, and part of a sneaky fourth behind the branches along the left edge of the frame.

Here is a less sneaky adult eagle:

and some mergansers and a raven at that same site:

We had a couple coyotes in this set. Here's one of them:

Eagle party! More eagles have been arriving every day. There is a citizen science group in Haines that does weekly eagle counts. Last weekend the tally was 775. It won't be too much longer before there are thousands.

Take a look at this handsome youngster:

We also have some ravens fighting over scraps.

Another photo of a wolf!

And our first moose photo! Well, sort of, anyway.

This last one is tricky. Along the bottom part of the frame in the middle, there is another "first" camera sighting. A rodent! It's impossible to identify the species, or get much beyond "rodent-like small animal." But there it is! Maybe not quite as grand as the brown bears, wolves, and eagles, but I think it's fun to see them just the same.

Trail Camera Photos: Bear Edition

Hey everyone! Over the past few weeks I've been working hard at sifting through our collection of trail camera photos and tagging them all-- adding digital labels to identify what was recorded in the image. Most weeks we download anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand photographs off our cameras, so sometimes it takes a while to get through them. We have nearly 15,000 photographs already from this field season, with about five weeks remaining to collect data.

Each photo must be properly tagged with information about the date and location the photo was taken, along with whatever critter(s) may have shown up, in order for us to be able to analyze the data later on. It can be a tedious and time-consuming process, but it's nice to have a searchable database of images. Once tagged, I can easily go back and locate every single photo we have of a marten, a canid, a crow, etc.

So instead of sharing photos from a specific location, this week I decided to share photos of a specific subgroup of subjects: brown bears! We have so many images of bears that it was hard to decide which to share. This is just a sampling of some of the bear pictures we've taken the past couple months:

This was a nice closeup we got at one of our first trapping locations, at the end of August. This is the same place we saw the bear cub and the wolf I posted earlier. This camera had great placement-- just about every photo we got off it was crisp, clear, and in focus.

 

Here's another earlier image. This is one of two female brown bears that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game monitors-- see her radio collar?

 

This image is more recent, from a set of cameras we have on a run of Chum salmon up Herman Creek.

  

Another more recent image taken at the same location. This is one of the better nighttime images we have of a brown bear.

Although this one isn't bad, either. But I just realized the clock somehow got reset on this camera, and the time stamp isn't right. Dangit! :\

 

This bear doesn't look particularly happy to have its photo taken.

Neither does this one. And it has backup!

This bear, however, is pretty fluffy. Not nearly as intimidating.

So many bears!

Trail Camera Photos!

These are some of the last of the photos from the cameras we set on the Sockeye runs. Since the Sockeye are tapering off and the run is at its end, there are fewer fish, fewer carcasses, and thus fewer animals coming to visit our cameras. Nevertheless, I found a few photos from our final set of Sockeye cameras worth sharing:

Hey look! A marten! In daylight! Almost all of the marten (and mink) photos we get are at night, with the infrared flash. It's really nice to see them in color.

Crow party!

Here's a new one: This is a varied thrush. Varied thrushes are more or less all over the place out here. They are striking birds, with a very distinct grey and orange pattern accented with black and white. They have little interest in our carcasses, but like all thrushes often feed on the ground. You've probably all seen a thrush before-- American Robin are in the thrush family.

Yet another bear photo. We saw very few bears in this last set of images. Most of the photos of were us (setting the cameras) and of mink and marten, with the occasional red squirrel or thrush thrown in the mix. But we did see a couple of bears, this being one of them.

 

Aaaaaaaaand another wolf photo! I'm very pleased to be seeing wolves in different areas around Haines. The first two photos of wolves I posted were from an area near the confluence of the Kelsall and Chilkat Rivers. This photo was taken near Chilkoot Lake. This appears to be a fairly young animal.

 

Wolves have a tough time living around Haines. There are no deer or elk here. The only large game for packs to hunt is moose, and most of the available moose habitat is much farther up the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers and up at higher elevations. Moose are hunted here, and although the moose population is managed to sustain hunting, it is not managed to sustain wolf packs. There is also a lengthy wolf hunting season-- nearly year-round, with a three-month hiatus during summer-- with a limit of five animals. Dedicated wolf hunters could easily disrupt an entire pack.

Many people in the United States are still strong advocates of predator control, and would prefer that wolves aren't around. Some of this is anti-wolf sentiment is interest-based (many game hunters believe that wolves kill a lot of the available prey in an area, meaning fewer animals available for harvest in the fall). Some is likely symbolic (wolves have been portrayed for centuries as something to be feared and destroyed).

Whatever the case, I'm happy to be seeing wolves on our trail cameras. Wolves help sustain healthy populations of their prey, which in turn impacts the vegetation on which herbivores feed. Wolves are often called keystone species-- species which have a disproportionally large impact on their environment, and whose presence helps to balance food webs. A large part of our research involves better understanding the impacts large carnivores, like bears and wolves, have on the environment, and why they are important.

The Chum are Coming!

Over the past couple weeks, the Sockeye runs have been slowing down. Most of the Sockeye in the spawning areas have now died, and few new Sockeye appear each day. Carcasses litter the streams, ponds, and banks. We've gradually seen less activity on our trail cameras-- fewer bears are visiting key feeding areas, and we come across fewer partially consumed carcasses along bear trails. But the bears have no need to be concerned. There are plenty of other fish in the stream!

Pink salmon are still running, although their numbers have decreased, too. Coho salmon also continue to spawn, but spawn in much lower densities and across larger areas than Sockeye, so it's more difficult to locate their spawning grounds. The bears' next big target, though (and ours, too, for our trail cameras) are the Chum. Just last week, there were only a few fish in this spawning channel off of Herman Creek. Already, the densities are quickly increasing:

Chum salmon are also called Dog and Keta. Keta is the name typically used by canning companies (after all, who wants to eat "chum" anyway?). Chum and Pink salmon are the least commercially valuable fish. Most commercial fishing and canning operations prefer King and Sockeye, but many subsistence fishers in this region like Chum just fine-- especially when smoked, fresh-caught Chum has good flavor.

Chum salmon spawn in autumn, from roughly the end of August through the winter, or at least until the rivers freeze enough to prevent their travel upstream. Chum spawn by the hundreds of thousands, and much like Sockeye they pack themselves into their spawning areas. Chum can pack themselves in even greater densities than the Sockeye. Sockeye are limited by available fry rearing habitat-- once their eggs hatch the young salmon fry need suitable places to grow for a year or two before migrating to sea. Thus, Sockeye need good places to lay their eggs that are also in areas fit for little fish to grow.

Chum, however, are limited only by spawning habitat. Their fry migrate to sea more or less immediately after hatching. Chum salmon don't need to find suitable places for their fry to grow, only good spots for the eggs to hatch. As long as they can locate nice, rocky substrate with good water flow, they can spawn, so Chum find whatever spawning habitat is available, even if there are already hundreds of other fish around. This makes them easy for wildlife to access. Just walk up to the water and grab one!

With the weather quickly cooling and the Chum beginning to run, the eagles are beginning to congregate. We've started to see far more eagles around Haines recently. Gradually over the next month, the water level of the Chilkat River will drop, exposing the river flats and providing many shallow areas for wildlife to access fish. The Chum run will increase, until the braided areas of the Chilkat are packed with fish. And, as temperatures continue to decrease and freezing begins elsewhere along the coast and in the interior, more and more eagles will travel to Haines to feast on Chum through the beginning of winter.

We will continue to set our trail cameras out to capture wildlife feeding on salmon. At the end of this week, we will take down our last set of trail cameras from the Sockeye runs, and, starting next week, will set our cameras on Chum spawning areas and on higher elevation wildlife trails. Once the eagles begin arriving en mass, we will also start working on the second part of our research here-- looking into eagle migratory behavior!

Trivia Question of the Week

This week's Trivia Question comes to you from our trail cameras! It's a little tougher this week:

What type of animal was captured in this photograph?

(You can click the image to view a larger version)

Hint #1: This photo was taken with an infrared flash at night, so colors won't be there to help you.

Hint #2: The animal in question is in the bottom left-hand part of the frame.

Hint #3: It may seem obvious to some, but it's worth pointing out: this animal is nocturnal.

Hint #4: It's facing away from the camera-- what we're seeing here is, predominately, its back.

Hint #5: This animal is a bird of prey.

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Did you guess Great Horned Owl? If you did, congratulations! Want to helps us identify some other animals?

One of the trickiest aspects of using trail cameras is that the photographs we capture aren't always straightforward. Animals sometimes move quickly across the frame, and the shutter speed of the cameras won't be high enough to prevent motion blur. Sometimes, animals get too close to the cameras and the flash reflects back into the lens, causing white-out or blown highlights. Some animals will be hovering around the edges of the camera's field of view, and only parts of them- tails, feet, the curve of their rump- might end up being captured. Photos taken at night can be particularly difficult because there are no colors. As humans, we rely on colors and color patterns to identify a lot of different animal species-- tough to do when everything is showing in gray-scale!

Did you have difficulty identifying the owl in this photograph? You're not alone. Correctly identifying the species in trail camera photographs is critical for later data analysis, so it can be time consuming and trying to sort through hundreds of photos and pick out the different types of animals in each. Sometimes we find images we really can't identify. With those, we have to do our best to determine the animal's family, at the very least. Is it a mustelid (member of the weasel family, like a mink, marten, ermine, otter, etc.)? Canid (coyote, wolf, fox)? Ursid (brown bear, black bear)?

We also rely a great deal on natural history (knowledge of the animals living in an area and their habits) and contextual cues. For example, wolves aren't likely to be seen close to town, so an shaky image of something dog-like is probably a coyote or domestic dog. River otters won't be found far from water, so an image of a large weasel-like animal captured with a camera on a high altitude trail a mile away from the nearest stream is probably a marten. If one set of photographs is blurry, but there is a photo taken a couple minutes before or afterward of a mink, the blurry photos are probably also mink-- it's uncommon to capture photographs of two completely different animals within a few minutes of one another, unless they're, say, different types of birds feeding along a spawning area.

Here are a few other tricky photos for you to try out:

See the hump in the bottom part of the frame? Any guesses? This one is probably a marten.

In the lower part of the frame, just to the left of center, see the lighter-colored animal against the dark background? This is likely a mink.

See the weasel-like animal just below and left of the center of the photo? This one is probably a mink, too.

If you enjoyed looking at these photos and trying to figure out what you're seeing, you might be able to participate directly in projects like ours in the near future. Yiwei is currently working on developing an interactive game for Facebook that will allow users to work in teams to help tag photos just like these.

More Trail Camera Photos

We've had our trail cameras up for just two weeks, and we've already been getting some great photos. Check out some pictures from our most recent download!

As usual, there are A LOT of bears:

 Look at the size of that Sockeye!

Who's there!?

Someone needs to lay off the salmon....

It's not all bears, though! Look at this raven and great blue heron:

And my personal favorite picture of the week-- we had a couple of wolves stop by! Here's a shot of one of them:

Rigby earns his keep

Here's a scenario for you: You have a dog who's young (somewhere between 14 and 16 months), energetic (think "bouncing off the walls"), intelligent (will make his own "fun" if not otherwise entertained), and is very driven (a mix of two different herding breeds). The dog is extraordinarily loyal, and will follow you anywhere you go. What's the best way to keep yourself (and the dog) sane?

Well, the first steps would be: plenty of exercise, lots of training, and strict guidelines and boundaries. The absolute best thing for a herder, though?

Give the dog a job!

Most dogs, regardless of breed, do well if given a job. Even something simple, like fetching the morning newspaper, will give a dog a sense of purpose. Dogs of any age, size, or breed can learn to do far more elaborate jobs, though. If you've ever seen the television show SuperFetch* which used to play on Animal Planet, you'll know what I mean! Dogs can learn to do a lot of things for us-- from search and rescue, drug detection, and assisting the disabled, to things like taking out the garbage, finding the remote control, and putting the toilet seat down.

Quark's job when we're out in the field working? Looking adorable. Also, she growls if there are bears nearby, and will speak on command to make noise when we're entering brushy habitat. Rigby's job? Well, he happens to be the aforementioned young, energetic dog, so Rigby has been tasked with carrying trail cameras for us in his backpack.

The cameras, in their steel-case housings, weigh around four pounds apiece, so with Rigby packing one camera on each side, he frees nearly ten pounds of weight from my pack. On a day when we're hiking four or five miles to a field site to set cameras, my shoulders really appreciate not having to cart around those extra eight pounds, and the backpack helps keep Rigby focused.

To be perfectly honest, he tires himself out more when he's not wearing the pack-- he runs back and forth on the trail constantly, using the woods as own personal agility course. But the pack forces him to think more about how he carries his weight and how to move through the trees.

Rigby's other jobs include riding in the raft or canoe, heeling when we think there might be a bear nearby, and pestering Quark.




*For those of you with Amazon Prime, you can watch dogs learn awesome tricks here; I'm pretty sure Netflix has them online as well.

Setting Cameras

These last couple weeks, we've been busy! We finished up scouting out areas, and selected three different spots for our first round of camera trapping using our trail cameras. This past week, Jenn, Quark, Rigby, and I set 20 trail cameras on Sockeye spawning grounds: one site in a pond off the Chilkat River and two sites at creek drainages along the banks of Chilkoot Lake. This pond near the Chilkat River is just upstream of one of our camera trapping sites. If I were a Sockeye, I might spawn here, too. Look how pretty it is!

There are many different ways to set trail cameras. If you want to maximize your chances of getting lots of photos of varied wildlife, it's a good idea to place them in areas wildlife are likely to be traveling. The most straightforward location is to set them on actual trails. Most animals have dedicated home ranges and travel the same areas frequently using trails, whether they be deer trails, bear trails, or roads or hiking paths made by humans. They can also be placed near a resource, such as a good water source (creeks, springs, ponds) or food source (berry patches, grassy areas, squirrel middens) that animals are likely to stop by. In this picture, the clearing on the ground is an intersection of two narrow game trails-- a great spot to set a camera!

Yet another way to set trail cameras is to bait them-- set out food or a scent lure to attract animals to the vicinity of the camera. We're interested in figuring out not only what types of animals live in this area, but also how many of them might rely on salmon as a food source during late summer and autumn. For that reason, Jenn and I are baiting our trail cameras with salmon carcasses.

After salmon spawn, they die. Many salmon are predated by bears before they have a chance to spawn. Bears prefer eating the fatty, energy-rich roe, sexual organs, or brains of the fish. Less desirable tissue, like muscle, is often left for other scavengers. Although bears are more likely to target and feed on fish that haven't yet spawned, salmon carcasses are attractants for most carnivores. Even if they find that the salmon staked in front of our trail cameras won't make a decent meal, the smell of decomposing fish acts as a strong lure for any passers-by.

Here, Quark poses next to one of our assembled trail cameras. The salmon carcass, which we pulled from a nearby creek, is staked in front. Note the steel casing, intended to protect the camera from curious bears. The branch wedged between the camera housing and the tree acts to both stabilize the unit and direct the lens of the camera downward, so that the fish and the ground surrounding it are in the field of view.

Despite most of our gear smelling like rotting fish, Jenn and I had a great week hiking into these areas and setting up our cameras. We were able to avoid rainy days, find plenty of spawning activity and carcasses to use as bait, and didn't meet up with any bears on the trail. Hiking into these areas is not something to be taken lightly. We head straight into prime brown bear habitat-- this time of year, bears don't stray far from spawning grounds. It's a nerve-wracking experience walking through brushy areas knowing bears could be very close by. We take every precaution to keep ourselves and the bears safe. I'll post more about this soon.

We'll leave the cameras up for two weeks. This coming week, Jenn and I will return to each of our three sites and check up on the cameras. Many things can go wrong with trail cameras, and we want to ensure we're getting the best data possible. Curious bears can shift camera angles away from the intended view, or occasionally, knock them off trees completely. Dirt, bird poop, and vegetation can block camera lenses. Salmon carcasses, although staked to the ground, can be carried away by hungry scavengers. SD cards can fail. In this photo, Jenn is securing one of our cameras to a tree with a cable lock, an additional method to stabilize the camera, and one that will hopefully deter theft.

By checking our cameras this coming week, we can address any problems, and, more importantly, get a sneak peek at what may be stopping by. We'll be revisiting our first field site tomorrow, so in a few days we'll hopefully have some great photos to share!