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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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!

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.

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:

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!