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September 6th 2020
What's it like doing field work during a global pandemic? Have the cougars changed their behaviour with less people around? What do cougars eat in the summer? You have questions, and I have some preliminary answers. Fortunately for me and my team, we were able to proceed with our summer field work with a set of protocols in place to protect us and the cats from covid-19. That included wearing masks when handling the cats, and whenever we had to be closer than 6 ft apart from each other. We weren't able to include volunteers in the field with us this summer due to concerns working with an expanded bubble of people, though we hope we can bring people out with us soon. My summer was filled with a lot of days sitting at a desk in my house working on coordinating the project, reading literature, writing, and my favourite part - watching the cougar locations come in. I really can't help it - I'm obsessed with these cats and watching where they go and what they do. I kept a close eye on the formation of GPS clusters so I could send our two summer technicians Kieran and Kayla to visit kill sites and collect data on their prey preferences. The only cats that really came closer to towns or areas with human development during the pandemic were the cats that are on their juvenile dispersal. This is normal for cougars because they are trying to find a new territory to establish when they are out on their own. I did notice that the backcountry was filled with campers, and people were coming closer to our resident cougars because provincial parks were closed for some time. Otherwise, I don't think the pandemic had much of an impact on our cougars but I will only know for sure one I have collected several years of data on their habitat use and response to human activity. Visiting cougar kills in the summer was really interesting and quite different from winter kills. I believe that the cats increase their kill rates in summer - meaning they kill more animals per week - but I have yet to run the stats on this. Carcasses were sometimes not entirely consumed, with only the organs eaten, and many of them were juveniles from this year's crop of baby deer, moose, and elk. Black bears showed up at almost every kill site that we monitored with cameras, and so did coyotes, turkey vultures, and ravens. Maggots take over the carcass in the summer heat pretty quickly, so the cats don't stay as long on a kill as in winter because the meat doesn't last. Our capture work is mostly limited to the winter months when we search for fresh cougar tracks and the hounds can follow them. However, we GPS-collared two adult females with 6-month old kittens last winter and now these kittens are adult-sized. We successfully GPS-collared a 1-year old brother and sister this summer by bringing hounds to the latest kill site of the GPS-collared mother. Now we can monitor when the juveniles make their own kills in the winter, and disperse from their natal territory in the coming months. Not all of our cluster sites are actually kills. So far one of our adult females has given birth to a litter of two kittens and we set up cameras to monitor them at the den which consists of a slash pile in a cutblock. A month after they were born, we went in to ear-tag, weigh, measure, and sex them and they were the feistiest, cutest things I've ever held in my arms. Waiting to collect the kitten cameras and hoping that more cougars will den help me work through those pesky office days! So far we have visited 375 cluster sites on the project and 225 of these were kill sites. This fall I'm still at the desk but going out periodically to visit kills and grab cameras. I've noticed that the cougars are killing more bucks than in the spring time, likely because the male mule deer are coming down from higher elevation to mate in the rut. I'm looking forward to our second winter capture season and working with government biologist TJ Gooliaff to plan it all out. Exciting times!
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About the author
I am an early career ecologist studying how species and landscapes interact in the face of climate change and human disturbance. Archives
September 2020
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