Pics or it didn’t happen: a successful first year of fieldwork
By Caroline Seip May was an exciting month for me as I marked the end of my one year pilot project, and I began deployment of the rest of the cameras for my graduate research project. Hopefully by the time this is posted all of my cameras will be set up in the field and […]
From Borneo to British Columbia; Human-Wildlife Conflict Challenges Remain the Same
By Jacqui Sunderland-Groves The Wildlife Coexistence Lab at UBC is researching a number of wildlife species to investigate how human development impacts their distribution and abundance, and how human-wildlife conflict can be alleviated. Find out more about #WildCo Globally, human-wildlife conflict incidents are occurring with increasing frequency and as we continue to alter natural […]
What to expect when you’re expecting (…a successful fieldwork season).
By Aisha Uduman I am currently in Sri Lanka, at the start of my fieldwork season investigating ecological and social dimensions of leopard-livestock conflict in two rural dairy farming communities. The last few months have been a whirlwind of courses, project and proposal finalisation, grant writing and fieldwork prep, so I thought it would be […]
It’s all about the bling! Tracking urban deer to manage human-wildlife conflicts.
By Joanna Burgar It’s just another winter morning in Oak Bay, temperatures hovering around zero, the first hint of sunlight peeking out…and a group of wildlife bios, a couple of vets, and members of the Urban Wildlife Stewardship Society congregating in a parking lot. As you do, when the dawn plans are to stealthily search […]
When is a big cat not a “Big Cat”?
By Joanna Klees van Bommel Let’s talk taxonomy. The decision to put species into defined groups is often straightforward and logical (vertebrates vs invertebrates), and occasionally arbitrary (barren-ground vs woodland caribou); but, in some cases, it’s a source of confusion. I study cougars (Puma concolor), also known as mountain lions, pumas, deer tigers, and many, […]
How to trap a small wild cat in 15 days?
By Cindy Hurtado If you ever wrote a grant application, you are familiar with the type of questions asked. In 2015, as part of a felid conservation project, Alvaro García-Olaechea and I were naively writing a grant to study pampas cat (Leopardus colocolo) in the Sechura Desert of northern Peru, and we were asked […]
Breaking through the Bog
A tale of field work in Alberta’s boreal forest by Erin Tattersall The helicopter lifts into the sky, blasting us with an icy wash of winter air and snow crystals. As the engine’s roar fades into the distance, we trudge across the frozen ground, each step a struggle to avoid sinking into the waterlogged sphagnum. […]