Sunday, September 19, 2010

Front Royal, Virginia

I have just arrived in Front Royal, VA to begin an internship with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. I am so excited! I start tomorrow on a project investigating fecal hormones for the purpose of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa). Using domestic cats as a model species, the project aims to optimize oocyte quality for IVF in the clouded leoard, as clouded leopards have difficulty breeding in captivity. Male aggression towards females in natural mating can often be fatal for the females, with the chance of losing limbs also high. With other projects studying ways to mitigate male aggression, artificial insemination of clouded leopards has also been examined. Clouded leopards are spontaneous ovulators, and combined with lack of response to hormone stimulation, artificial insemination has proved ineffective for these cats. I will be working for postdoc Dr. Rebecca Hobbs assessing how domestic cats respond to hormones such as estrogen and progestin for the purpose of developing a successful program of IVF for the extremely endangered clouded leopard.

I am staying just a few steps from the laboratory I will be working in. The dorm houses many interns during different semesters, and there are currently seven or eight women this fall. I've met three of my housemates in addition to a visiting cheetah scientist, and the backgrounds and scientific interests I've come across are amazing! My neighbors other than the interns include bison, cranes (cannot remember what species... will find out), and maned wolves. The cranes make a bit of noise at night and they sound like the combination between a loon and large woodpecker hacking away at a tree. Come breeding season in November, I have been promised sleepless nights. The bison are... big. I can see their field from my bedroom window, and the maned wolves are located throughout the compound and call to each other in the night (I am waiting to hear this). Since I've only seen the back end of one of these very red, very tall wolves, I cannot yet remark on their tall legs and glorious manes. I can, however, say that they are very sneaky. Other animals here include Przewalski's horses; onagers (a Persian donkey); Eld's deer; red pandas; cheetahs; and clouded leopards.

I arrived yesterday after driving from Whitefish, MT, to Houston, TX. The job offer came three weeks ago, so the whole process has been rather fast. I miss Montana and Bobbie already! As of when I left, we had yet to catch either of the two bobcats with the failed collars. This week, however, Bobbie has managed to catch a few more bears in her traps, so the excitement in Flathead National Forest never ends.

Training starts tomorrow- wish me luck!

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Interesting Video

I dreamt last night I was at a wildlife sanctuary that housed rescued lions. In the dream, a small group of people entered the enclosure containing one lion and two lionesses. I was one of the people in the group. The entire dream consisted of this small group trying to not get bitten by these lions. Unfortunately, the male lion kept coming up to me and rubbing his heavy mane along my midsection, repeatedly mouthing my arms and legs in the way that small puppies do when they are teething. I spent the entire dream terrified that this lion was going to do what he was made to do: eat meat. Photographers were nearby trying to capture these moments in "conservation." While I often wake up wondering what the heck is going on in my subconscious, this dream was such a healthy reminder that although I love cats, I would be scared out of my mind to force shared space with one. That's just not smart! When I came across the following over coffee this morning, I couldn't have found a better example of why captive animals need respect, too!

I first saw this video courtesy of Big Cat Rescue, a wildlife sanctuary in Tampa, Florida. While I recognize that the benefit was for tigers and some sort of conservation, the message sent through this video does not positively support tiger conservation or accurate tiger behavior. I want to share it because there are so many things going wrong!  Foremost, it is not a tiger attack. This tiger, who was already clearly overstimulated and showing signs of stress, is very excited about the cologne the man is wearing and is trying to bask in the scent. Second, why did said man see fit to wrap his arms around a tiger's neck? Thirdly (that is actually a word!), the tiger should not have had the opportunity to get close to anyone. And finally, what the hell was a tiger doing at a fundraiser? Even if you don't know tiger behavior, it is easy to imagine how very quickly the situation could have gone awry and that man would have been killed. Such irresponsible tiger promotion! Both parties are very lucky, as the animal probably would have been destroyed for mauling a human, and well, the guy's luck is pretty self-explanatory.


Tiger Attacks At Fundraiser!

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Trapping Bobcats

In light of the new and exciting information that two of our bobcats were not dead, we have instead had to deal with two collars failing instead of bobcats... meaning that we have to trap two bobcats in 250,000 acres of national forest in order to remove and replace said collars. Where is an easy button when you need it?! Luckily (relatively speaking, that is), we've been able to follow the bobcats via telemetry to get an idea of their whereabouts. After following M6 around for three days on foot, the obvious decision from that point onward was to only set a trap when we determined what area the cat was hanging out in. The collars send a retrieval signal (which sounds dangerously like a mortality signal... thanks fine print manual) 24/7 once the collar battery fails, so really we only have a small window of time to collect the collar. If the battery dies completely, no more signal and our cat is as unknown as it was before being collared.

For the past few weeks we've been setting and checking traps. Three of the six traps set were collapsible, similar to the have-a-heart design and non-fatal. The other three were much larger, weighing almost forty pounds and hand-built by Bobbie. The traps are double-wired, and this past winter one of her bobcats chewed through the wire. These traps take quite a beating, as the cats basically ping-pong about inside the trap once the gate slams shut. In winter, when the bears were hibernating, Bobbie used meat as a lure. One bobcat, and the largest of the collared cats, was caught twelve times this past winter because he learned that Bobbie wasn't going to hurt him and that he could get a free meal each time he went into the trap. In one case, this cat ate almost fifteen pounds of deer meat in a night! The cat weighs thirty five pounds (which is rather large for a bobcat)! That would be like me eating fifty pounds of meat... okay, I'm totally lying about my weight, but that's a lot of food. Now that it's summer, the bears are out and about, and meat in a trap is no longer an option. Bears are more opportunistically carnivorous, but they do enjoy a bit (or a lot) of meat now and then. Since we don't have any bear-proof traps, using meat would mean certain death for the traps, a danger to us, and no bobcat in our traps. We decided to trap M5 first, and instead of meat used the always delightful scent lures. These little glass bottles contain all that is disgusting to the human nose, and all of it is au naturale. Be it skunk musk, bobcat scent glands, salmon oil, or the mysterious lure No. 2 (very popular amongst cats), a drop rubbed on the base of a tree- bobcat height- will attract all sorts of wildlife just dying to get a better whiff. Once we set traps, I traipsed about animal trails making a scent trail for our nearby bobcat to follow. Curiosity always killed the cat, so the scent lures are intended to lead the animal within site of the trap. We also hung blank CD's from tree branches to attract the curious cats ("oooooh, shinyyyy"), and we used salmon oil only inside the trap to provide incentive to enter the trap. Should the animal apply pressure with his paw, the door slams and the cat is secure until we arrive. The traps were covered with branches to shield the animal from weather or human eye, and we began to check the traps every day.

Checking for traps is tedious and always a waiting game. The animal may move from the area, be too wary of the trap, or wait several days before considering approaching the foreign object. Or, if he's been trapped before, like ours, he could be trap shy. Since it's summer, we've had to be extremely careful of bears being in or around the traps when we approach them. I was nervous on the first day checking traps! I felt a little like Chuck Norris with my hand on the trigger of my bear spray as we climbed into the trees toward traps. All of my bear experiences thus far have been from either the truck or with lots of trees between us with me yelling "bad bear!" Day after day, however, the traps have been empty. We were extra careful in setting the traps: we wired them to trees so nothing could carry them off; we hid them from roads but in areas open enough that we might see anything dangerous as we approached; and most importantly, we did not get any of the scent lures on our hands! Still, wildlife is wild and nothing is predictable.

The day we set our fourth trap, there was either a moose or a bear nearby in the woods interested in our work, though lots of yelling rendered the stranger silent. Walking down animal trails can be quite unnerving since everything uses them. I have substantially freaked myself out while setting traps because I've walked quite a bit away from Bobbie to mark trails, where strangers lurk. Thinking like a bobcat requires a lower sense of balance, and being low to the ground and having the hairs on the back of your neck stand up is truly a wild feeling! Twice I very seriously felt like something was watching me, and not a hare or a squirrel. Could have been a mountain lion, a baby moose, or a bear. This day, and one other, I'm comfortable not knowing. After returning from the trail and humming quite loudly to myself, I suddenly came face to face with a grouse. The silly little bird had somehow gotten between Bobbie and I undetected and was stupidly walking about like the chickens I grew up laughing at. To make a very long story short, we ended up chasing that grouse (what bear wants to eat a grouse?), and I am so happy that no one was there to film it, because the grouse won 2:1. We did, however, use some donated feathers for our trap, and confirmed with the squirrels that we are insane with our hysterical laughter and tripping over trees. This very trap was to hold some excitement in the coming days.

I am so angry that I was not actually here for this. This past Saturday was the first and only day all season I have missed. I woke with a terrible migraine and it rendered me totally useless. Traps have to be checked, so Bobbie ventured out this past weekend to check traps. When she got to the trap with the grouse feathers, she noticed the trap door was closed. Checking for M5's signal and not finding it, she assumed there was another bobcat in the trap, as all was silent. The trap was well covered so she could see nothing as she approached the trap. Bobbie was ten feet from the trap when it exploded into the air, leaping from the ground as if alive and being thrown over the saplings. Inside the larger trap burst a very frantic black bear, blasting at lightning speed past Bobbie and off into the trees, hollering the whole time like a cub though it was a young adult. Bobbie says she basically levitated back to the truck, only emerging to check out the trap after she had relearned how to breath from inside the vehicle. When we both returned the next day to collect the trap, I could see where the bear had broken through both sets of wire as well as snapping the heavy pvc like a twig. Good thing he was the more frightened of the two! We are fairly certain it was the yearling cub we saw at the beginning of July (the one standing up in the picture in a previous posting). Either way, it most certainly was not a bobcat, and I most certainly am still disgruntled that I missed the excitement!

To date, we have still not trapped either of the sneaksy, tricksy little cats. However, the Montana field season has been nothing short of exhilarating!