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September 11th 2023 By Ashley Giovaninni - Hodges lab Honours student & WiRE lab Wildlife Projects Assistant Hey, my name is Ashley Giovannini. I’m an undergraduate student majoring in Biology at UBCO and I’m very passionate about sharing science through photography. I hope to build a career as a scientific photographer helping researchers present their work to the public. I joined the Southern BC Cougar Project team as an Honours Student working with Dr. Karen Hodges in September 2022. My research topic involved analyzing the behaviours, presence, and abundance of scavenging birds using camera trap data from fresh cougar-kills. This research gave me the opportunity to get a sense of what it’s like working with camera data and transitioned into a position expanding my work into a full manuscript for publication. Before I could finalize the manuscript, I had to dive back into the data and incorporate another year of detections and prepare it for statistical analysis. It was daunting to say the least. Using the software program R studio for the first time outside of a biostats class, I had to figure out how to group images together by time, check for data entry errors, and to make sure I wasn’t accidentally deleting lines of data that I needed. I spent hours upon hours trying to get it right. Then, when I finally made it to a point where it looked like things were starting to come together, I realized I had grouped my data incorrectly and I needed to start all over again from step 1. I was deeply humbled by the process of cleaning the data, but man did I jump for joy when I finally got it right and I could make my first graph. I was on to data exploration. It was so cool to make graphs that showed me how bird activity changed based on the differences in location and time of year. The predominant scavengers I found to be scavenging at carcasses are Raven, Turkey Vulture, Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle, Black-Billed Magpie, and Canada Jay. I was shocked to observe the extent that Ravens scavenge at cougar-killed carcasses. They were at almost every carcass observed during the study and although they spent most of their time in singles or pairs, there were many instances where more than 10 ravens would congregate at the carcass to scavenge. I think it’s a case of power in numbers. No other scavenger would go near the carcass when that many ravens were around, except on the odd occasion a very confident eagle. But even then, the eagle wouldn’t scare the ravens away, it would have to share the resources with them. Another interesting interaction I saw when analyzing this data was that whenever a Black-Billed Magpie showed up to a carcass, it was almost always followed by a coyote. I haven’t been able to dig deep into the reason for this observation yet, but I can’t wait to examine the interaction better in the next few months. Based on the data exploration that I have conducted thus far, season seems to be an important factor that influences scavenger community dynamics. For example, the seasonal arrival of Turkey Vultures in spring shifts the dominant avian scavenger from ravens in winter to vultures. Bald Eagles were not seen scavenging during autumn, which may correlate with the salmon run, a rich resource for eagles that time of year. Birds occur in the lowest number on carcasses in the dead of winter when snow fall is heaviest. This is likely because the meat is frozen and buried in snow, so birds can’t access the meat. However, when winter transitions to spring, the amount of scavenging from birds increases.
Honestly, I never thought I would really enjoy spending my time digging through data and writing code to analyse it. I always believed that I only wanted to do field work when it came to research, and that conducting analyses would feel too much like a chore, but I was wrong. I still prefer being outside, who doesn’t, but I really enjoy manipulating data and producing something meaningful. It’s so exciting to finally get a piece of code you’ve been stuck on to finally work, to be able to see the data come to life in front of your eyes, to read what other scientists have found and compare it to your work, and to see that the data you have is showing you something new about the system you are studying. This work isn’t easy, but man is it worth it. I’m so grateful for Siobhan, Dr. Hodges, and Dr. Ford for giving me these opportunities with the Southern BC Cougar Project and guiding me through all these learning curves. Soon we will publish the results of the data I’ve been working with, and everyone will get to see some of the amazing systems that make up the wilderness that surrounds us here in the Okanagan.
1 Comment
Duncan Gallacher
9/11/2023 02:23:38 pm
Ashley works with me at Jealous Fruits. It's very interesting to see pictures and data of the project she has been telling me about for the last 2 years. Not only are these projects interesting, they provide background for research which impacts all of us.
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Authors
The authors are Southern BC Cougar Project team members & volunteers. Past Blog Entries
September 2023
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