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By Siobhan Darlington, PhD student & Project Coordinator November 15th 2020 The global pandemic has resulted in mass lay-offs to seasonal employees in the environmental sector and the cancellation of many field-based wildlife projects in 2020. So what is it like doing field work during a global pandemic? Have cougars changed their behaviour with less people around? What do cougars eat in the summer? You have questions, and I have some preliminary answers. We began the Southern BC Cougar project in December 2019, several months before the pandemic spread to British Columbia. My summer was filled by many 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 would refresh my screen 20 times per day, just to see if a single new location was transmitted. The few times I would leave my house, I would check them on my phone. I love watching where cougars go and seeing how much ground they can cover travelling across mountainous terrain in a single day. Each cougar collar that we deploy transmits a GPS location to satellites once every 2 hours, and when a cougar kills large prey it will stay in one spot from 1-10 days consuming its meal. We can identify potential cougar kills by first identifying “clusters” of locations that are transmitted. I kept a close eye on the formation of clusters to send our two summer technicians Kieran and Kayla in the field to investigate and learn what the cougars have been eating. Interestingly, the pandemic did not appear to shift cougar behaviour with the reduction of human activity in towns and the outdoors. The only cougars that came closer to towns during the pandemic were juveniles on dispersal. This is normal for cougars because they are trying to find a new territory to establish when they leave their mothers. I did notice that the backcountry was filled with campers, and people were coming closer to our resident cougars because provincial parks were closed. We won’t know the true impact of the pandemic on cougar behaviour and human-cougar interactions until we have collected several more years of data. Conducting field work during a global pandemic requires much more planning than home office work. Fortunately for my team, we were able to proceed with our summer field work with a set of protocols in place to protect us and the cougars from covid-19. Cougars can contract covid-19, and little is known regarding the transmission rates and effects in the population. Therefore, all of our team members wear masks while handling them, spending time indoors, in the trucks, and any other occasion where we had to be closer than 6 ft apart. We weren’t able to include volunteers in the field this summer due to concerns working with an expanded bubble, though we hope to provide other covid-19 friendly opportunities for involvement. Visiting cougar kills in the summer was interesting and different from the winter. Cougars increase their kill rates in summer - meaning they kill more animals per week - but I have yet to run the statistics on this. Carcasses were sometimes not entirely consumed, with only the organs eaten, and many of these were juveniles from this year’s crop of baby deer, moose, and elk. Black bears scavenged almost every kill that we monitored and so did coyotes, turkey vultures, and ravens. Maggots take over the carcass in the summer heat very quickly, so the cougars don’t stay as long on a kill compared to the winter because the meat doesn’t last. Not all of our cluster sites are actually kills. So far, two of our adult females have given birth to a litter of kittens. We set up cameras to monitor them at the dens which consist of pile of woody debris or thick vegetation. A month after they are born, we ear-tag, weigh, measure, and sex kittens to collect valuable data on their health and survival. The kittens are very spotty at this age, with paws far too large for their body size. They are large enough to wear an ear-tag but small enough that we can (somewhat) easily handle them.
To date we have visited 415 cluster sites on the project and we found kills at about 60% of those. I have noticed that the cougars are killing more bucks in the fall than in the springtime, likely because male mule deer come down from higher elevations to mate. This fall, I am still at my desk but periodically visiting kills and grabbing cameras. Watching the camera footage of the kittens helps me get through those pesky office days in my house! I look forward to our second winter field season, despite warnings that this will be the coldest, snowiest winter in 30 years. We’ve already had a few snow days this month, and I’m here for it. No matter the challenges, I am grateful to be researching such interesting predators. These are challenging times, but we are making the most of them!
38 Comments
Andrew Harcombe
11/17/2020 04:49:25 pm
Where is the mother while you are handling the kittens?
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Siobhan Darlington
7/3/2021 10:43:25 am
The mother moves a few hundred metres away from the den while we process the kittens and waits for us to leave. We monitor her return from her GPS collar data and also the cameras we set up to measure any potential impact our presence may have.
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Authors
The authors are Southern BC Cougar Project team members & volunteers. Past Blog Entries
September 2023
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