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By Mariah Mueller, Winter Cougar Technician April 3rd, 2022 My name is Mariah, and I am a Winter Cougar Technician for the Southern BC Cougar Project. I have recently graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia with a BSc in Wildlife and Fisheries. I am passionate about wildlife conservation and love being able to work outside everyday, so I feel very fortunate to have landed this job. Field days can be very long and involve some difficult weather conditions, however they never get old because you always find something different and exciting! As a winter field technician, my main job is to investigate cougar kill sites and collect data about the habitat, prey species and any scavengers. We can tell when a cougar has likely made a kill by monitoring its movements using GPS collars. When a cougar has been hanging out in a small area for a few days or longer, then it is likely feeding on a kill it has made. That is when my field partner Kirstyn and I head in to investigate. It is kind of like a scavenger hunt because you don’t know what you will find, or if you will find anything at all. A typical day for us usually starts by sunrise, as we hop in our truck with our trailer and head out. We unload our snowmobiles, strap on all of our gear, and hope that the snowmobiles start with a few tugs on the pull chord. We snowmobile as close as we can to the cougar kill sites, and snowshoe the rest of the way. Sometimes this is a short 200m walk through the forest and some days it is a few kilometers up a steep hill. Once we get to the site, we start looking around for any signs that can tell us what the cougar was doing there. If it hasn’t snowed before we get there, we usually find fresh cougar tracks that will lead us right to their kill, bed site and latrine. It is a bit trickier if we don’t get to a kill right away and the tracks are melted out or covered. Sometimes a kill can be hard to spot at first because cougars like to cache their meal under cover below a tree or blowdown, burying and covering it with snow, hair or debris to help conceal it Once we find a kill, we take a few samples including cougar hair from its bed site or tracks, cougar scat for possible dietary analysis, prey hair, prey jawbone for aging, and prey long bones for determining the health of the prey targeted. If the kill is still fresh with lots of meat left on it, we set up a camera so we can detect any scavengers feeding on cougar kills (such as eagles, coyotes, wolves, bears, bobcat). My favourite part is that you never know what you are going to get when you hike in. We have been to some sites where we couldn’t even find a track, as if the cougar was never there, or some where just a deer hair mat was left behind and everything else has been consumed or scavenged. We have also seen some really cool things, including a mule deer that had been recently killed with just the cavity opened up and the organs consumed. We also found a 90m drag line in the snow down a steep hill to where a deer was finally cached. We even found an elk, an old moose and 2 coyote kills. Winter conditions have brought challenges that I have not experienced during my previous summer jobs. I have learned that tasks require much more time than they would in the summer, dealing with the trailer, sleds and deep snow. Conducting remote field work in the winter requires a lot of planning and problem solving. This has made me realize the importance of teamwork, especially working in such a small team of usually just two people. We have been in situations where we are a long drive, snowmobile ride or walk away from home, when a problem arises. We could ask for help on the in reach and wait hours for someone to help us, walk out in the dark, or try to solve the problem ourselves. We have learned to never leave without a shovel, spark plugs, or a headlamp in case things take longer than expected. Equipment inevitably breaks down and needs new parts over time, so we have had the opportunity to learn some basic sled maintenance and have spent some time on youtube watching things like “how to adjust the carburetor” or “changing sled belts”. Most of the time we are out of service and just have to give it our best shot. One day our sled wouldn’t start so we just looked at all the parts and found that a wire had broke loose- we reconnected it and our sled fired right back up! Another time, Siobhan had to tow Kirstyn’s sled out (luckily, we have 2 and usually both don’t break down at once). Working in snowy, icy conditions means you are bound to get stuck at one point or another. As springtime approaches, we are finding the backroads are melting and are either muddy or very icy, so the chains have definitely come in handy.
I am grateful to have had the experience of exploring the Okanagan while learning new field skills and participating in data collection for an amazing project. I aspire to pursue a career in wildlife management based on research. I hope to start a masters degree in the next few years to help develop these skills. I am open to working on different species but have a particular interest in spatial ecology and wildlife diseases. In the meantime, I hope to work as a technician on different research projects to gain experiences with different wildlife species and issues. I am excited to see where this takes me!
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The authors are Southern BC Cougar Project team members & volunteers. Past Blog Entries
September 2023
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