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By Brooklyn Maher, Cougar Technician September 19th 2021 My name is Brooklyn Maher, I recently graduated with a B.Sc. in Zoology and am starting my Masters degree in Biology this fall at UBC Okanagan. Wildlife and conservation have always been my passion, so I felt very lucky to spend my summer as a cougar technician for the Southern BC Cougar Project. One of the main tasks of my job this summer was locating radio-collared cougars. We track cougars while hiking to their kill sites, locating those whose collars fail to transmit regularly, or while visiting a den site. Each collar has a VHF frequency that we detect using telemetry equipment. The range of telemetry equipment depends on the terrain and the elevation from which we scan with our antenna, so we would drive to different areas within a cougar’s home range hoping to pick up a signal. Under optimal conditions a signal can be picked up from as much as 25 kilometers away. If the collar is updating normally, the sound is a medium pitch beeping noise. If a cougar is close (within 100 m), we can hear the beeping sound when turning the gain on the receiver almost all the way down. Long scanning days were filled with the company of my fellow technicians, podcasts, music, and an abundance of coffee as we travelled roads and stopped along intervals to bring out the telemetry set and listened for beeping. I will be the first to admit that we had a few days where we were concerned that our telemetry receivers may be broken due to the lack of beeping that we were desperately hoping to hear. Even though we know the boundaries of each cougar’s territory, it can be very difficult to locate and pinpoint the individual. High points and open areas like the tops of mountains and hills provide great vantage points for scanning and picking up signals. On the other hand, it can be very difficult to pick up a signal if the cougar is in a sheltered area like a valley bottom or under debris such as fallen trees. Our team spent many hours and even days searching through cougar territories trying to track down certain individuals, and we often heard radio-silence. It turns out that cougars are hard to find! However, we did not always strike out and when those faint little beeps did ring through the receivers, we were very excited! A home range is an area where an animal lives, searching for resources, food, and mates. Many species have different winter and summer home ranges. While the summer and winter home ranges of cougars are not entirely separate, they do have concentrated summer and winter areas. In the Okanagan, these areas potentially coincide with the movement of their main prey, Mule deer. Male cougars have larger home ranges on average at 150 to 700 km2 than female cougars whose home ranges vary from 31 to 300 km2 on average (Logan & Sweanor, 2010). Males often overlap with the home ranges of multiple females for breeding purposes. Factors such as habitat quality, abundance of prey and territory vacancy all impact where and how large the home range of a cougar may be. Kittens will stay with their mothers for a year or two after birth before heading off on their own. Male offspring tend to disperse further away from their mothers (on average 49- 483 km) once they have matured in search of their own territory and females to breed with (Laundré & Hernandez, 2003). Female offspring often establish home ranges close to their mothers. Using GPS-data and remote cameras, we have detected several mother-daughter pairs occasionally sharing meals and interacting with each other. For me, seeing the radio-collar data display home ranges of our collared cougars was very interesting and illustrated a real-life concept that I have spent time learning about in my biology degree. While becoming a cougar tracker protégé, I have also learned many other new skills on the project that I will use in my future education and career goals. Our team spent a day in the lab processing the samples of bones, teeth, and hair which we had collected over the summer and dried bone marrow as an indication of prey health. We were also given the opportunity to learn how to correctly use and operate a dart gun for sedating live animals. While I had previous experience using and operating trail cameras, I quickly learned the importance of installing bear guards for baited camera studies and enjoyed learning how to use Timelapse II to classify images. While my masters will not involve the capture of live animals, I will be conducting camera trap surveys and the experience I gained this summer has directly impacted how I plan to conduct my own research.
Field work isn't always easy but the data that I helped to collect this summer will be analyzed to better understand BC’s cougar populations. It was amazing to work on a project examining so many aspects of cougar ecology, and I hope to one day to put my new skills to use and land a full-time job in wildlife conservation and management.
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Authors
The authors are Southern BC Cougar Project team members & volunteers. Past Blog Entries
September 2023
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