|
Oct 14 2022 - By Reese Embree, Wildlife Projects Assistant My name is Reese Embree and I am working as a Summer Cougar Technician for the Southern BC Cougar Project. I grew up in Calgary, where I first ended up falling in love with the outdoors at a summer camp in the Kananaskis. Besides just spending time outdoors, I enjoy hiking, paddleboarding, and any sort of arts and crafts. I am currently working towards my undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UBC Okanagan. I have been eager to get involved with wildlife biology and feel extremely fortunate to have landed my first field technician job with this project. Working as a Cougar Technician means that we go out to investigate cluster points formed by the cougars’ GPS collars. As a first time field tech I was excited to get started, put my nerves to the side, and learn how to become a pro cluster site investigator. A significant portion of our day is spent driving out to the sites which are mostly located across the Okanagan or in Boundary Country. We use active logging and forest service roads to get as close as we can before we have to hike in. Our backroads map helps us determine which roads to use to get to the site, but it’s never that easy. Oftentimes we’ll discover the road deactivated, overgrown or maybe even washed out by a river. So it’s useful to note a backup plan and probably a backup plan for the backup plan too. But even the existing roads can be in pretty rough condition. This was a bit nerve wracking for me as I had no experience driving on roads like these, but I was ready to step out of my comfort zone and figure it out! I remember a particularly stressful drive on our camping trip in Princeton. The road we needed to get back to the campsite on the first day was quite tight with logs jutting out on either side, often giving us just about an inch of room on either side of the truck. Although I was stressed, I was impressed with myself for managing to drive this road. But that slight satisfaction ended quickly when about halfway through the road was washed out by a river. I now had to drive this road back to find another route (*sigh*). This is where having many backup options comes in handy because it seems we had to exhaust all our other options before we found the longest (but doable!) detour route to get us back to the campsite. Even though I’m no pro, I’ve learned how important good communication and confidence is for navigating tricky backroads. Once we’ve driven as close as we can and hiked our way to the cluster point, it’s time to start investigating the area. Our first priority is to discover if a kill was made. These carcasses can get pretty funky in the summer heat, especially when they’ve hit the sweet spot of 1-2 weeks old. It’s the perfect length of time to fill the forest air with their stench and accumulate what seems like an infinite source of maggots. Before starting the job, I knew to expect some pretty gross carcasses. But imagining what something may look like is a lot different then experiencing it. You forget to think about how all these things come together; the smell filling the air, the flys smacking against your face and of course the squirming layer of maggots you’re cutting through. Recently Emily and I had walked into what I would deem the nastiest kill of the summer. We smelled the animal for about 20 minutes before we ended up finding, not one, but two mule deer carcasses. At this point the carcasses were about 50% deer and 50% maggots. Now I had to cut out the lower jaw and femur of both the deer to take back to the lab for prey health and age analysis. Seeing and touching all the maggots combined with the smell definitely was enough to gross me out. But with a good mixture of laughing and saying “Omg there’s so many maggots” every couple of minutes, I managed to collect all our samples. While it does win the award for nastiest site of the summer, it was still a very interesting site to investigate and gave me some good videos to gross out my friends with. This summer has allowed me to step out of my comfort and discover all the badass things I am capable of. I’m so grateful to work on such an interesting project and start getting experience in the world of wildlife biology. I have gained so much experience and practical skills I can take with me to future field technician jobs. I’m excited to continue my education in this field and plan to pursue my own research in the future.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The authors are Southern BC Cougar Project team members & volunteers. Past Blog Entries
September 2023
|