2024 Wildlife Highlights

Non-invasive Monitoring

Here you can get a really clear look at how effective this method is for getting DNA from bears without them even realizing they're giving us a sample. The DNA is in the hair follicle – the little bulb at the base of a hair.

If we had to choose, we'd prefer the bears go under rather than over the wire because hair from the shoulder often gives a good, consistent sample. But tummy hair from when a bear goes over can still be used. We've experimented with different heights of wire. Too high and smaller bears may go under without leaving a sample. Too low and the big bears can clear it too easily. 50cm high is about perfect.

Cougar and Her Kits

Juvenile cougars stay with their mother for one or two years. They leave when their mother is ready to breed again so they aren't killed by adult males.

Puma, panther, cougar, catamount, mountain lion – is there a difference? They are all names for the Puma concolor species, but depending on who you ask, some of them might be considered different subspecies such as the Andean Mountain Lion, the Florida Panther, or the North American Cougar.

Bear Family Party

This is an example of where it is extremely useful to have a trail camera at each site so we can verify which barbs have hair tufts from different individuals. This lets us submit better samples to the lab for DNA analysis.

Plus, even if the lab results are inconclusive, we'll still know that this female had 3 cubs with her, and if they show up at another site, we'll have another chance of getting a conclusive ID for each bear.

Want to know why we're collecting hair? More info  here .

Hare Snags

Although trail cameras allow us to collect some very useful information, they also record a lot of images that we have to sift through. It takes a lot of time to classify and organize the photos and videos. To illustrate the volume, here's a time lapse from one site, where nothing showed up for a few months, except hares.

Comparing Coyote and Wolf

You can get a good sense of the difference in size between a coyote and a wolf in this video. Wolf paw prints are about twice the size of a coyote's. Besides being shorter and leaner, the coyote has pointy, almost fox-like features vs. the wolf's more rounded face and ears.

Moose Family

Moose are the largest member of the deer family in the world, and while most predators will avoid a healthy adult moose, their calves are a common spring food source for bears.

In 2024, we launched a 5-part moose research project that looks at population changes, habitat, human influences, and testing new methods for monitoring. Check it out  here .

Rub Trees

Bears like to rub on trees. They might be leaving chemical messages for other bears or maybe just having a good scratch. Whatever the reason, we can use this behaviour to our advantage by putting some barbed wire and scent lure on trees to collect hair from animals that are wary of our normal lure sites.

Rub tree hair collection has been used in other bear population surveys, such as one in  2014 in the south of Jasper National Park . We're trying both the classic brush pile in a barbed wire corral and lured rub trees.

Rub Trees Continued

Here's a great example of a grizzly using a rub tree. What do you think – is it scent marking or scratching? Trying to shake a squirrel out of the tree top? It's possible we got a sample from this interaction, either from a barb down by its butt, or even a tuft of hair wedged in the bark.

Sometimes people ask if the barbed wire could hurt them. Not likely. Bears have extremely tough skin and thick fur. We've even seen cubs deliberately rubbing on wire, seemingly getting a lot of enjoyment out of the back scratch, and we've never seen blood or tissue on a barb.

Black Bear Gets the Message

Did you guess back scratch or marking for the last one? Whatever the grizzly's intention, this black bear seems to be interested in finding out all about who was there 10 days earlier.

Bears have a fantastic sense of smell, which they use for finding (or sometimes avoiding!) each other. But they mainly use it to find the different foods they eat throughout the summer.

Wolverine

It's rare to see wolverines, so it's no surprise that information on their populations in Alberta is sparse. But if you're lucky enough to spot them or their sign, you can help! Submit your observation to  Wolverine Watch , a group filling in some of those data gaps.

The Lynx and the Hare

These two animals make up one of the classic predator-prey case studies in population ecology. A boom in the number of hares causes a boom in the number of lynx, which causes a drop in the hare population, which causes a crash in the lynx population, which causes a boom in the hare population...

It's the song that never ends!

Revisiting Sites

We try to return to each hair snag site every couple weeks for two reasons. First, we want to collect the hair while it's fresh and before it blows away or gets mixed up with the hair of another visiting bear. Second, bears like to absolutely obliterate the scent lure piles and we need to refresh them.

We're using a bunch of different lures to see what is the most effective at attracting bears to our sites. They all smell less strongly after a few weeks, especially if there's been rain. However, some lures, like the rotten cow blood, still reek when we come back.

American Marten

This excellent little climber is at home in the mature pine forests of the foothills where it can find plenty of bird nests and rodents to feed on.

In another project, we're learning that they can also use other types of habitat. Read about that  here .

Fisher

The fisher is the larger, darker cousin of the marten, and although it can certainly climb trees, it seems to spend more time on the ground where it hunts. Like many in the weasel family, they take prey far larger than themselves. They eat squirrels and birds, but also trickier prey such as porcupines, foxes, even deer fawns and lynx.

Wild Horses

The Alberta Government estimates that there are well over 1,000 feral horses in the east slopes south of the Brazeau River.

This site is between Sundre and the Ya Ha Tinda. Both these areas have a long history with domestic horses: Parks Canada has been raising horses for their backcountry wardens at Ya Ha Tinda for over 100 years!

Comparing Bear Sizes

A grizzly and a black bear walk in at exactly the same spot at this site, giving us a really good comparison of their sizes. The barbed wire strand is about 50cm high, by the way.

Aside from the dramatic difference in bulk, you can also get a really good look at their profiles. The grizzly bear has the huge shoulder hump, swollen with digging muscles. The top of its face is curved, unlike the straight muzzle of the black bear.

Buck

Antlers are pretty cool. Unlike a sheep's horn, which is made of keratin like a hoof or your finger nails, antlers are made of living bone tissue. Now we're wondering... does this count as an exoskeleton?

In the spring and summer, deer antlers are covered in soft tissue called velvet, that supplies the antlers with blood and nutrients to support growth. In the fall, when the antlers are no longer growing, this dries out and the deer rub it off.

Wolf

Years ago, we had  a project  where we'd fly out to caribou mortalities to try to determine cause of death. The goal was to understand the threats to their populations. The field team could usually figure out what predator had been involved by looking at the carcass.

Cougars are very neat eaters and if the prey is small enough, they might try to haul it into a tree. Bears often try to bury the carcass when they've had their fill, to save the rest for later. But the most obvious kills are when a wolf pack gets at it: bones and giblets scattered everywhere.

The biggest challenge was when multiple predators had been to a kill site. It was tough to tell which was the predator and which were scavengers who came later.