Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, writes from Albany, where he is comparing the behavior of fishers in urban and wild settings.
The numbers are in:
We found higher diversity and overall higher activity of animals in our camera traps set in urban forests than in those out in the wild areas. The objective of this study was to compare the potential prey communities that fishers might encounter in these two environments. Could fishers be lured into these areas by abundant prey? Now we know that, yes, this could be part of the explanation (i.e. hypothesis not rejected).
This part of our project was headed up by Joseph Chase, a student from Tech Valley High School. He came to us offering one month of work to meet his school’s requirement of “project-based learning.” This was good timing, as we were just about to start our camera trap survey. We put him on this project, and he did a great job, not only setting and collecting cameras at the various GPS points we gave him, but also entering the data into our database and doing some preliminary comparisons.
I love camera traps because they are easy to use, and it is fun to look at the results. Lock a camera to a tree, write down the GPS coordinates, and walk away for a few weeks. Read more…