Season 4
Episode 7
Does Hiking Impact Wildlife? Check the Camera
Transcript
Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
Michael Faist: My parents met working at a camera store, so we always had a lot of camera gear around the house. But when I was 13, my parents gave me my very first DSLR with a big chunky frame and a zoom lens. I had a tiny point-and-shoot camera before that, but I was convinced something that could fit in my pocket would not be enough camera for our family vacation to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
Michael: The Rockies were unlike anything I'd ever seen growing up in the Midwest. And armed with my new camera, I took pictures of everything. The view from every scenic pull out, every wildflower. Photogenic cloud or notably large pinecone. But one picture from that trip that stands out in my memory is a photo I took of a moose. The first moose I'd ever seen. Neck deep in a lake holding its massive antlers above the water as it swam from one side to the other.
Michael: It was gone within a few minutes, and the photo, looking back on it, wasn't all that impressive. But I think about that moose often as one of the first experiences I had with a wild animal. At least one bigger than a squirrel. It kickstarted a fascination I still have with the natural world and an appreciation of the power the photography has to capture moments like this. Wild animals in the wild.
Michael: It's no wonder that cameras are one of the most common accessories you see around Glacier today. They are the lens, pun intended, through which many of us see and remember national parks. But cameras are also increasingly being used by scientists to study the same animals us visitors feel lucky to see especially remote cameras which trigger when they sense movement. These "camera traps," as they're called, can reveal glimpses into a side of Glacier that we can never see, how wildlife behave when there are no people around.
[Car sounds]
Michael: We are in the car.
Peri Sasnett: Where are we going?
Michael: We're driving up the road out of East Glacier that heads towards Two Medicine, looking for a camera.
Peri: And what's the camera looking for?
Michael: The camera is looking for moose. Largest member of the deer family. Very charismatic. Big noses.
Peri: I feel like charismatic is debatable.
Michael: I love moose.
Peri: I think a lot of people love moose and a lot of people think moose are one of the uglier creatures.
Michael: What? How could you think Moose are ugly?
Peri: I'm not saying I think that, but I've heard people say that.
Michael: Gangly? Yes. Ugly? No!
Peri: Weird little dewlap thing dangling.
Michael: [Laughs] It's charming!
[Theme music fades in.]
Peri: Some say charming.
Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Michael.
Michael: In this episode, we're zooming in on two different animals one big and one small, one you may have seen and one you may have never heard of. They'll help us understand the increasing use of cameras in the field of wildlife biology and reveal that even if you leave no trace, you have a bigger impact on the natural world than you might think.
[Car sounds]
Michael: We're turning just before the road to the Two Med entrance. Going off the pavement.
Michael: Peri and I went out for a day to check on a wildlife camera with Landon McGee.
Landon Magee: Ah, yeah, so my name's Landon Magee. I'm a Master's student at the University of Montana in the Wildlife Biology program. I'm an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe.
Michael: We were joined by one of Landon's technicians, Ethan Rowe. The two of them are working for Blackfeet Nation Fish and Wildlife, leading a moose study on the Blackfeet reservation and the eastern portion of Glacier National Park.
Landon: You know, they love kind of where areas people call them "swamp donkeys" just because they kind of similar by and they like to hang out in the swamps and wade through the ponds and eat kind of some aquatic vegetation can find them long stream bottoms, creek bottoms, river bottoms...
Michael: And Landon, who has been placing cameras all over the place this year, was nice enough to take me and Peri to the easiest-to-reach camera in his whole study.
Landon: Yeah, so we're just going to head about 50 yards into this big aspen stand here.
Michael: [to Landon] Great, we'll follow your lead.
Peri: Sweet! I mean, this looks like moose habitat.
Landon: Yeah.
Michael: Now I find moose to be really interesting and not even slightly ugly. As the second largest mammals in North America, they're really strong. Bull Moose's iconic antlers can grow up to five feet across, and they use those antlers to fight over female moose.
[Grunting moose sounds and clattering antlers.]
Michael: Which is a great excuse to remind folks to stay 25 yards away from moose and other non-predator wildlife in the park.
Landon: Like any other animal. Give them their distance, you know, just let them do what they need to. You know, it's, you know, the added stress of people trying to get up close just puts more stress on them that they don't really need.
Michael: But at the same time, moose are seen as gentle giants. We see them as being so friendly that they usually have Canadian accents in movies like the Disney movie, "Brother Bear.".
[Clip from movie begins playing.]
Brother Bear Film Clip: "Oh, look, I am sorry. If I was driving this never would have happened, eh. You never let me drive you never let me do nothing. Oh, trample off, eh! I said I was sorry. Let it go. I can't believe you totaled a mammoth."
[Clip from movie fades out.]
Michael: And maybe this blend of strength and friendliness can help explain why Moose are so popular. We ran a People's Choice Awards contest on Glacier's Instagram a few years ago, and moose were voted the most popular animal in the park, beating mountain goats and grizzly bears.
Michael: But despite all their charisma and their massive size, we don't actually know much of anything about how they're doing as a species around Glacier.
Landon: You know, we really didn't know what their status of the moose population was on the Reservation. And then the park hasn't done like any kind of moose study in I think somewhere close to 60 years. So they really didn't know anything about their moose population currently either. And so Blackfeet had listed it kind of as a "species of interest." And yeah, just that just I guess, snowballed into this project.
Michael: I checked. There haven't been any moose studies in the park in 60 years, but Landon's changing that. His study is measuring the moose population on the Blackfeet reservation and much of the east side of Glacier. And to do that, he placed cameras like the one we're at today throughout his study area. And all of the cameras were placed at random.
Landon: Sitting down and trying to pick, you know, 100 camera locations of where, you know, would be good spots would be very time consuming and hard to do. And of course, it introduces a lot of bias. And so having this truly random sampling allows you to get into places you thought you'd never go your whole life. I know there's, there's been a few that I've been to both summers so far.
Michael: And so we're visiting this easy to reach camera to make sure it's still working. Landon's technician, Ethan, walked us through the check up.
Ethan Rowe: When we're arming the camera, we like to put it waist-high, so it would just sit, like, somewhere right here.
Peri: That's like knee-high on a moose!
[All laugh]
Ethan: Yeah. So right now we're doing a revisit, so we're just checking up on the camera, just if the camera was still functional. We changed the memory card at all... and if we did, the I.D. Of it.
Michael: The downside of randomly distributing your cameras, though, is that while some are 50 yards off the road and easy to hike to while holding a microphone, others require miles of bushwhacking through areas with no trails. Honestly, it sounds a little heinous, but that hasn't deterred Ethan.
Ethan: And hikes are a big plus of it, you know.
Peri: Are you sure?
Ethan: I really enjoy the hike sometimes, even though I like to complain along the way. I think when I'm done with it, I really tell Landon, "I really appreciate it out here."
Michael: With these randomly placed cameras set far enough apart to avoid double counting the same moose during a certain time frame. Landon can run all the data through a computer model to estimate how many moose live here. And the data isn't just a bunch of ones and zeroes. It's pictures, which for Landon, has been fun to look through, but a lot of work.
Michael: [to Landon] With, you know, dozens of cameras out at a time, like, how many pictures do you capture over the course of a summer?
Landon: Last year, we did 100 cameras. And I think with all of those, we had over, just a little over 2 million photos.
Michael: [to Landon] 2 million!?
Landon: Yeah. Thinking about that: these cameras are set to both motion detection, (so anything that walks by, grass blowing, anything will set it off), but it also takes a picture every 15 minutes. Part of a time lapse function on the camera. So it has both of those modes going the entire summer.
Michael: [to Landon] So 2 million, how do you go through that?
Landon: A lot of time bent over at a computer.
[All laugh and drum beat music fades in.]
Michael: Blowing grass... waving branch.. blowing grass... Moose?
[Drumbeat music stops.].
Michael: He had some research assistants to help sort through these images. And some companies are even marketing A.I. tools that promise to speed up the process. But despite manually sifting through 2 million photos, Landon was excited about the results.
Landon: You know, I guess looking through the cameras last year, there was a lot more sightings than I had anticipated. We were a little worried that we weren't going to get a whole lot of moose detections just because of how, you know, just having these cameras in the middle of nowhere. And what are the chances of a moose, you know, walking by my camera in such a large area?
Michael: Landon emphasized that one of the things he loves about these photos is you get to see how Moose behave when there's no one around to watch.
Landon: One of the cooler photos or videos we had on the video cameras we had out last year was a moose calf nursing. And you could hear like the sucking noise of the calf just going to town.
Peri: Wow, that's amazing!
Landon: Yeah, it was cool. It's probably the best video I have.
Michael: This is the audio from that clip.
[Nature sounds and sucking sounds fade in.]
Michael: To paint the picture, the calf is mostly hidden by thimbleberry bushes as it reaches up to its mom. An adult female moose can easily be six feet tall and weigh 1,000 pounds, while a newborn calf weighs as much as a small dog like a corgi.
Landon: And this getting that firsthand view into, you know, what their life looks like when nobody is out here. You know, they've there's probably been some areas where they've never seen a human or a big gray box strapped to a tree. And so seeing what they do and how they interact with that, it's been pretty cool.
Michael: [to Landon] I guess, just as a baseline, like why why use cameras as a tool in the first place instead of like going out in the field and sitting around all day?
Landon: Well, I think I mean, a lot of the stuff that I'm trying to do can be accomplished with more invasive techniques like collaring, capturing, chemical immobilization, helicopter, all that, just really invasive kind of stresses animal out a lot and also costs a lot of money.
Michael: As with so many things, the biggest factor is cost. There are a lot of species deserving of study and relatively little money to go around. So you have to have a good reason to get a wildlife study funded for Landon's. It's the fact that moose hunting funds a lot of conservation work on the Blackfeet Reservation. Blackfeet Nation Fish and Game, along with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, issue a small amount of moose tags every year, permits to hunt a moose on Tribal, state or federal land. But to be clear, not in Glacier National Park.
Landon: Say, do an auction system until they bid on the tag. And I think the starting bid for moose is like $14,000. And we usually get it up to like $30, $35,000 for a moose tag. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a huge source of revenue for the department. I mean.
Michael: By better understanding the number of moose on the Blackfeet Reservation. Fish and Game can issue an appropriate number of tags without fear of harming moose populations as a whole. And on top of that, we'll also get insight into the moose in Glacier, which speaks to one of the appealing traits of camera traps. They're pretty cheap. High quality cameras are getting less expensive every year, and the only expense beyond that is the time it takes to install and remove them. Landon, Ethan and their small team can realistically study a huge area.
Landon: You know, Moose don't know political boundaries, so, you know, you're going to have moves that are going back and forth and whether you're going to get them on the reservation during your time, sampling is going to be difficult to predict. And so having cameras in the park kind of allows you to understand that transboundary movement.
Michael: Landon's work stands to help Glacier and the Blackfeet Nation manage Moose, but his study is still underway, so there's no population estimate for him to report just yet.
Landon: People always tell me that, you know, "How many moose out there?"
Peri: Let me get back to you in a couple years.
Landon: Give me two years. I'll let you know. [everyone laughs]
[Music fades in]
Michael: We'll have to stay tuned to see what Landon learns down the road. But you don't have to wait to see the results of a camera study. You just have to look to another animal.
[Music concludes]
Alissa Anderson: So they have these very specialized adaptations for living in the deep, deep powdery snow environment. I don't know. I mean, they're cats. You know, cats are kind of weird.
Michael: This is Alissa Anderson. Starting in 2019 as a grad student at the University of Montana, Alissa led a camera trap study of a mammal in Glacier that is far more elusive than moose, the Canada Lynx.
Michael: [to Alissa] Have you ever seen the lynx in person?
Alissa: I have only seen a lynx associated with a live trap for research, so I consider that to be cheating. I did work for one winter trapping for research. I walked up to the trap there just like I had one lynx that literally I think it was singing death metal to me.
[Clip of a lynx yowling]
Michael: It's rare to see any wildcat in Glacier this summer. After ten years of working and living here, I finally saw my first mountain lion. And they're four times bigger than lynx are.
Alissa: It's funny. And then you get all these tourists who go to Glacier for one day and send you these videos, and they're like, Hey, is this a lynx? I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm hike that trail 10 million times. You have no idea how lucky you are!"
Michael: But while I'd guess few park visitors have even heard of Canada Lynx, they're a really fascinating animal and they're perfectly suited to live in Glacier.
Alissa: They are a specialized cat species that has evolved to live in what we call the Boreal Forest. So, you know, mostly across Canada, Alaska. And then that Boreal Forest does reach down a little bit into the lower 48. Part of their specialization is that they specialize in eating snowshoe hare. It's the vast majority of their diet.
Michael: Lynx and their favorite food, the snowshoe hare, both have huge feet relative to their body weight, which allows them to run on top of deep snow. I found a great example of this in a 1976 documentary called "Day of the Lynx." In the clip, filmed in the winter, you see a coyote sneaking up on a snowshoe hare.
[Clip from "Day of the Lynx plays.]
Day of the Lynx narrator: "A coyote has been diligently following the trail of a snowshoe hare. It flushes, running in the direction of the big lynx."
Michael: Then you see the lynx, tall tufts of black hair on their pointed ears, comically large feet, poised and waiting.
Day of the Lynx narrator: "It can run atop the snow, unlike the coyote who breaks through the crust and travel slower. The coyote stays doggedly on the trail, but he's too late. The Lynx has made the kill.".
[Clip from "Day of the Lynx concludes and synth music plays briefly.]
Michael: Glacier has seen less and less snow over the years since the park was established. The park gets 30 fewer days each year of freezing temperatures compared to 1980, the equivalent of a month that used to be freezing cold. The now isn't. So for lynx, this cold adapted animal, climate change is a huge concern. Big enough that they were listed under the Endangered Species Act. Their threatened status encourages groups like our very own Glacier National Park Conservancy, to fund Lynx research like Alissa's.
Alissa: The main facet was what we call an occupancy survey. So where are we detecting them? What kind of areas are occupied by Lynx?
Michael: Landon is studying moose by counting them, since he's doing a population estimate. In contrast, Alissa's study wasn't designed to count lynx, but to figure out where they live, and where they don't. And she focused her cameras on park trails.
Alissa: Like a lot of carnivores have been found to use human trails You know, you have a higher probability of detecting by putting cameras on trails.
Michael: [to Alissa] They can get anywhere much faster on trail.
Alissa: Yeah. And so having cameras on trail means that you can put cameras out without using any kind of bait or lure and still have, you know, a decent probability of detecting carnivore species or these, like, more rare, elusive species.
Michael: Landon's randomly placed cameras make sense for his population estimate and works well in part because Moose are six feet tall. Lynx, on the other hand, are just two feet tall and would disappear in a lot of Glacier's brush. Focusing on trails is a great way to spot lynx. It works great for Eliza's occupancy study and helps her avoid most of the bushwhacking that Landon has to do. But she still used a lot of cameras.
Alissa: So we used 300 and, I want to say, 305 cameras for the Lynx occupancy study, four cameras per cell across the whole park, basically.
Michael: And searching through these images it wasn't just lynx she got pictures of.
Alissa: I think my favorite was porcupine. I think we got, I want to say, 13 porcupine. Which is the same number we got bobcat. We got hardly any bobcat. More porcupine than I expected.
Michael: Porcupines are another poorly understood animal in Glacier. Ever since the eighties, they've been an increasingly rare sight, and nobody's really sure why. Data from Alissa's lynx-focused work could contribute to separate research on porcupines or other species in the park.
Alissa: So we also have this big trove of data on every other species of wildlife that happens to use trails in Glacier, which is a really cool and powerful part of cameras, I think.
Michael: But of course, she also saw a lot of lynx. In total, they captured 404 images of lynx and the cats showed up on 25% of the cameras she put out throughout the park. Many images were simply lynx walking by, but others were more unique.
Alissa: We did get one set of photos of a lynx walking by with three little kittens running around in front of her with their tail sticking up and just looking cute. So that was cool. We got one photo of a, well, looks like to be a juvenile snowshoe hare of the year running in front of the camera, being chased by a lynx, which was super crazy.
Michael: [to Alissa] Oh, and I'm sure they run out of frame so you never know what happened.
Alissa: I don't know. But they were very close, like within to think of each other. So I have a feeling that, yeah, young one did not--
Michael: [to Alissa] Didn't make it.
Michael: And this study in Glacier adds to a larger body of research in northwest Montana. The audio of a Lynx vocalizing that we shared earlier--
[Clip of lynx yowling plays.]
Michael: came from a monitoring project looking for rare carnivores in the Swan Valley, south of Glacier. It was shared with us by the Southwest Crown Collaborative and Swan Valley Connections. Knowing where lynx live now allows us to notice when and how they're impacted by climate change and other stressors, and that'll help the park manage for their success. These photos have also been exciting for park visitors and employees because they're a window into the hidden lives of our wildlife.
[Music fades in.]
Alissa: We got a handful of wolverine, I think maybe 12 or something, and that's always fun. You never see so many of these animals, or very rarely. And it's just a really cool way to just, you know, see what all is around you and using the same trails that you're using. It's sort of funny; there were a couple of times when you just going through the photos, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and organizing, it'd be like a grizzly bear or even once, I think a lynx, you know, within minutes of a human-
Michael: [to Alissa] Really?!
Alissa: -like, in the exact same spot, you're like, Wow, I wonder how that worked out?! Yeah.
[electronic music fades in sampling the "Day of the Lynx" narrator saying, "During what we call, The Day of the Lynx!" then music fades out.]
Michael: But Alissa's research also revealed another, more surprising, conclusion.
Alissa: Yeah. So basically more or less half of the park, the east side of the park, stayed closed to the public in 2020.
Michael: Because of the timing of a lesser study, 2019 through 2021, her work overlapped with the arrival of COVID-19. And because of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, half of Alissa's study area was closed to the public as a precaution to limit the spread of COVID. The Blackfeet reservation shut down. And the park, who shares a boundary with the reservation, closed its eastern entrances to support that precaution. Areas west of the continental divide remained open, but eastern entrances like St. Mary, Many Glacier, and Two Medicine, were closed. This posed a roadblock for Alissa's research, but there was an agreement that allowed for limited administrative use so long as nobody stopped on the reservation, even for gas. And Alissa's research made the cut.
Alissa: So we were very fortunate and grateful to be able to continue our work on the east side during the summer of 2020. And it did provide a really unique opportunity, sort of more of an experimental design.
Michael: It was a perfect setup for an experiment she never could have arranged otherwise. One year of data with wildlife and people, and one year with wildlife and no people.
Alissa: We had cameras out in the same exact location during the same time period, different years. But like, you know, June 15th till August 15th or whatever in 2020. And also in a year when the park was open to the public and there were thousands of people and like hundreds of people every single day walking in front of those locations. So we were able to compare wildlife activity and presence and detection and those two different scenarios.
Michael: Right away, comparing the open and closed years revealed a pattern.
Alissa: For the most part, most of the findings were that when there's fewer people around, you know, the animals were being detected more frequently or at more different places. You know, I think some of the ones that were strongest were elk and coyote.
Michael: Coyotes were seeing way more often when there weren't people around.
Alissa: Coyote kind of surprised me, honestly, because, you know, they're kind of a generalist species and they can, you know, get used to stuff.
Michael: And I mean, you see pictures in some communities where they're like riding the subway! So you'd think they'd be more kind of comfortable.
Alissa: Yeah, that kind of surprised me that they had such a strong reaction, negative reaction to increased human use.
Michael: That same trend was observed in a lot of animals, including lynx, moose, bighorn sheep and black bears, although it wasn't true of every species. Foxes were the opposite. The probability of detecting a red fox was higher in the summer with people on trail.
Alissa: So, you know, one theory could be we found more foxes because we were finding fewer coyotes, and coyotes are dominant over foxes. And so that's, you know, an explanation. That's just, I think that's super interesting.
Michael: This is something I feel like I and a lot of folks have anecdotal understanding of. It feels like deer like to be around people, whereas you're encouraged to make noise on trails so you won't run into a bear, as bears generally don't want to be around us.
Michael: But when that personal experience becomes a statistically significant research conclusion, it made me reconsider the impact I have on this place.
Michael: It's tempting for me to imagine if you're following all the principles of leave no trace, you know, hiking up to Avalanche Lake like you're not disturbing anything. The park is kind of behaving as it would be if you weren't there. And your paper seems to imply that that's not true.
Alissa: Even if you don't hit an animal with your car or you're not hunting an animal or you're not throwing rocks, an animal or your dogs not chasing an animal simply by existing on the landscape and walking on trails, I mean, we do have an influence on wildlife activity patterns and space use, simply just by being there.
Michael: This hits at the core of the Park Service's mission, to preserve and protect the natural world here, while also providing for the enjoyment of visitors. Two goals that seem to be in tension with one another. A dual mandate at odds with itself.
Alissa: So it's a really interesting conundrum. I think you were saying, sort of the dual mandate of the park, right? I'm certainly not going to advocate for closing the park forever to people. I think that's insane. I think it is kind of interesting to imply that that's necessarily bad. I don't want to say that that's necessarily bad like humans have existed on this landscape with all of these animals, you know, forever. It's just it's interesting and it's something that I think, you know, now we certainly need to think about and consider a little bit more carefully because we have thousands, millions of people, you know, hiking down some of these trails, you know, over the course of just a three month period.
Michael: I've talked for years with visitors and colleagues about this tension in the NPS mission, but I'd always pictured it applying to large scale management decisions like wanting to build a new parking lot. It felt like something I could avoid on a personal level by doing the right thing, which in hindsight feels a little naive. I like working here because I felt like my work can have a positive impact. But Alissa's study left me wondering if the best thing I could do for lynx and moose, is leave.
Michael: But at the same time, the reason I care about wildlife is because of experiences I've had, in nature. Experiences in national parks, like that mediocre photo I took of the first moose I'd ever seen. And it's unlikely so many people from around the world would care about this remote corner of northwest Montana if they'd never been here, if they'd never had the chance to connect with it on a personal level, to go hiking in the mountains, to see wildlife in the wild, forming memories that last a lifetime. Finally, the only way for Glacier to responsibly manage animals like moose and lynx, is to understand them, which takes research, sending passionate, curious people out into the park to learn more.
Ethan: Yeah, you know, that was my first camera did by myself. You know, I guess it's just the bird leaving the nest.
Michael: People like Ethan, the wildlife tech working with, Landon on the moose study. After two summers with Landon, Ethan is pursuing a degree in wildlife biology this fall at the University of Montana.
Ethan: You know, I always wanted to be out here doing this type of work, and I think that's a big motivation for me, is that, you know, not a lot of people are out here and that, you know, as me and him just trying to make a new step into history.
Peri: Moose pioneers!
Alissa: I mean, I guess it's the idea of do we only care about species for the viewing enjoyment of the public or do we care about them for their intrinsic value on the landscape and also for their important ecological roles? And if you care about that and you care about every species.
[Closing theme music fades in.]
Peri: Alissa's research suggests that even treading lightly, we will have an impact on the natural world here--it's unavoidable. But if we can accept that, it encourages us to think about the kind of impact we would like to have.
[Closing theme music plays fully under Peri reading the credits.]
Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you.
Peri: Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes.
Peri: Special thanks this episode to Landon Magee, Ethan Rowe, Alissa Anderson, Mark Biel, John Waller, and Swan Valley Connections and the Southwest Crown Collaborative for sharing their amazing lynx growls. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.
What do animals do when we’re not around? One way to answer that is by using remote cameras. By focusing on two camera studies in Glacier, we learn more about two animals in the park, and those of us who visit it.
Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.
Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/