A Single Hair

It might not look like much. In fact, you might not notice it at all. But a single hair is all Jesse Hogg needs to help tell an important story. Jesse is working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other project collaborators as a Klamath Basin Tribal Intern. Jesse began his work with us on the Eastern Klamath Study Area (EKSA) which straddles the California/Oregon border. The EKSA is one of several locations where project biologists captured and relocated fishers to the Stirling District of Sierra Pacific Industries. We are using non-invasive methods to monitor the fisher population of the EKSA to evaluate if the removal of the fishers we relocated was detrimental to the population. Jesse set, checked, and collected hair samples he found in devices designed to snag hair from local fishers. The genetic material stored in the root of hair can reveal an animal’s species and sex and characteristics used to identify unique individuals. After wrapping up a successful season, Jesse is now working in Stirling to help monitor radio-marked fishers.

The Klamath Basin Tribal Internship Program seeks to inspire young native community members to develop the technical skills required to monitor and manage species and habitats, to pursue college-level educational opportunities, and to succeed in conservation-focused careers. The program provides employment and professional development opportunities for members of six native communities of the Klamath Basin of northwestern California and southwestern Oregon.

In The Field With Fishers

Our situation on the ground has been a little hectic over recent months and some of you avid followers may have been feeling a little neglected when it comes to field updates. Well, fear ye no more, I shall share a few details regarding the animals we are currently tracking on and around Stirling as of late February.

We are currently tracking 23 Fishers with active telemetry transmitters on and around the Stirling District. Of these, 16 are fitted with VHF transmitters that we must actively track. 15 of these animals are females wearing VHF collars, the other is a male born on Stirling in 2012 who was given an implanted transmitter due to his age and potential to outgrow a collar. The remaining 7 animals are males of greater than 1 year of age fitted with ARGOS collars, these collars collect locations via satellite and can be conveniently tracked from the comfort of our desks. A breakdown of these animals by year of birth/translocation can be seen in the table below.

Right now we are unable to account for 3 more animals (2 females, 1 male) with potentially active transmitters who we hope are still going about their business out there. They were all born on Stirling in 2012 and have been missing for over a month. Sometimes such animals turn up in unexpected places (see previous post “The Grass Is Always Greener”) or are recovered during our trapping efforts and sometimes we never learn their ultimate fates. Either way, they are young and wild and all we can do is to keep searching.

You can get an idea of the spread of our animals across the study area at the moment from the aerial photos below, to give a little perspective the lines on the image represent the county lines of Plumas to the East, Tehama to the west and Butte in the South.

Female locations:

Year 2 translocates in Yellow, Year 3 translocates in Blue, Juveniles from 2011 in Red, Juveniles from 2012 in Green

Male locations:

Year 1 translocates in Purple, Year 2 translocates in Yellow, Year 3 translocates in Blue, Juveniles from 2011 in Red, Juveniles from 2012 in Green

As you can see we have a pretty wide spread of animals across our study area at the moment, and we are aware of uncollared individuals in many of the intervening areas. As denning season creeps up on us we will be kept busy trying to keep tabs on everyone, this year is shaping up to be an interesting one with more potential dens than any previous year, I will update you all with some of our denning predictions in the near future.

-CAB-

The Great Kit Debate

In a somewhat desperate bid to up my posting rate I’m going to revisit old ground in this post and return to a brief email debate from last April.

And so a brief background is in order…

As we build up to this years denning season we have begun the task of collating and analyzing our camera data from the first two denning seasons on Stirling. As many of you may know the season really begins to heat up in early April as we confirm natal dens (a natal den is the den in which a female gives birth to her kits) by performing walk-ins on stationary females. It is usually on the second walk-in to a given tree that we consider the female has indeed denned. At this point we set a series of remote cameras around the den structure in order to passively monitor the females activities. Through the denning season a female Fisher will usually progress from her natal den through a number of maternal dens (a maternal den being any den occupied after the natal den). Thus one of the most exciting things we see on our cameras is the female carrying her kits out of the den, this gives us a great opportunity to count the number of kits.

So here the debate arises. While going through our pictures of female 17582’s natal den from the 2011 season I came across some familiar images, the first image is of 17582 moving her first kit from the natal den to her first maternal den roughly 100 yards away. Nothing too contentious there.

The picture below was taken 20 minutes later and appears to show her moving a second kit, or potentially a second and third kit at the same time, as the wily Roger Powell contended.

And here is the same image expanded;

So I ask your opinion,

-CAB-

On The Road Again

A lot of what we talk about and report on is our female fishers. I suppose there are a lot of reasons for that but a major one is that we usually track our females and most of our males wear Argos transmitters produced for us by Sirtrack. The great thing about these transmitters is that we don’t have go out and do the tracking. The location is estimated through overhead satellites that transfer the data to a processing center that then sends it to us in our email – what some have dubbed “armchair biology”. One of the really important reasons we put these on males is because they allow us to track fishers over long distances.

Male fishers have big home ranges compared to females and they seem to cover a lot of area. Here, I have included a figure that shows data that we have collected on 4 males from the last 3 months (not all our males are included here). You can see from the points that they do a pretty good job of staying away from home ranges of other males even when when they share a common border and have some overlap. Just for fun I included a visual representation of a Kernel Density Estimator for female fishers. Basically, the darker colors are where female fishers are found the most. As you might expect there is a some overlap between males and females, but some males are somewhat off by themselves. It makes sense the the biggest most dominant males have home ranges that include more female’s home ranges, but we are still testing this hypothesis.

The locations for 4 selected males

Yesterday Kevin described the frustration of not being able to find animals that “disappear”. The information we are getting from our Argos collars have been really informative with regards to showing us the fishers sometimes do seem to just go exploring. Just recently we have had two males that have seemed to wander away from their usual haunts. Had we been tracking these animals with regular VHF telemetry it is likely we would have just “lost” an animal for awhile until it eventually showed up again. We know females take these same types of trips, but I suspect we catch them in the act far less frequently.

If you look below at the two other figures  I’ve included you can see male 1 and male 4 have each recently taken petty significant jaunts. Male 1 only recently set out toward the east. He has covered about 10 miles in the space of about a week. The other male made about a 20 miles round trip over the course of about a month. Notice that he wandered right through the middle of one of those dark red areas – the home range of one of our females released in year 2.

What do these trips represent for a male fisher? Well, that is another thing we are still thinking about. Maybe they are checking out locations of females. Particularly with the breeding season fast approaching it may be useful for males to keep track of potential mates. Perhaps they are simply looking for an area that has higher concentrations of prey or maybe, like ourselves, they just want to see some place new once in a while.

Male 1 recent movements

Male 4 recent movements

Hangin’ with the Beard

Yesterday saw Roger and I back in the field tracking female fishers near the Ishi Wilderness Area. The Ishi Wilderness area is a unique place near the northern end of our study area and lies just to the west of the Stirling District. Located along Mill and Deer creeks the Ishi wilderness is relatively low and dominated by Grey Pine (Pinus sabiniana) and other vegetation associated with the foothills.

View of Blackrock near the Ishi Wilderness

The Ishi Monument located near the Narrows

Our fishers were not quite into the Ishi wilderness but they were quite close. We found one female in Deer Creek just below (to the North of) Sugarloaf. It took us a few tries to get a reasonable location (triangulation) on her, but in the end we felt pretty confident in our estimation. The other female was just over the ridge near the Narrows in a small tributary of Mill Creek. Both females could be heard from the Ishi monument located in this area (see picture). This girl was a little harder to narrow down because her signal was bouncing all over the place. This is pretty common but is made worse by the rock faces and pinnacles that are found in this area.

Sign Post for the Narrows

Eventually, we did a reasonable job locating two females in a pretty cool area. Roger and I had some good discussion including the possibility that I may be suffering a psychological condition associated with getting a PhD. This seems pretty obvious since only a person with mental problem would get a Phd while working on fishers.

-ANF-

Return to the field

We seem to be having a spell of good weather over the district currently which is allowing a little more freedom in the field since our return from the West Coast Fisher Symposium in Sacramento. There is still a little snow on the roads at higher elevations and the peaks of Lassen to the North are finally showing white but skies are clear and most of our access points are open.

Yesterday saw an overdue visit to some of our more Northerly females on the edge of the Ishi Wilderness, we currently know of two females in this area, both of whom were located yesterday.

Today I managed the first walk-in on our most recently collared female (see post January 25^th 2012). I found her in a draw high above Big Chico Creek keeping an eye on me from the canopy of a large Douglas Fir. The photo fails to do her justice but you can make her out peering down from a mass of branches some 100 feet from the ground.

This being the first time we’ve had contact with her since she was collared I was pleased to note that she didn’t appear agitated, neither vocalizing nor attempting to move off while I was observing her.

-CAB-

Pekania pennanti

The recent meeting of the Western Section of the Wildlife Society has been interesting. One important conclusion that Roger and I have reached is that it really is time to start calling fishers by the genus Pekania based on work done by research from Koepfli et al 2008. The alternative would be to put wolverines into the genus “Martes”, but such transitions seem unlikey.

Sure, if you still call them Martes pennanti we’ll still know what you are talking about, but this way is more fun (and accurate). Okay, I”m not sure I’m willing to completely give up on fishers being a “Martes” species, but the genetic work is interesting and something we should give serious consideration to.

-ANF-

Springing the trap

Though the aim of our trapping efforts is to catch fishers, we sometimes find non-target species in the traps.  Striped and spotted skunks, ringtails, grey fox, and squirrels are the usual suspects.  Some of them even seem to find the wooden cubby of the trap comfortable!  Last time I caught a ringtail, I opened the back door of the trap and left to do other work.  Upon returning 4 hours later, it was still resting in the box!

Kevin

Creatures of the night

With the belated and thus far underwhelming winter storms making an appearance recently a few of us have found ourselves with time on our hands away from the field. In light of this situation the ever industrious Aaron has, among other assignments, set us to work organizing a digitalized mountain of trail camera pictures.

As a (more?) naïve youth I used to quite enjoy going through these pictures, then I came to work in bear country…needless to say, the novelty has worn a little thin. For the uninitiated; it is a favorite pastime of black bears to find, wander around in front of and then try to eat trail cameras, this can become a little tedious to watch the 10^th or 100^th time you see it. Nonetheless, we do get to see some of the more reclusive local residents going about their business too.

I thought I’d share a few recent favorites to add a little color…then I realized they were all night shots.

Enjoy!

-CAB-

New juvenile fisher

Today we captured a new juvenile fisher near Hwy 32! This is the 5th juvenile female fisher captured this year (2011-2012), and the 9th total juvenile. She was collared with a VHF transmitter and we will begin tracking her as much as possible in the near future. This is exciting news because thus far 6 fishers have been documented to have died on our project. Capturing 9 juveniles that are independent of their mother’s and surviving indicates that at the least we have replaced those deaths with fishers born on the study site. This is one indication that the populations may be stable or even growing.

Currently we are tracking 24 animals with VHF transmitters and another 9 with Argos satellite (PTT) transmitters. Capturing, collaring and following many animals is important to improve our understanding of what habitat requirements they have and how that is influencing our incipient population.

-ANF-