Better a late reply than never… I’m sorry I misunderstood your comment with regard to who was threatened! I agree with you that while it’s fascinating to see wildlife, it’s usually with the sad knowledge that this also endangers them. A couple weeks ago, while road biking, for example, I finally saw my favourite of last year’s pups of the local wolf pack. Right on the (small) 1A highway. It made me very happy, yet, a few hours later it got onto the TransCanada, and was killed. If it hadn’t been that used to roads and traffic, I wouldn’t have seen it, but since it was habituated, it also meant it would venture onto deadly terrain. I guess the problem is that we, too, need undisturbed and natural landscapes to feel happy, but by going there we usually degrade the very wilderness we seek.

Mirjam

That’s the bait that we nailed to the tree, a frozen beaver carcass (or whatever is left of it at that point)!

A hair trap traps hair! Haha. It looks as follows: We wrap a tree with barbed wire, to up to 3 metres above ground. At the top of the barbed wire we nail a frozen and skinned beaver carcass to the tree (sounds as nasty as it is!), as a bait, so wolverines have a reason to show up and climb the tree. As the animals climb up, the barbed wire rips out some hair from the animal, which we later collect. A camera is installed on a tree nearby, to confirm if the hair is likely from a wolverine or not, as many animals have similar looking hair. Analyzing hair samples is expensive, so we only want to do it for hair which are very likely wolverine.

The follicles of hair (but not the hair itself) are living cells that contain DNA. By collecting and analyzing DNA from as many individuals as possible, we can measure the impacts of the TransCanada Highway on the wolverine population in the mountain parks. The main concern is that the population may be split in a “North of Hwy” and “South of Hwy” sub-population, with not very much gene-flow (i.e. individuals that cross the highway and mate there). Wolverine density is low to begin with, thus any splitting of large, healthy populations into small isolated ones poses a great risk that these become inbred, and may ultimately go extinct.

Cheers,