Category Archives: volunteers

Time to Get Bear Aware in Colorado

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Colorado Bear AwareColorado Parks and Wildlife is looking for Bear Aware volunteers in Glenwood Springs and will train them tomorrow (April 20).

According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s website:

Bear Aware is a network of trained Colorado Parks and Wildlife volunteers throughout the state who help their neighbors and communities prevent problems for themselves and for bears. Our Bear Aware program was founded in 1998. Today there are over 220 volunteers, statewide, dedicated to helping people coexist with bears. Bear Aware volunteers can answer questions, offer practical advice and even make house calls. They also do educational programs and staff informational booths at events.

Wildlife managers in the Roaring Fork Valley expect significant bear activity in the region again this year.

“Simple things like keeping trash and food away from bears can help,” said said District Wildlife Manger Dan Cacho, of Glenwood Springs in a press release. “But people often need to be reminded and Bear Aware teams have been effective in spreading education in other communities across Colorado.”

Read the Colorado Parks and Wildlife press release here.
Find out more about the Colorado Bear Aware program here.
Read an article about the call for volunteers in the Aspen Business Journal, here.

Image: Colorado Parks and Wildlife Bear Aware program sticker

Time to Get Bear Aware in Colorado

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Colorado Bear AwareColorado Parks and Wildlife is looking for Bear Aware volunteers in Glenwood Springs and will train them tomorrow (April 20).

According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s website:

Bear Aware is a network of trained Colorado Parks and Wildlife volunteers throughout the state who help their neighbors and communities prevent problems for themselves and for bears. Our Bear Aware program was founded in 1998. Today there are over 220 volunteers, statewide, dedicated to helping people coexist with bears. Bear Aware volunteers can answer questions, offer practical advice and even make house calls. They also do educational programs and staff informational booths at events.

Wildlife managers in the Roaring Fork Valley expect significant bear activity in the region again this year.

“Simple things like keeping trash and food away from bears can help,” said said District Wildlife Manger Dan Cacho, of Glenwood Springs in a press release. “But people often need to be reminded and Bear Aware teams have been effective in spreading education in other communities across Colorado.”

Read the Colorado Parks and Wildlife press release here.
Find out more about the Colorado Bear Aware program here.
Read an article about the call for volunteers in the Aspen Business Journal, here.

Image: Colorado Parks and Wildlife Bear Aware program sticker

Why Deer Die

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Wisconsin deer trap“Hunter harvest continues to be the greatest cause of death of both adult and yearling bucks, while predation was the leading cause of fawn mortality, with most predations occurring within the first four to six weeks following birth,” said Jared Duquette, research scientist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and lead researcher for a five-year study of causes of adult deer mortality and a three-year study of fawn mortality in an item in department’s weekly news bulletin.

According to the weekly news summary:

Capture of adults will continue through the 2012-13 and 2013-14 winters. Fawns were live-captured in May and June in 2011 and 2012 and will be captured again in 2013. A number of captured adults and fawns are fitted with radio collars. All are fitted with ear tags. Additional metrics are collected including body weight and size, blood samples, sex, presence of external parasites and age. Does are also examined for pregnancy. Deer are followed by radio signal until death, at which time researchers study the mortality to determine cause.

More details on the two studies are available in the department’s news report. Wisconsin is also conducting some other interesting deer studies. You can see the list here. I’d be interested to know the results of “An evaluation of the usefulness of deer-vehicle collision data as indices to deer population abundance.”

Read the weekly news item detailing the two deer studies here.

Photo: Closed box trap with deer feeding around it, courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Adventurers for Science

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Gregg Treinish

Let’s say you need to keep tabs on pikas, those high elevation relatives of rabbits and hares that are under threat from global warming. The average citizen scientist can’t climb the scree fields of some of the continent’s highest peaks to report back on pika populations. What is a wildlife biologist to do?

Adventurers & Scientists for Conservation is a non-profit organization that seeks to match top-level adventurers with particularly difficult scientific research that requires the adventurers’ special skills.

For example, Adventurers & Scientists for Conservation has not just one, but 22 parties that are traversing the Pacific Crest Trail (a high-elevation scenic trail in the American West) collecting data on pika straw piles, urine stains, and sightings of the pikas themselves. While the projects that get media coverage run to the truly exotic, such as Himalayan mountaineers reporting on flights of bar-headed geese over the Roof of the World, the organization does plenty in the U.S., including projects involving wolverines, glacier worms, and whitepine and grizzly bears.

Organization founder Gregg Treinish is both a world-class adventurer and a scientist himself. He was named National Geographic Adventurer of the Year in 2008 for being the first person to trek the entire 7,800-mile Andes Mountain Range. He’s been a field technician for the USGS Montana Cooperative and Montana State University, and a field biologist with the University of Minnesota and Wild Things Unlimited, an independent research organization.

Read more about some of the organization’s adventurous successes in the Toronto Globe and Mail and the journal Science. Or, visit the organization’s Web site for details, including how to get your project on the list.

Volunteers guard lake sturgeon

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Let’s face it, most fish and wildlife volunteers pull weeds or help stock fish. That’s why it’s always fun to read about unique volunteer opportunities. In Wisconsin, one of those opportunities is to serve as a Sturgeon Guard for spawning lake sturgeon in the Wolf River and its tributaries, the Embarrass and Little Wolf Rivers. The volunteers serve 12-hour shifts with a partner, and get a front row seat for the sturgeon spawning spectacle, which features females five- to seven-feet long, and their many male suitors cavorting in shallow water.

The program has eliminated sturgeon poaching in the area, and, apparently, some volunteers are disappointed when their 12-hour shift is cancelled because it falls outside of the actual sturgeon spawning window. Shifts run from April 15 to May 5.

Read more on the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources website here. A direct link to the Sturgeon Guard program is here. Or read this article on the guard from a 2006 issue of Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine.

Photo: Lake sturgeon, Eric Engbretson, US Fish & Wildlife Service