 Cooley and wildlife technician Gabe Wilson '04 search maps for roads
that will take them close to a cougar's last known location, as
reported by a GPS transmitter on the cat's collar.
Photographer Bob Hubner and I join Cooley at the Wedge
for two days in January 2006. We want to see for ourselves what her
research entails. With luck, we’ll witness a capture and see a
cougar up close.
The weather has been mild lately, and our first day with Cooley
is about 30 degrees and stone clear. She says the warm weather will
make tracking difficult, because bare ground and crusty snow don’t
hold scent as well as soft snow. The study area is mostly still
covered, but the snow is less than a foot deep in some places and
everywhere has the glassy look of snow that has partially melted
and refrozen.
We cover many miles by truck on county and forest service roads
deeply rutted with packed slush. As we drive, Cooley keeps the VHF
receiver on “Scan,” so it cycles through all the frequencies. When
we hear a beep, she asks which frequency it is. That tells her
which cougar’s collar sent the signal. Cooley constantly checks in
by radio with wildlife technician Gabe Wilson (’04 Wildlife
Ecology) and houndsman Tom MacArthur, who are monitoring receivers
in their own vehicles a few miles away. Ideally, the same cougar
will be detected by more than one of the searchers, allowing them
to triangulate and pinpoint the cat’s location with a fair degree
of accuracy.
That’s not how it works today. Most of the beeps we hear are
faint, except for the ones that turn out to come from Cooley’s
hound, Emma, whose “let’s go!” whine exactly matches the receiver
beep. The few times we get a decent signal, Cooley pulls over and
tries to get an antenna reading from the side of the road. Every
time, the signal fades or moves north into Canada, where she can’t
follow.
We encounter a couple of men on ATVs, who recognize Cooley and
stop to chat with her. At a road crossing, an older couple in a
Toyota pickup truck wave us over. They ask Cooley if she’s found a
cougar today, then report, “We live way back there and we haven’t
seen any all winter.”
We rendezvous with Wilson and MacArthur, who share what they’ve
heard from the people they’ve met on the road. Cooley says
interpreting information from local residents is tough. Some
observers are reliable, but often there’s over-reporting of cougars
because of old beliefs and "groupthink."
“It’s like anything in the media,” she says. “When there’s one
report on cougars, the number of reported sightings goes way up.”
Most of the time, the reported “cougar” isn’t a cougar. It’s a
bobcat, or a dog, or even—she says this has actually happened—a
large housecat.
Tracks are often misinterpreted, too.
“They aren’t complete nomads, they have a territory and they go
around and around it,” says technician Wilson. He compares the
number of tracks a cougar leaves in well-traveled parts of its
territory with the number of tracks we make going from our front
door to the car or mailbox. If a female cougar with a couple of big
kittens walks through a yard a few times, it can look like the cats
are traveling in herds.
Cooley gets out her laptop to download the latest GPS readings
from the collared cats. The collars send a signal to a satellite at
programmed times; researchers can download the data at their
convenience. The technology allows them to get a more detailed
picture of the cats’ movements than has ever been possible
before.
Cooley shows us the map on her computer screen. Data points show
the location of each cougar up to six times every day. Seeing all
the points for a certain cat, it’s easy to draw the outline of its
100- to 150-square-mile territory. A male may overlap with more
than one female, but females don’t overlap much with other females,
and males don’t overlap with other males. Where there’s an area on
the map with no GPS points, Cooley knows there’s probably an
uncollared cougar living there that she can then attempt to capture
and collar.
When a cat’s GPS signal remains in a small area for several
days, the cat has probably made a kill and is staying near the
carcass. When a female stays put for longer than that, she’s
probably denning up and giving birth. Cooley has a good idea when
that will happen, because she knows when mating occurs: the signal
from a male accompanies the signal from a female for several days.
Cooley then counts forward three months to anticipate when the
litter is due. She visits den sites about six weeks later to tag
the kittens and fit them with expandable transmitter collars, so
she can follow them as they grow up and move out on their own.
GPS technology has revolutionized her work, but even with the
hot new tools, Cooley spends a lot of time driving and hiking.
 Cooley checks her bearing with a compass.
“Without the field component, you miss a lot,” she says.
“I’m almost glad we didn’t have GPS collars the first while,
because we spent a ton of time out there tracking. You learn a lot
just walking around out there.”
Since a cougar capture doesn’t seem to be in the cards today,
Cooley sends MacArthur and Wilson west to try to locate the cougar
she’s named Faith, in hopes of getting a line on her for tomorrow.
Then she, Hubner, and I go looking for a kill site. A week ago,
Cooley got GPS readings that showed Old Girl hanging out in one
spot for several days. The cat had probably made a kill and was
staying with it as long as there was still something edible to stay
with.
The three of us pile onto a snowmobile; Emma runs behind. After
a mile or so of whomping over the forest road’s snowdrifts, we
reach a creek. It feels good to get off the machine and walk.
Guided by her handheld GPS unit, Cooley leads us about a kilometer
into the woods.
A short way up a hill, there it is, right where the GPS said it
would be. This is like no wildlife carcass I’ve seen during my
years as a hiker. It’s a circle of hair a few feet across. No
bones, no hooves, no skin, just hair, in a dense layer a couple of
inches deep. Cooley says the bones were probably carried off by
coyotes or ravens.
Just downhill from us, Emma finds a prize: the mandible. The two
halves are still together, pink-stained and fresh-looking. The
teeth are high-crowned, meaning the deer was relatively young.
Cooley will be able to determine the species and age in the
lab.
We walk back to the snowmobile and sled out to the truck. Wilson
and MacArthur check in by radio; they didn’t find Faith.
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