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A UVic graduate student has been setting traps to harvest pictures of animals instead of their skins, to demonstrate how animals shift their behaviour when humans disturb their habitat.
Sandra Frey completed her work for a master’s degree at the University of Victoria in 2018, using image data collected by cameras in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta.
The images revealed shifts in the daily hunting habits of carnivores — wolves, cougar, coyotes, lynx, wolverines, martens and long-tailed weasels — when humans disturbed their habitat.
“These are remote cameras that we put up in the field for months, even years, to capture and download images,” said Frey. The cameras are motion-activated. “And all these images are time-stamped, so we know the time and date these animals are active.”