This summer, Professor Laura Prugh has taken two trips to the field—first with one of her current graduate students near Mount Rainer, and then to southeast Alaska with a master’s student who’s joining her lab and starting at SEFS this fall.
For the first excursion in June, Laura spent a few days south of Mount Rainier in Gifford Pinchot National Forest with her current master’s student, Mitch Parsons, and his summer field technician, Aaron Black. Mitch’s project is looking at trophic relationships of reintroduced fishers in the South Cascades. Fishers were reintroduced this past winter, and another round of releases will occur this winter. So Mitch is assessing prey availability using sign surveys and small mammal trapping, and assessing the occupancy of competing carnivores using camera trapping.
Then, two weeks ago Laura traveled to Glacier Bay National Park in southeast Alaska to check out future study sites for her incoming master’s student, Mira Sytsma. Using camera traps, Mira’s project will involve looking at how visitor shore excursions affect the activity of terrestrial wildlife. They spent three days on a research boat with National Park Service Biologist and project collaborator Tania Lewis, and they visited many sites—enjoying amazing wildlife sightings along the way, too, including a wolf with three pups, two brown bears, lots of humpback whales, orcas, sea otters, Stellar sea lions, harbor seals, moose, mountain goats and even a porcupine!
We look forward to hearing how these projects progress!
Photos © Laura Prugh.
