April through June, 2016

As noted last quarter, the MSU Wildlife Management course once more did their lab work on our property. One part of the lab is to locate radio collars the professor has hidden; in actual practice, these collars would be on wild animals. The other part of the lab is to place cameras where the students estimate there will be interesting activity; an important sub-part of that is to make sure they get good GPS coordinates for the placements so the professor can find them in a few weeks. The more trouble he has finding them, the more points deducted from the grade.

We know there are mountain lions around, having seen their kills; for many years we have been hoping to get a picture. This year a student finally caught four pictures of one. Mountain lions prowl in the dark, so the picture quality is poor; in fact, the contrast was so poor one could barely make out a shape. Gary improved the contrast and made a 4 second movie using the pictures. The students got a picture of a wolf two years ago, which is actually more unusual.


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