I'm Tania Lewis Glacier Bay National Park terrestrial wildlife biologist and
I'm working on a project this summer looking at the activity levels of
wildlife in the presence and absence of people now we know that people disturb
wildlife to different extents and it's really important for us as managers to
know how we can manage people so that we minimize our disturbance to wildlife so
in this project we're using remote cameras meaning cameras that are not
attended we put them up and leave them and they collect motion sensor image as
well as time-lapse photography I just got back from a trip setting up ten of
these cameras in five different locations in Glacier Bay along the
shoreline and we will look at and compare between different areas and also
compare levels of wildlife activity to a similar study that we did in 2017 and 18
when we had more normal levels of tourism on the beach this summer 2020 we
do not expect to have too many people on the beaches of Glacier Bay because of
the Covid-19 pandemic and there won't be as many boats in the
water either such as cruise ships and tour boats will all be way less this
year so it's a really exciting opportunity to look at sort of a
baseline of wildlife activity without people around and then we can compare
that to years when there's normal activity and try to find thresholds of
human use that don't significantly impact wildlife activity some of these
cameras that I put up are in wilderness and we don't take that lightly in this
park we know that installations in wilderness can impact people's
experience and wilderness character but we also know that the information gained
from this study can be really important to minimize disturbance to wildlife and
so we feel like the benefits will outweigh the negative aspects of these
cameras out the cameras are low and pointed downward
so they're not capturing people's faces we're not using these cameras for
surveillance these are just for a wildlife activity so we hope that the
public understands the importance of using these cameras in the wilderness
for this information. We just got back from two days up in Glacier Bay
deploying these cameras we went to Reid Glacier Lamplugh Glacier a cove in the east
arm called hunter- Hunter Cove, as well as South Sandy Cove and then Bartlett Cove
is our fifth study site for this project. So it was beautiful trip another
exciting thing about Glacier Bay this time of year is there's a lot of bears
on the beach there are mountain goats have had their kids so we saw four or
five different sets of moms with kids very small baby mountain goats.
And then the other exciting thing is that it is bear mating season and we saw
two different pair of adult bears that we presume are probably mating pairs and
maybe because there's way less boat traffic in the bay both sets of mating
brown bears were just hanging out on the beach in fact one set was snoozin the
other set was wrestling and that's not so common in the middle of the day this
time of year in Glacier Bay to see these bears right on the beach just relaxed so
perhaps evidence that that the wildlife is really going to get a bit of a break
this year without so much human presence. We also saw a humpback whale that was
breaching and tail lobbing and pec lapping and that was super exciting to see.
We saw some really cool animal sign on the beaches and again because it is a
season of mating brown bears they are more active at rub trees and mark trails
it's believed it plays an important role in their reproduction in finding mates
and so we saw that bears had very freshly marked trail and probably
actively rubbing on these trees. Alright here we are in South Sandy Cove
and we just came upon the most amazing mark trail but I think I've ever seen.
A bear did this. Possibly more than one but by just grinding their feet into the
ground and you can see must've taken a long time for them to get through all that
moss quite deep and they lead into the woods probably to a rub tree where
bear's will rub and leave their scent and it's believed it's a bit of a
calling card where they can advertise who they are if they're male-female even
their size and other information so we'll see that in a sec. This is one of
the mother of all mother rub trees in South Sandy Cove it's at the juncture of
two trails you can see one to the right there of the tree and then there's
another one coming up from the back of South Sandy Cove there, and then I'm standing
on one going towards the south side of South Sandy and over here we have put up a
camera if you can see it there it is that will get pictures and videos of
bears rubbing on this rub tree. And I've had a camera on this rub tree three other
years and we've picked up not only brown bears and black bears but also moose
they don't rub but they do sniff it and also coyotes and wolves which sniffed
the tree and sometimes pee or poop so these trees are probably real
important in the animal community for communicating who came by and when and
what they're up to so hopefully we'll get some good video and I'll show it to
you later in the summer