[truck driving]
[James] My first fall, when I was up trapping with Tucker,
um, he had to go off and set a line and I was still on the road and I had, uh,
some telemetry equipment with me. And this truck rolled by and it had
some hunters in it and they're blanged with blaze orange, and they stopped and they
asked me what I was doing and I said, "Oh, i'm radio collaring some snowshoe hares."
And they asked me if I could radio collar some elk for them,
because they had a hard time finding them. [laughs]
I said I would if I could, but I can't. [laughs]
I go to Seeley Lake just about every weekend for at least a day.
I spend a lot of time with Brandon Davis and Tucker Sites.
We have a good time up there. We get a lot of work done,
in some pretty tough conditions, um, but it's a lot of fun, we learn a lot,
and we're getting to use a lot of things that we have been taught in classes.
[dog whimpers]
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] James, Brandon, and Tucker are,
are really great representatives of the, of the quality of undergraduates that we have
here at the University and really all over, students that are learning the, the craft of wildlife biology.
[Brandon] I'll take that. I'll do date. A little [inaudible]...
Alright, i'm going to go ahead and toss these on the trap.
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] Everybody likes to call hares bunnies,
people like to call hares rabbits. In one big way that hares are different
from rabbits is that hares are exposed to predetors from day one.
Rabbits, as we know from storybooks, rabbits live in warrens, rabbits live underground.
Rabbits are born helpless, eyes closed, safe from predetors.
Momma takes care of them for quite awhile.
Hares, by contrast, are born right where mom drops em.
No hare ever dies of old age, they, they typically will be dead within a year.
The most consistant signal of climate change in temperate regions is a redcution in number
of days with snow on the ground. What hares have evolved is a way
of tracking their camouflage with the seasons by, um, changing their coat color from brown to white
when the snow comes.
[Brandon Davis] It is possible, when hares are mismatched,
uh, their mortality rates increase. So this is, you know, critical to their survival.
85% of their, of mortalities, is due to predation. If we get a really fast signal coming back to us,
that means its mortality. So our goal is to go find that collar
as soon as possible and then get it back on hares as fast as we can.
Because we wanna get as many hares, collared hares, in the field as possible.
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] So it’s been about fourteen years that,
that I’ve been doing the snowshoe hare research.
Studying population dynamics of hares gave me a really great appreciation for how
many different ways hares can die, and that of course is quite important for forest management.
So, for example, James will study...
[James] I am kind of like a CSI investigator.
I'm investigating the, the scene of some mortality event, or hopefully some survival event,
that has happened in the past. And once I reach that site with the GPS,
I take a canopy closure photo looking straight up through the forest canopy;
and I use that photo to measure the percent closure that the forest has at that location.
From that location I measure three different sub plots, and at those sub plots,
five meters from the plots center, I measure the horizontal cover.
At those sub plots I also measure the ground species diversity.
This is something that forest managers could use to maintain a persistence
of snowshoe hare populations in, in a forest; even though they want to
thin it or manage it in some way.
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] With this appreciation of how many ways hares
can die, it really set me up for this question of, 'well what happens when this white hare
is on a brown background?' So what happens when you have
a species whose change from brown to white is triggered by daylight? So daylight shortens,
but the snow perhaps doesn't come. Or daylight lengthens, but the snow
is already, is already gone. The big question here is
can hares adapt to climate change? There is a potential for adaptation,
both through evolution and through behavioral plasticity, or behavioral changes.
Brandon's project, uh, is looking at one of those components of behavioral plasticity.
[Brandon] The name of my project is, uh,
snowshoe hare behavioral response to a potential predator.
Our goal is to see if mismatched hares flee sooner than hares that are matched.
[hard static]
[Brandon] Pull the antenna up and you get a, you,
you get a signal back from the collar. It's like beep...beep...beep...
That's an alive signal.
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] Tucker is as good as anybody I’ve ever seen
in using radio telemetry to find animals. He's got a really uncanny sense, sense for that.
Walking in with the dog on a leash, so the hares never actually in danger,
and recording the distance at which the hare flees and the cover that the hare is hidden in,
relative to its camouflage.
[Brandon] I let my leash out to 24 feet,
the dog went in and the hare came out. It was pretty neat. The best one we've had so far.
We'll measure the flight initiation distance when the hare flees from the approaching predator.
[Brandon] It was hiding in the juniper,
and in the direction it fled...
[Tucker] He alerted by the dog.
[Brandon] Yeah. ...
And we take a picture from the hare’s perspective, or the hare’s eye level,
of that cut out to see the concealment seen from the hare’s perspective. ...
Uh yeah I tried to get as much lead as possible; and I did, and it worked.
[whistles - Sage, come here girl]
[Brandon] Well they call us the red headed dynamic duo,
because we do match. I mean I’ve been up there
almost every, every weekend this semester and she's been right there next to me.
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] You learn so much everyday with,
when you're out working with dedicated, passionate, competent, uh, students.
And this enthusiasm; that's always invigorating for me to see.
[hard static]
[Tucker] There we go, there's one. *beep...beep*
[Brandon] How many do we have that are alive right now?
[Tucker] About five.
[Brandon] About five?
[Tucker] Mmhmm...
[Dr. L. Scott Mills] You can't get too attached to something
that only lives for a few months and then is killed by a predator.
They're an amazing species and, and obviously there, they're,
if I may say so myself, they're photogenic and charismatic.
[tailgate shuts]
[truck doors slams]
[truck starts up and drives away]