Animal psychology for camera trappers – Part 3

The late Stanley Young (1889-1969) trapped predators for the Bureau of Biological Survey and documented the demise of Colorado’s loner wolves.

The loners were habitual cattle killers, often trap-maimed and sometimes idiosyncratic animals with monikers like Old Two Toes and Club Foot.

The Custer wolf kept company with coyotes. Killer was coyotecidal, and Whitey had a penchant for bobbing the tails of cattle.

They were notorious at eluding federal trappers and postponing the fateful grip of the Newhouse No. 4 ½ -- a forged steel double long-spring, smooth-jaw trap with drag chain and grapple.

But eventually they erred, and the traps got them.

The longevity and killing rate of individual loners has recently been called into question.

The estimated ages of those loners whose skulls reside in museum collections are too young to account for the lifetime kills attributed to them. It’s more likely that several animals including dogs and wolf-dog hybrids contributed to the record.

But no one can deny the loners’ uncanny ability to detect the trappers’ painstaking efforts at disguise and deception. They could scent danger from minute traces and sidestepped hidden traps.

But if a trapped wolf twisted off part of its foot and escaped it wasn’t an experience it forgot. It was a powerfully painful learning experience, and relevant to discussions about the hurtful effects of camera traps.

So first let's talk about learning associated with pain.

It seems likely that, unlike children, loner wolves got the message after a single close call with fate. This is called single-trial learning

No matter how attractive the bait or lure, trap-wise loners fled trapping sites as soon as human scent was detected.

This type of operant conditioning is known simply as punishment.

Surviving a strychnine-laced bait had the same effect. We have all experienced conditioned food aversion – that long lasting food-specific loathing from food poisoning.

Conditioning can be specific to a given context. A trap-shy wolf might respond to human scent with conditioned avoidance when encountering a hidden trap, but not when encountering a flock of corralled sheep.

If the animal encounters the stimulus in a different context and doesn’t give the conditioned response, it is said to discriminate between situations.

The loners seemed to recognize the danger-laden stimulus of human scent in different contexts, and thus showed stimulus generalization. You can call this survival instinct.

Let’s compare these forms of punishment with the alleged “hurt” caused by camera traps.

Encountering a camera trap for the first time can be a surprising or unexpected experience for an animal. It may also be an alarming experience, but most of the time cameras do not evoke strong fearful responses, and initial vigilance quickly wanes.

Animals habituate to trail cameras because fear is not reinforced with painful stimuli. A repeating electronic flash may be ignored or investigated, but isn’t shunned.

All circumstantial evidence indicates that habituation is the prevailing response of wildlife to cameras left in the woods.

References
Gipson, P. S., W. B. Ballard, and R. M. Nowak. 1998. Famous North American wolves and the credibility of early wildlife literature. Widllife Society Bulletin, 26(4):808-816.

Young, S.P. 1970. The last of the loners. The MacMillan Company, New York.

Animal psychology for camera trappers – Part 2

Mammals and birds quickly learn to associate related stimuli or events.  Associative learning includes classical (or Pavlovian) conditioning and operant conditioning, as well as simpler forms of learning, such as habituation.

Camera-trap an area over time and there is a good chance your subjects will make an association between the camera and the olfactory and visual stimuli you leave behind.  

If you thought your camera trapping shenanigans in the woods were unnoticed, guess again. Chances are local wildlife knows the camera is there, and they are not afraid of it.

You will fool them more often if you set your cams in new areas where the residents have never encountered you and your equipment.  

The regulars who appear in your pictures may not know who or what you are, but in their universe or Umwelt you are a distinct blend of stimuli.

Why? Because you smell, and so does your camera, which also flashes and makes sounds.  

Whenever you venture into the field, you inadvertently scent mark your path and equipment.  

Unless you take extreme measures. Then you can reduce your scent by washing with unscented soap, wearing clean clothes, and masking your scent.

The best way to mask scent is to thrash your body like a Finlander in the sauna. No need to strip down or surround yourself with svelte blonds, just beat yourself with aromatic plants like bay or sage until you smell like trampled plants.  

The new carbon-impregnated clothes on the market may help to absorb some of your smells before they give you away.

Or you can spray yourself with Stumpy’s root juice.

But generally speaking, odor prophylaxis can be rather tedious, and scent-cleansing rituals will not render you smell-anonymous.

If you use scent lures or bait, like road kill, you reward the animal to tolerate the proximity of the camera.

Everything about the scent lure reaction -- from intensive sniffing, to slobbering, rubbing  and rolling in the scent, as well as evacuating the bladder and bowel -- indicates they find it highly compelling and meaningful.

The camera becomes an accessory to pleasure. 

I have a hunch – let’s call it a hypothesis -- that when resident animals cross your scent trail they may search for your camera, because food and scent have repeatedly reinforced tracking your scent trail.

Your scent is a cue to seek the reward of “good smells and eats”.

I believe this is more likely in species have relatively small home ranges, because the probability of camera encounters is relatively high.  We’re talking here about wood rats, gray foxes, skunks, opossums, and racooons.

On the other hand, baits and scents may be less habit forming in far-ranging species like mountain lions, wolverines, fishers, bobcats, and coyotes.

It takes more time for them to make their rounds in their larger home ranges. Positive reinforcement will not occur until the animals have been repeatedly rewarded. 

In support of this idea I would point to the tigers in Nepal’s Chitawan National Park. 

Though they killed tethered buffaloes at a bait site near Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge, radio-tracking showed that they ranged as far and wide as other tigers in adjacent home ranges. In other words, they maintained their usual beat in search of prey. Some cats however became habitual bait visitors.

Okay, I've slipped from animal psychology to arm chair theorizing. Now someone needs to collect the data.