Conducting elk research (horsing around) in Canada
I spent the month of January and March on the Ya Ha Tinda Ranch in Alberta, Canada capturing female elk as part of my PhD research project. Using horses that are trained to be calm around elk and position the rider for darting opportunities, we are able to get close enough to the elk herd (approximately 20-30 meters) to use a dart gun to immobilize female elk.
This technique allows us to select which elk we capture which is essential to keep working GPS collars on animals that can live up to 20 years. We captured 39 female elk in March and attached GPS collars that will send us location data every 13 hours. We will use this data to monitor adult female movement and survival as well as calf survival. While processing the elk, we drew blood for pregnancy, genetic, and disease analysis; took fecal and tick samples for parasite analysis; and measured the amount of fat on the rump and depth of the loin using an ultrasound to determine body condition.
Hans Martin, PhD student, and Colleen Sutheimer, Research Assistant, process an adult female elk.
My research is part of the long-term Ya Ha Tinda Elk and Predator project, one of the longest running elk studies in North America with over 16 years of data on the population dynamics and migratory movements of the Ya Ha Tinda elk herd. This herd declined from a count of about 2,200 in the 1990’s to about 4-500 individuals in recent years and is partially migratory, meaning that some individuals migrate and some remain on the wintering area year round.
This particular herd has three migratory segments, western migrants (15-20% of the herd) migrate into Banff National Park, eastern migrants (27% of the herd) migrate to provincial lands exposed to oil and gas development and logging, and residents(40-50% of the herd) remain on the winter range year round spending most of their time on a Parks Canada horse ranch.
Early on in the study, it appeared that migrants and residents had similar life-time fitness, but differences in survival and reproduction. Scott Eggeman, a previous graduate student at the University of Montana, found that individuals were switching between being resident and migrant and vice versa at an average rate of 15% per year. This means that unless you can track the same individual throughout its life, it is difficult to know how differences in survival and reproduction between these strategies affect the population. Using our long-term data on survival, reproduction, and migration, I plan to use advanced statistical methods to determine how and if this switching behavior has affected population dynamics in this elk herd.
Measuring rump fat (left image) and loin thickness (right image), using ultrasonography.
If you want to learn more about research conducted by the Ya Ha Tinda Elk and Predator Project, please visit our web site.
- Hans Martin, PhD student in Fish & Wildlife Biology
