Year funded 2020
Project: Quail surveys to connect red wolf presence to quail survival
Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, Wildlands Network was able to hire two North Carolina State University wildlife/forestry undergraduates to work as summer interns on the quail project. Field work began June 1, and continued to August 7.
The two interns conducted 190 point counts for bobwhite quail, each five minutes long, at a range of sites across the red wolf recovery area. During those surveys well over 1500 quail calls were heard, representing at least 200 birds.
It is apparent that the large fields at the north end of the refuge continue to hold abundant quail populations, as our anecdotal observations had indicated. These fields also happen to be the preferred hunting grounds of the red wolves that live in the refuge. The interns also rotated a set of 20 cameras twice around the wildlife refuges, yielding a total of 39 placements and thousands of images.
Red wolf Camera Trap Photo Selection
Using WildLife Canada funds, Wildlands Network was able to hire a third intern, a recent graduate from North Carolina State University, to work on sorting through their impressive catalog of red wolf camera trap photos to pick out the best images for later use. From 186,000 photos of wildlife, the intern narrowed it down to the top 3000 or so photos. These favorites are further broken down by species, so it will now be easy for them to pinpoint their top photos of deer, wolves, bear, bobcat, etc. Having this arduous task completed puts us in a great position for gearing up to create a red wolf science-advocacy video in the next phase of our Wildaid-funded project.
