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In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with James Helferich and Dr. Lisanne Petracca about the ocelot project in Texas.
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Where to find Dr. Lisanne: Website
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt 0:09
Hello, and welcome to the K9Conservationists podcast, where we are positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs. Join us every other Tuesday to talk about detection training, canine welfare, conservation biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla Fratt, one of three co founders of K9Conservationists, where we train dogs to detect data for researchers, NGOs and agencies.
Today, I’d like to give a shout out to our student Sho Rapley. Y’all heard Sho on the show a while ago talking about training her Kelpie to find drop GPS trackers from birds during her PhD. And one of the things I admire most about show is just her creativity when she’s bringing dogs to conservation questions. She really thinks differently and is super diligent about how to address these questions about bringing dogs and conservation together, and does an awesome job testing out those theories as well. It’s just been so fun to like, get to watch all of her projects unfold in our student groups and learn a lot from her.
So today is the first of we’re doing a little bit of a two parter about our recent project, helping out find ocelot scat in South Texas. So today we’re talking to the two researchers most involved in this project, and then in two weeks, y’all will hear from Lauren Wendt about how the work on the ground actually went. So James, why don’t we start out with you introducing yourself. Tell us a little bit about your history, what brought you to this project, and I don’t know if you’ve got dogs or other hobbies you want to tell us about. That’s great, too.
James Helfrich 1:27
Yeah. Thank you, Kayla, thank you so much for having us on I’m really excited to talk about this project and to kind of share the work we’ve been doing. So my name is James Helfrich. I’m a PhD student in Dr. Lisanne Petracca’s lab at Texas A & M University-Kingsville. I’m originally from the upstate New York area. I did my undergrad at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and Wildlife Science. While I was up there, I did a lot of work with the New York State DEC. I did some, like, deer work, and got into like, biometrics work. I eventually made my way down to Mississippi, where I worked on some rattlesnake projects. I did a lot with endangered rattlesnake conservation for Eastern Mississauga got really into population modeling and in population ecology and density estimation. And that’s kind of how I ended up here with Dr pachaca is working on density estimation. That’s showing one of my main focuses and backgrounds. So, you know, the project here is trying to figure out how many OS lots there are. And I thought that was really, really exciting. So I was very excited to apply, and was lucky enough to be brought on board.
Kayla Fratt 2:25
Yeah, it’s definitely a cool project. I know we just keep talking about it within our team of like, man, we got to work on ocelots in the US. Like, how cool is that? So yeah, Lisanne, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your lab and what you all are up to. And, I mean, also give us your a little bit of your a little bit of your personal background as much as you care to share.
Lisanne Petracca 2:43
Sure. So most importantly, I am the owner of a 10 and a half year old english bulldog named George who is somehow still alive after battling every health issue under the sun. I love her to death, and she’s the reason my world turns. So about me, I’m originally from New Jersey, and you know, my mom was living there up until recently, she’s now in South Texas. Whoop, whoop. Yeah, so let’s see, I got my master’s from Duke University during that time is when I started wading into the big cat world from like a GIS remote sensing perspective. Those skills I got during that degree led me to be hired by Panthera as a geospatial analyst, and so I was a geospatial analyst for a while, and then a conservation scientist for a while. And during that time, I got my PhD at SUNY ESF, where James did his undergrad. And so we were in Syracuse at the same time, but we were like two ships passing in the night. And then I, when I left Panthera, went out to do my postdoc at the University of Washington, working on wolves with Sarah converse and Beth Gardner. And then after a few years there, I was lucky enough to land this position as Assistant Professor of carnivore ecology at the Cesar Claiborne Wildlife Research Institute and Texas A & M-Kingsville. Man, saying my job is always, it takes like forever to say so I am the principal investigator of the spatial and population ecology of carnivores lab. So we call ourselves the spec lab, and we have, let’s see we have seven students, a program manager, an undergraduate, two full time technicians. Who am I missing? Oh, a postdoctoral, basically, an assistant research professor. Professor, and we focus on quantitative approaches to carnivore ecology and management we have so at the moment, I’m working on projects relating to both recovery of the federally listed Ocelot and also to establishing some baseline information on Mount lions here in south Texas. So recently, we put the first GPS collars ever on mountain lions here in south Texas. There was very little known about lions in this part of the United States. There was no formal management of mountain lions. So yeah, with the ocelot work and the mountain lion work, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on down here.
Kayla Fratt 5:47
Yeah, yeah. It’s so, so neat. And I guess I also kind of forgot that y’all would have mountain lions down there. The range of mountain lions and where they show up is just it never stops surprising me.
Lisanne Petracca 6:01
Yeah, yeah. And what’s, what’s crazy is that here in Texas there is no management, so they are non game, so they can be taken in any quantity by any means necessary. And Texas is 95% private lands as well. So it’s a really, really interesting place to be studying a large carnivore, that’s for sure.
Kayla Fratt 6:23
Yeah, that’s fascinating. Yeah. Well, we’ll come back and talk about that in some other episodes. Today, we got to talk about Assad’s. So, yeah, we should actually start way back at the beginning. I’m thinking so not just I was going to start with, like, the history of ocelots in the US. Like, do people even know that ocelots are here? I think a lot of people probably don’t, but I’m also realizing we’ve got a lot of dog people in our audience who might not even know what an ocelot is. So what do they look like? What are they? They might not know an ocelot from a sea cucumber.
James Helfrich 6:58
Yeah. So ocelots are one of the last remaining or, I think the only remaining spotted tropical felit in the United States. So they are a small cat species. They’re like, a little bit smaller, about the same size as a bobcat. They’re pretty they’re stockier than, like a margay or like a jaguar, and they have more of a stockier frame. And they look they have the beautiful rosette patterns that one of the spotted tropical fat cats are so famous for. They, you know, hunt small mammals and birds and that kind of thing. So they’re really, really cool cats, but they’re just really small, not really small, but a small felid that they get in there, one of the last, if not the last tropical cat left, kind of the United States, especially spotted cats, yeah, yeah.
Lisanne Petracca 7:46
And for a sense of size, they range between, you know, 15 and 35 pounds as adults. You know, there was one that the team caught that was, you know, 30 pounds, which is like a huge, huge Ocelot that is on in the upper kind of range of their weights.
Kayla Fratt 8:06
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s a that’s a small border collie that’s bigger than I then, I think especially when I was a kid, I’m not entirely sure as that. As a kid, I really knew the difference between ocelots and margays and onseas and all the other little tropical cats. But I think I always thought of Assad’s as more like, yeah, maybe a big barn cat. And yeah, they, I think they can be quite a bit bigger than the most healthy domestic cats, at least. So yeah, how have ocelots always been extremely limited in the US, or was, what is their kind of historic range? And if it was larger, why has it shrunk?
James Helfrich 8:49
Yeah, so, you know, obviously ocelots are pretty prevalent in South America and Central America. They have and still are, but the ocelot seem to be very prevalent in the southern United States. So they used to be, the range used to be throughout Texas, parts of Oklahoma, parts of Arkansas, parts Louisiana. So used to be very, very wide ranging within the southern United States. However, you know, obviously in past turn of the century and all the industrialization and people moving about and being all up here, you know, habitat loss and harvest really are the two main reasons the range has been really, really restricted from those areas. So they’re really habitat specialists. They use these dense thorn scrub areas, a lot of which has been lost in Texas. So right now, you know, at one point, they were throughout most of the state, in multiple other southern states, and now they’re really in these very isolated pockets, very small and isolated populations at the very southern tip of Texas, right by the Mexican border.
Kayla Fratt 9:43
Gotcha. And we might not know this yet, so I might be asking questions that I don’t mean to be gotchas. But are these populations kind of being supplemented by healthier populations right across the border, or are these populations relatively self sustaining, still
James Helfrich 9:59
and. Far as we don’t know, most of these, we consider these populations to be isolated from their kind of Mexican counterparts.
Lisanne Petracca 10:07
That’s a Yeah. And a note on that is that, you know, for the longest time, you know, there’s just been this, this narrative that you know, there are two populations that are becoming genetically divergent. You know, you have your ranch population, which is on private lands, and then you have your refuge population, that is at a National Wildlife Refuge. They’re separated by 20 miles. And you know, they’d always been considered because of some genetic results suggesting that the refuge population was becoming more and more inbred and divergent, that these populations were in contemporary times, fully isolated, despite the fact that they’re only separated by 20 miles. Yeah. So what’s interesting though is that last month, an animal that was caught the year before in the ranch population was captured in the refuge population. So this was the first time in 40 years of tracking these cats that this exchange has been formally documented. Now it may have happened and evaded our detection as scientists, but this is the first time that we had seen this exchange of individual. Now, this individual named Lewis would need to reproduce in order for that genetic exchange to actually happen, but it was really, really exciting that these two populations that we had considered completely cut off from one another may have more connectivity than realized. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 11:47
gosh, I hope that’s something that you get to see more and more of. And it’s not that you just captured the one in 40 years. But this actually, these populations aren’t as isolated as that. So that 20 miles, you know, on one hand, 20 miles is nothing for medium to large carnivores. But on the other hand, you know, fragmentation is is tough. So what does that 20 mile stretch look like? Is this like strip mall Central? Is it ranches like? What makes it so challenging? Connectivity wise,
James Helfrich 12:18
it’s it’s ranch Central. So it’s a lot of private ranches. And you know, maybe we saying you could speak to the specifics, but I believe it’s, you know, cattle ranch area, some wind farm areas, probably. And
Lisanne Petracca 12:31
there’s roads that need to be traversed as well, with roads being a high source of mortality for ocelots. There is. So if you look it up on Google Earth, there does seem to be some wetlandy type areas along the eastern side that perhaps was used as a corridor of sorts, but at some point the cat would have had to cross highways. And these are South Texas highways. They’re what like four lane but those roads would need to be crossed to make that connection.
Kayla Fratt 13:03
Yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, that’s, it’s quite the track. And, you know, they don’t necessarily have the map to look at and pick out their best route when they’re when they’re thinking about dispersing. So this was not a cat that was collared, so you wouldn’t be able to know the exact route he took. My understanding that, right?
Lisanne Petracca 13:22
No, we had a PIT tag put in it when it was on the the ranch population, so we were able to identify it by its PIT tag. And now that you know, it’s not imperative that an animal does need to cross a four lane highway, there is a means of getting between the ranch and refuge where that road crossing doesn’t need to happen, but it is, you know, private lands. And, you know, you know, it’s not protected, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 13:49
yeah, yeah. And so I’m assuming cars are a big risk for them nowadays. Is there still any, like, harvest or take of ocelots, or at this point, are they relatively just, you know, it’s small population, fragmented population, and cars being the main problems.
James Helfrich 14:08
Yeah, so, you know, they’re federally protected, federally endangered, so it’s very illegal to harvest one. So roads and car mortalities is really the main thing we’re looking at right now. That’s, yeah, been a topic conversation a lot with one of their main source of mortality being cars. Yeah, yeah, that’s however.
Lisanne Petracca 14:26
What’s interesting is bobcats and ocelots can look really, really similar down here. So bobcats are super spotted. In fact, our undergrad workers often think on a camera trap that a bobcat is an ocelot. And anyway, so there, there was a story where, yeah, because the rival high school mascot was a bobcat, someone from the rival school, you know, thought they. Killed a bobcat. And was like, yeah, like, yeah, you guys are going down in that football game, and it was an ocelot.
Kayla Fratt 15:09
I did not know that story.
Lisanne Petracca 15:11
Oh, yeah, that’s a story that an undergrad of mine told me, and I’m, I hope I’m not putting someone on blast out there, but yeah, so, so there are accidents that happen that are certainly not intentional.
Kayla Fratt 15:22
Yeah, I’m looking at, I just did a quick Google of, like, South Texas bobcat. And I’m shocked how, I mean, they’ve got a much lighter coat than what I’m used to seeing in the north as well. So they don’t have that really pronounced, like the little triangle cheek hairs, which, I mean, that’s also kind of a links thing, but just looking at some of the coat length, and, yeah, some of them are so spotted, okay? And a couple of these are definitely ocelots as well. They’ve got rosettes. Oh, that’s from the Lewiston lab, SDSU, ocelots and bobcats anyway, yeah. So if you’re, if you’re, if you’re dubious of this, definitely do a Google. There’s actually a one photo of a guy with a harvested bobcat, where I’m shocked how spotty it looks.
Lisanne Petracca 16:10
Super spotty down here.
Kayla Fratt 16:11
Yeah, yeah, that’s really cool. They’re beautiful. So Lisanne, can you tell us a little bit about maybe some of the so that’s, that’s the state of assaults in Texas right now. What is your lab working on? And then we’ll use that as a launching point to dive deeply into James’s work.
Lisanne Petracca 16:26
Sure, so the work that we’re doing, so essentially, we landed a large contract from US Fish and Wildlife to work on the recovery of ocelots here in south Texas, and this is a project that we are not doing alone. So we’re working with East Foundation. We are working with National Resources Institute at Texas A and M College Station. We are working with fish and wildlife. We’re working with the Cincinnati Zoo. So essentially, what we’re working towards is, first of all, establishing a baseline of what we know about ocelots here in south Texas. And we’re also working towards a reintroduction to what is considered, you know, a third population of wild ocelots, and that is to buffer against, you know, some of these stochastic events that could be impacting the two extant populations. So where this third population is intended to go is, you know, away from high volume, high speed roads. You know, it’s away from the coast, so buffering against hurricane events, it is on a parcel of land that is conducive, ownership wise, to having Ocelot presence. So that is where this team that goes beyond, you know me and the lab, that’s where that’s what we’re all working towards. And so to that end, yeah, there. There are a lot of different projects going on. So James’s project is, is arguably, well, yeah, there’s a couple, but this is one of the ones to really establish that baseline. So, you know, with this recovery stuff, you know, the recovery goals, according to the recovery plan, are very numbers focused. So, you know, we need 200 ocelots in South Texas split this way. And it’s like, well, hold on a second. Have we ever, have we ever truly understood how many ocelots there are to start with? What, what is the baseline? And, you know, and that, and that’s not because, you know, this hasn’t crossed people’s minds. It’s because it requires a lot of cameras and a lot of funding, and we have that now. So it’s not like no one had ever thought of this before, but now we have the resources to be able to do that well, and that’s where James’s project comes in with, I mean, flooding Ocelot habitat, we have access to getting densities, being able to extrapolate those numbers to the rest of intact tamale. Tamale and birds grow up here in south Texas, and using two different methods, so both cameras and also scat dogs to determine, you know, what is most efficacious when you have, you know, a low density, endangered species in tough habitat, you know what is? What is the best way? I have a student focusing on genomics, which is 100% not my expertise at all. But when you’re a PI principal investigator, you have to kind of become a jack of all trades. So I have a student focusing on, you know, next gen sequencing and using snips, which are single nucleotide polymorphisms, to get a sense of what the current, you know, state of genomics is for ocelots, you know, in these two extant populations, you know, what is the genetic diversity? What is the level of inbreeding? If there is a. Genetic bottleneck. You know? When did that bottleneck occur? I have a student working with me, and Dr olyn Martin, who’s an epidemiologist who and we are working on a three felid system. So we are working with the ocelots, we’re working with the bobcats, and we’re working with putting collars on domestic cats as well. So TLDR version is there’s in the ranch population. There is a nearby kind of feral cat population in a town called port ansfield. And so we’re collaring all three species and looking at how they are interacting in space. We are going to be taking, we already have taken biological samples, and we’re going to be screening for a certain virus that is common among felids to determine kind of directionality of transmission. So first of all, prevalence is this virus in all three species, and if so, what is that directionality? So it could be that bobcats are serving as kind of a non competent post, so they’re a buffer preventing the species from getting from this, this virus, from getting from domestic cats to ocelots, or they could be the vector. So that’s that’s a really, really cool study that is, again, the spatial stuff completely in my wheelhouse, this sequencing of a virus and determining disease transmission, not my wheelhouse. So that’s why it’s really neat to work with those with different skill sets to kind of do your best work. And lastly, is another kind of baseline question that hasn’t been answered before, is looking at both bobcat and Ocelot reproduction and kitten survival. So we’re hoping that in the near future, we’ll have permission to do this for bobcats. At the moment, with any endangered species, there’s some permitting stuff that you have to go through. But we’re looking to put these little, teeny kitten collars on bobcats, once we establish where a den site is. And these collars are super, super cool, where through VHF, they can actually communicate with the mom’s GPS collar. So rather than having to be out there every day, you know, with your, you know, VHF and trying to determine, oh, are these kittens around? Are they alive? Those kitten collars are commuting directly with the mom’s GPS collar, and we compare two kitten collars at a time. Thankfully, ocelots don’t have more than two kittens and a litter bobcats, they do, so we’ll have to cross that bridge, but we’re going to be getting at estimates of kitten survival, and also just looking at general den site selection. You know, when, where these bobcats and ocelots are choosing to put their dens? You know? Is that in line with their overall habitat selection, or is there something different going on? And yeah, we have a student on that who has two years of experience with ocelots already down at Laguna, Atascosa, that refuge population. So she’s, she’s kind of the one to lead that project. And yeah, I’ve got a, I’ve got a really, really great team. Oh
Kayla Fratt 23:20
my gosh, yeah, those are so so many cool, different projects, all just rotating around the same question, the same problem I have, like so many different directions. I want to go and ask questions about these kitten collars, though that’s that’s the first thing. I assume they have some way to stretch and grow when you say they connect with mom’s collar and but that means you don’t have to be out there with the telemetry. So for someone who’s less familiar with what these GPS collars are like and how they work, what can you break that down a little bit?
Lisanne Petracca 23:51
Sure. Yeah, so we haven’t deployed them yet, so speaking from a place of largely ignorance, but how this is going to work, I hope, is that, essentially, you know, the the moms caller is one that will have GPS capabilities, so we can get, you know, exact locations. And you know, once a day, twice a day, that caller will communicate with the satellite and get those data, you know, sent to us from a remote portal so we can track where these animals are in real time. So these kitten callers will not have GPS capability, but they do have the ability to kind of talk to the mom’s caller. So essentially, we haven’t programmed them yet, but I believe that essentially, these callers will check in with the mom at a certain interval, whether it’s hourly, whether it’s twice a day, whatever we decide, because we want battery life. And essentially, the mom’s caller will send us a signal when the. Mom and the kitten have been separated for a certain amount of time. So we would expect, you know, a few hours when the mom’s out on a foraging mission, you know, bringing back food for the kittens or or however that is. But we would not expect, you know, 24 hours to go by where the mother and the kitten are not physically together. So essentially, what the mom’s caller will be able to tell us is, hey, alert, this mom has been separated from one of her kittens now for a very long time. That would suggest that there has been a mortality, and we would be able to go out there and scan for the kittens collar and determine what happened to that kitten, kitten survival and felids. You know, obviously, is not as high as as that you know of an adult. You know, it’s, it’s a tough life. You’re open to predators such as coyotes. Also in times of resource stress, you know, there may only be enough resources to support one of the two so but yeah, there, there. We don’t. There was a study done on data from the 1990s that was trying to get at this. They were not able to follow the fitness for the full year, and that is what we hope to do.
Kayla Fratt 26:17
Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah. I can’t wait to see all that when it comes out in, yeah, 357, years, whatever, whatever it all happens.
Lisanne Petracca 26:24
It’s a master’s project. So we’re hoping that, at least for bobcats, we can put Yeah, that we can get our eyes on a fair number of dens. You know, collar those females get collars on kittens. And yeah, we’ll, we’ll see how it goes,
Kayla Fratt 26:40
yeah. Oh, that’s so neat. Yeah. And so it sounds like for then, kind of rewinding a little bit to this feral cat, Bobcat Ocelot question be, are we thinking that bobcats are either buffers or vectors, mostly because there’s more of them, or are they more likely to kind of be in that, in that interface between the two species, kind of spatially as well.
Lisanne Petracca 27:04
Yeah. So I think both are true. Well, James’s study will help us understand, you know, relative density of ocelots and bobcats on that ranch population. But something that I didn’t say that is a very important point is that? Yeah. So the the domestic cats tend to be, you know, in this more, you know, human dominated type town, the ocelots are firmly in the thorn scrub in this ranch population. And the Bobcats being habitat generalists, they’re, they’re all over the map. So, so it’s that spatial segregation is the reason why we’re thinking that, you know, bobcats could be either a buffer or a vector.
Kayla Fratt 27:46
Yeah. Okay, that makes sense, yeah. And it’s just so interesting thinking, you know, I’m much more familiar with like Guatemala and El Salvador. Felids and their ocelots are probably the most generalist, and they’re the ones that are more likely to be close to farms other than the Jaguar news also seem to be really tolerant of particularly coffee plantations in El Salvador. If you look at the maps, it’s like, oh, they don’t mind that all of this is just coffee, or they probably mind some, but less so than the margays and the ocelots are kind of in between, and it’s interesting, yeah, I guess here in south Texas more it’s kind of battle of the generalists and the ocelots have chosen to be specifies, I guess. Yeah, that’s how interesting. Because, yeah, I’m only used to thinking about ocelots and how they fit in, in relation to other spotted tropical kitties, and not related to Bobcats at all. Yeah.
Lisanne Petracca 28:38
Yeah. It is super interesting, by the way. So I come from, you know, I’ve done a lot of work with Jaguar. I’ve done work with African lion, but, you know, with Jaguar, work. So I did, you know, a bunch of work in Belize. I’ve traveled all through Central America when I was in my role at Panthera. And it’s so strange that a species that is of Least Concern, you know, globally IUCN, they are of Least Concern. They’re of such imperiled status here in the United States. So I’m used to ocelots just like it’s bycatch data, like we want to know where, we want to know where the Jaguars are and where the Pumas are, yeah. And now, you know, ocelots are like gold and the and, you know, their recovery again, 12 point 2 million from us, fish and wildlife, to bring about their recovery and reintroduction. It’s, it’s, it’s phenomenal, yeah, to see this happening.
Kayla Fratt 29:36
Yeah. Oh, that’s great. So okay, so James, can you tell us a little bit about, like, what are the questions driving your research and some of the other tactics that you’re using so far to try to collect that data. And then we’ll finally get to dogs. I know some of the listeners are like, I’m ever gonna talk about dogs here? But no, we’re talking about cats first.
James Helfrich 29:54
Yeah, of course. And luckily, dogs will play kind of a big part in in some of my methods and what I’m working on. So I. Lisa and I talked a little bit earlier about establishing these baseline numbers and the fact that really, like, we have this goal of reproduction, and this goal of, you know, Oslo out to the future of Texas, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna do all this work, but we haven’t had a really strong baseline. How many are there cancer, right? So my background is a bit in density estimation and abundance estimation, which is, you know, what really interests me about this project. So if you Google like ocelots in Texas, or can you read news articles? You see a couple like numbers floating around for how many there are a lot of things like news articles will say less than 100 or you could say, See like around 80, or like somewhere in that range. But really, we don’t. We haven’t had the resources to fully go out and get, like, a really, really robust, solid, like, this is how many are in these populations. This is how many are probably in the state. That’s my goal. That’s kind of the overarching theme of my, of my PhD work, is just how many offsets are there? What’s their density? What are the landscape variables that influence their density? So my first kind of goal is specifically related to these two populations, and we are just flooding the two populations with cameras to try to get an abundance estimate. So a lot of my work in capture, recapture, for those unfamiliar, is really you can monitor these populations over time and with cameras or with dogs and get individual IDs. And essentially, you can do some math that relates to how often you capture the same individual versus how often you capture a different individual, and get abundance estimates. That’s kind of the very basic math of how we get abundance and essay estimates is by figuring out how likely you are to capture an individual on a camera or with a scat dog. So yeah, this was
Kayla Fratt 31:53
actually something that had crossed my mind while Lisanne was talking, and I didn’t. I lost, lost track of it was so with ocelots, I assume that it’s kind of like jaguars, where we can based on spot patterns, we can re identify individuals exactly images. Okay, cool,
James Helfrich 32:07
yeah, yes, that’s really why these cameras are so important. So we’re putting we have. We bought 500 cameras for hopefully buying more soon. So we’re gonna put 500 cameras out across both the branch population and the refuge population, and try to just get a good estimate. Also can do Bobcat estimates. So we can say, hey, what’s the spatial distribution of Bobcat density, and how does that relate to Oslo density? We can also get, I’m sorry, we can also get information on the landscape. So we can say, How does like, this type of thorn scrub or this density of vegetation relate to their density of ocelots? So we Kay, ocelots are really, really dense. And, you know, five foot high this species thorn scrub in less dense and, you know, open fields and stuff like that, sure. So we can really get a lot of the work out. Work I do is merging both just raw budget estimates with spatial information.
Kayla Fratt 33:09
Yeah, oh, cool. And yeah, I think it’s so it’s so cool to think about. Okay, so is there is good habitat, just good habitat. So then we’re gonna maybe run into areas where both popular both types of cat are at higher densities, or are they segregating? Yeah. And how are they thinking through this? And thank you for the explanation as well. Of kind of some of that Mark recapture, like, how we actually get an abundance? Because it’s not. It’s a lot more complicated than just, Okay, how many pictures of ocelots did we guess? Yeah,
James Helfrich 33:41
what’s really cool about some of the working with the team we’re working with now is we do have these collars on these animals, and there are ways to integrate collar information into the density estimates based on resource selection functions, which is really cool. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 33:53
I think, I think a couple of my lab knights do some of that sort of stuff. I’ve got so many lab nights, it’s hard to keep keep track of what they’re all working on, but that sounds like something we talk about in lab meeting. So cool. So what you know? I know there’s, there’s been some research in the past, kind of looking at how dogs and cameras can interact and how they can complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but I’m not sure we’ve talked about it on the podcast. So do you want to take us through a little bit of why? You know? Why dogs and cameras? Why not hair traps and cameras, or hair traps and GPS collars or and, you know, maybe, maybe it’s just, why did we pick these two?
James Helfrich 34:37
So I’ll start with cameras, which is historically been what people have used for spotting elusive cats, right? It’s, if you some of the initial like Mark recapture literature, a lot of that focuses on like rodents in like these German traps, it’s like, we can’t just trap ocelots the same way. We can trap rodents and release them and get that as our abundance estimate, especially because with. This endangered species, it’s really important to get these non invasive methods. So by non invasive, we mean we’re not harming the animal in any way by having a walk past a camera like we would if we were, you know, actually trying to, like trap them, to like mark them in some way, like historic Mercury capture stuff that’s been done, yeah, so cameras and scat ducks both are what we’d consider non invasive, Mark recapture methods. So cameras are great because you can just put them out there and leave them and they take pictures for you, right? It’s it requires as much as it takes a lot of effort to put them out, as we’re experiencing now, comparatively to a lot of other methods, it does not require a lot of hands on effort every single day, because you can just kind of set it out and let it do its the let it do its let it do its thing, yeah. And because ocelots are have these rosette patterns, it’s very easy to ID individuals from pictures. And so I’m going to use, you know, some artificial intelligence programs, some of them, other things to really like, get these good ideas, so we can put a picture of an Oslo in the computer and tell us this is this individual. Oh, cool. We can use that to retain information on these individuals through time. So cameras are really great for that work, especially, again, all swats are fewer. They move around at night a lot. So it’s easy to get those infrared cameras. They can just go out, versus us trying to do something during the day to catch them. Now, the SCAP talk work is really, really really interesting. It has not been done before for ocelots in Texas. There has been some scat dog work out of our department before. There has been some scat work before, but nothing really focusing on ocelots and scat dogs and the scat not only doesn’t give us individual ID, but we get that genetic information because we can take the scat samples, we can run it through and find genetic ID, right? So it’s almost like doing a hair snare, right? Or if you have hair snares for bears or whatever, and they go through and you can do the ID of the hair also, I threw these Thorn scrubs. I don’t, I guess, I don’t know how vel hair snares work. That’s not something I’m very knowledgeable on. If that’s ever been tried with oscillators before, it was
Lisanne Petracca 37:00
not, it would not work for their coach, their type of coach. Yeah, I don’t see that working well. Also, I doubt we would be permitted to use something like hair snares on ocelots because they are enlisted species. So permitting, you just have to be like, extremely, extremely cautious.
James Helfrich 37:23
Yeah, if that makes sense. But scat, we can still get genetic ID, but like, the animal’s nowhere near the scat by the time we get to it, right? So in dogs, as we’ve experienced, really useful as they can, you know, sniff it out way easier than we can see it. Yeah? So really, the goal is to see we figured cameras would work pretty well. We’re pretty well. We’re pretty confident. We’ve got a lot of investment into these cameras, but we were really like, hey, no one’s really done scat dogs for ocelots in this region. We think it could be really cool. We think it could add a lot of additional information. So that’s why we contacted you. And we want to try to get this program started, just to see how well the scat dogs worked, right and supplement our abundance estimates with it.
Kayla Fratt 37:59
Yeah, exactly. I was just, I’m finishing up a proposal right now that’s talking about trying to compliment, you know, scat dogs and camera traps paired. And there’s a fair number of papers, if you kind of like, are in the scat dog literature, conservation dog literature, in Google Scholar, there’s a fair number of papers that are looking at, you know, comparing dogs and cameras or using them together to kind of supplement each other’s weaknesses. Because, yeah, one of the biggest things you can get out of scat that you can’t get out of a camera photo is what that animal has been eating. And hypothetically, in some cases, you can also get other things, like hormones and parasite loads and some of those sorts of things. A lot of those are trickier than I had originally understood now that I’m in a lab where a lot of my lab mates are working on those sorts of things, like your scats have to be in really good shape to get a lot of that sort of information. And I guess we didn’t talk about, you know, we’ll talk about this in two weeks with Lauren, quite a bit, but some of the the environmental conditions out there that might make scat challenging. We’ve talked a lot about Thorne, so I think that we, you know, we can hint at some of the location problems, but does that really thick underbrush also make it challenging with the cameras? What are some of the like, roadblocks you’re running into just because of the challenging environment you’re
James Helfrich 39:18
in? Yeah, so it’s to be honest. You know, access is a big issue. This is very hard to walk through. To actually physically place the cameras. We do a pretty good job of clearing out the vegetation. So, you know, we’ll put we, typically, when we decide a camera site, we’ll go out there. And what we’re looking for are used game trails in the thick thorn scrub, and ideally like convergences of game trails. So we can say, hey, if any, if there’s an awesome, if there’s any animal walking through this thorn scrub, it’s probably going to have to walk through this point based on where the game trails are. So that’s what we’re looking for when we set cameras. So yeah, League of all, and we have to clear vegetation. And it’s spring analysis right now. We have five, two technicians out there, and they have to go and clear. Your brush away from the cameras that it doesn’t, you know, the breeze doesn’t blow a leaf, and then it takes a million pictures and runs out of battery. So that is an issue with these high vegetation areas. But I still think it’s really neat. We get a lot of cool species, obviously, other than all thoughts, we have a couple of health stock animals that will knock them over sometimes, but we do we do pretty good, yeah, and
Lisanne Petracca 40:24
to add something to that. So, you know, as you know, the the origin of this idea really came from this thought of, how can we maximize, you know that bang for our buck quotient. So the camera work, as James mentioned, we have two full time technicians out there, and they’re going to be hired until this project ends. I mean, which is, you know, three and a half years from now. I mean, maintaining a camera grid like that is a serious, serious undertaking, accessing those cameras, having to clear the vegetation, you know, swap memory cards, change batteries, put them in in the first place. I mean, so in in this kind of habitat, there isn’t always, you know, the perfect tree, so we’re using T posts. So we’re just pounding T posts into the ground and that, those are camera sets. So it’s a lot of work, right? And it requires, you know, consistent effort over a long period to do what we want to do here, whereas the idea of scat dogs, it’s like, hold on a second. So also, each of those cameras cost us 500 so we’re using top of the line Reconyx, hyper fire twos. So not including the T post and the protective housing, those cameras are $500 oh my god, so and how many cameras are we ordering? James total for you, we’ve
James Helfrich 41:50
already bought 500 and we’re planning on ordering another 250 so we’ll be at close, closing in on probably north of a quarter million dollars total.
Kayla Fratt 42:00
Oh my Yeah, which is, and that’s just the camera gear,
Lisanne Petracca 42:04
the camera, so that is wild, right? Whereas I’m thinking, everyone’s like, Oh, scat dogs, yeah, they do really well, but, man, it’s expensive, and it’s like, well, I’m spending $250,000 on camera traps, so put a few really concentrated scat dog seasons be more efficacious, you know, for time and money, and so that was what I that we are seeking to answer here. You know what? What are the benefits, both, you know, from the scientific side, you know, how many individuals are being estimated by these two methods, but also cost effort, you know, not only the cost of those cameras, but two full time technicians out there every day doing this work. So that is something that we, we hope to answer and yeah, learn from this past season to make some adjustments to, yeah, so it’s, it’ll be a really good learning process, no matter the outcome.
Kayla Fratt 43:05
Yeah, absolutely no. It’s so cool, and that’s such a good reminder as well. I think it’s easy to think about the scat dogs. Part of the problem with scat dogs pricing wise, because that is, yeah, that is the most common problem that we run into, is that it’s an expensive service. It’s also, it’s a price that you have to pay every day that we’re out there and continues every year. And I think depending on your project and your goals and your setup, the cameras might be cheaper because you can, you know, you can continue using those same cameras, hopefully for many years to come. But you know, depending on what you’re trying to cover, it’s not always clear that the cost is the costs are very hard to compare. And that’s something we run into in almost all the papers that are looking at these different cost benefit analyzes, is it’s really hard to figure out. You know, sure, the cost per day of the dogs is really high, and then the the startup costs with the cameras is really high. And like, how do you how do you measure that?
James Helfrich 44:02
It’s hard, especially at the scale we’re working at, yeah, working at a very large scale for this type of project,
Kayla Fratt 44:10
yeah, yeah, that might be one of the largest camera projects I’ve ever heard of. I’ve got 100 for my upcoming work in Alaska, and I feel overwhelmed with that.
Lisanne Petracca 44:18
Well, we do have paired trap. So really, like you divide by two. So 750 divided by two. I mean, it’s still like a ton of cameras in vegetation that’s really, really hard to walk through. Also, there are, I have never been around more ticks in my life than here in south Texas. I mean, you walk through and you are just like smothered in ticks. It’s, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s no joke out there, but it really is, like, gorgeous country. The bird diversity is incredible. You get to see weird species like nilgai, which is a Pakistani ungulate that is, that is pretty. Much just made its home here in south Texas. So it’s really, it’s challenging, but I would say rewarding, though I’m not out there every single day, but it’s a really unique place to live and work. And
James Helfrich 45:16
just a sidebar, I just want to mention, because you mentioned the two cameras set up, just to as an anecdote. See why we do that is to get that individual ID from both side of the CO patterns. And we set up our camera traps. We put them, um, if angled, oops, facing towards each other, but angles slightly away, so that we can get, as an animal walks by, we can get both sides of its unique co pattern, yeah. So that’s why we do the two camera setup.
Kayla Fratt 45:40
Yeah. Thank
Lisanne Petracca 45:40
you for that clarification, James. I just breeze right past that like, yeah, it’s a paired setup, right?
Kayla Fratt 45:46
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is one of the things that I’ve been really trying to, like improve as as a podcaster, is remembering, like, the breadth of our audience, like we’ve got a small audience, but they’re anywhere from, like, hardcore dog people who just kind of think that the Working Dog side is cool, and they’re not ecologists at all, to, like, pretty hardcore ecologists who are, like, dog curious, and then a lot of excited amateurs that are a little knowledgeable about both. And then we’ve also definitely got, like, pros in the field, like, just trying to trying to hit everyone is challenging, and I’m sure we miss a lot of the time, but as long as we’re not missing the same group every time, I guess it’s okay. So is there any possibility of so I know you’re also doing some trap. You know you’re obviously doing some trapping to get the collars on. Can you then get the individual, the genetic individual ID matched to a coat pattern. So then, like hypothetically, so I’m just imagining it would be so cool if you can get the scats from the dogs matched to individuals on the cameras. Or is that not a gap that we know how to bridge yet, that
James Helfrich 46:57
is something I’d really, really like to work on. So we have been collecting scat from individuals when we capture them, yeah. So ideally, hopefully, we can take the scat we have into samples and see if any of it matches the scat we collect at actual workups and captures. And then we know when we work up an individual, we take pictures of it, and so that we can see that CO pattern match to camera. So hope, my hope, is we can use our workups and our actual capture effort to to bridge the gap between this gap we capture to the field and the cameras individual. So that’s something I’ve been thinking of. We’ll see if it works. Hopefully it works. I don’t know yet, but that’s the plan. Is to try to do something like that.
Kayla Fratt 47:37
Yeah, that’s so cool. Because then again, you know, you can, you can match these two things. So you can say, Okay, we’ve got a picture of this Ocelot way over here, and then we’ve got a scout over here, so a we know it was in those two places. And then we could say, you know, his coat looks great over here, and here’s what he was eating. You know, like, whatever it is, I don’t know it’s, being able to match mesh those two pieces of information is something that you guys uniquely get to do because you’re doing so many different monitoring efforts consecutively. I don’t think I’m going to have the opportunity to do that with my wolves up in Alaska, because we’re not, we’re not trapping and collaring. So I’m not going to know who on the camera corresponds to which scouts, unless I’ve got unless I get a camera image of a wolf defecating in front of the camera.
James Helfrich 48:24
Oh, I was just gonna say, Yeah, we really are privileged to the only reason I can think we could do this is because we have the capture effort. Because unless we I can’t think of another way to link camera images to scat, unless we had some sort of capture effort beyond seeing an animal defecation.
Kayla Fratt 48:45
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If anyone else can think of something, let us know if we’re missing something. But yeah, so let’s for the last couple of minutes here, let’s pivot to talking a little bit about the dogs and how the dog work went. Again. Our next episode is all about prepping the dogs, training the dogs, sharing a couple stories from the field, but I want to hear from you all as well. Like, how did it go? What was it like preparing for the dogs? What surprised you? Yeah, tell tell us what it was like.
Lisanne Petracca 49:13
Can I I’ll hand this over to you, James, but I’ll just start with the with the the tale of the disappearing scat. So basically, when I threw this idea out there, you know, when I, when I first, because I’ve only been in this position for about 16 months, so I’ve had to build this team. Really, really, really, yeah, it’s my life is utter chaos at all times. But you know, Daniel Scott, namil, who, who is kind of the trapper guy for our team out at the refuge population, you know? He said, You know, I never see scat. I just don’t see it. You know, when he’s worked with other species, he says he sees their scat, and he’s like, I just don’t see it. And I was trying to figure out, well, is this going to be, like, a huge fail? And then Dave Hewitt, who’s the director of ck, no Bry, he said, you know, it could be the dung beetles. It could be that the dung beetles in this environment are, you know, there’s a scat out there, and they just kind of take it and they roll it up and it’s gone. So that is the story that I knew coming into this. Like, would the scat dogs be able to find anything? Because apparently the scat is disappearing. It could be dung beetles, I don’t know. And James, I’ll hand it over to you.
Kayla Fratt 50:37
That’s fun. Yeah, go ahead, James, yeah. So,
James Helfrich 50:41
you know, I had a really great time. I was, I was, you know, very lucky to be able to be out there with them every day. And I had a really great time working with Lauren and working with Finn and Benny. I think it well. So we found, if I think I can say this, 21 SCAP samples total. So we were there, so not, like, a lot, where I was like, Yeah, we did a bang up job, and it got a lot, but better than nothing, and better than, obviously some of them. Let’s stay into it and not not being subject to the curse of the dug beetles. So I think it would I really enjoyed a really great time. I’m really excited for the samples that we are able to get more will be able to do with them. I think that it was very unique experience for me. I’ve never worked with, you know, texting dogs before, or working dogs really at all. So I’m out. I’m used to going out there with, you know, either for captures or with my camera technicians that we were just charging through the thorn scrub to put cameras in. And what we were doing here was Google working on transects, right? So our goal is like, well, it’s really, really thick, so we can’t spend all of our time just going straight through the thorn scrub, but we can’t just hang out on roads. Because if we’re hanging out on roads the whole time, we’re not going to get ocelots, because we don’t think they’re going to hang out on roads. Like, what’s some how can we design transects in a way, but even just move through the property in a way that’s going to be, you know, feasible, so that we can actually go more than a quarter mile a day, but also that we’re still likely to find Ocelot scat. So there was a lot of pictures out there, and I’m sure Warren will, Warren will show some and talk about it next week. Of us, of Finn and Benny, just really easily, because they’re, you know, the size of an ocelot almost just getting through the thorn scrub, and the two of us back there trying to, like, through these thorn scrub areas. So it was really cool seeing almost how the dogs navigated through it, because they gave kind of an insight into how other wildlife navigate through the thorn scrub that I’ve never seen, because we don’t see, really see wildlife themselves moving through it. So I thought that was really cool. And, you know, falling along as the dogs, like, you know, sniff outlook for the scout, was was really cool, and it was just a cool experience overall.
Lisanne Petracca 52:43
Yeah, can I add something? So for those who may be tuning in because they’re like big Ocelot fans, so throughout Central America, ocelots make latrines, so they have these communal areas where they would defecate as a means of marking territory, communicating with one another, like, hey. Like, I’ve been here just so you all know, we have not been able to find Ocelot latrines here yet, which would have made the ocelot work, probably a lot more straightforward, in fact. Like, who needs scat dogs when we can just buying latrine sites. But the thing is, we have not been able to find a single latrine. Mike to us, who’s, you know, the godfather of Ocelot work down here. He is, is not convinced there are latrines here. And so that was an additional thing where it’s like, where, where the heck are ocelots defecating? And it doesn’t seem to be in latrines. How can we find it? So that was a whole nother thing too.
Kayla Fratt 53:46
Oh my gosh, yeah, that’s really interesting. Why? I mean, yeah, why? Why would they not latrine here? Why?
Lisanne Petracca 53:54
Don’t know? And so I’ve sent so, you know, I have a couple students who are monitoring the GPS data like crazy. And then it’s like, this male keeps coming to this one place, and I’m like, get out there. We’re gonna find, you know, the first confirmed latrine for Oslo to get out there. Get out there. And then she’s like, oh, yeah, it was just, like, a there’s just a rest site. There’s nothing there. Nothing there at all. And it’s like,
Kayla Fratt 54:18
no, just a snapshot. Yeah,
James Helfrich 54:24
that’s what it will say. Yeah, go ahead. Has been cool. On that front is some of the students who have been monitoring the GPS cars they’re showing me the other day. They’re like, Yeah, this one also, like, spends a lot of time here. Like, Oh, we found like, three sketch there, so I thought that was so hopefully we can even use some some GPS data. It’s been cool to see, kind of confirm. Like, okay, yeah. So the areas where we found the most scat are in general areas we’ve kind of seen the Assad’s Hangout, which I think has been very anecdotal, like just them showing me in the office, not any sort of official analysis on this. But yeah, I thought that’s been a cool use of the GBS, yeah. Which,
Kayla Fratt 54:56
on one hand makes sense, good to confirm. On the other hand, it’s like, Oh, bummer. We’re, hopefully we’re finding places where the ocelot we didn’t know the ocelots already were, but hopefully we’ll still get some of that. And, yeah, and kind of, to put that number in context, you know, 21 scats and you all were out there for about a month. So it’s, no, it’s not a ton, but have how many of those scats Do you think people would have found without the dogs, if you had gone out without the dogs? Like, what are kind of like your scat samples looking like otherwise?
James Helfrich 55:30
So yeah, we don’t collect. No one really does, also at scat surveys beyond just collecting scatter captures. So I can say anecdotally, there is maybe like four or five that, like, I’m pretty confident we would have saw without the dog that was just so obvious in the path that we were right now and the dog found it. But yeah, we don’t. No one’s out there, just, like, collecting scat anyway, right? So this, this is what we would have had, right? There’s, hasn’t been a lot of this work done before, so,
Kayla Fratt 55:59
yeah, yeah, definitely. That’s one of the things I’ve got on my data sheets for my wolf work in Alaska is, like, the visibility of that scat. Because I want to try to have a very basic quantity, quantification of, like, would we have found this without the dog? Yes, no, maybe. Because, you know, I think that’s often a worthwhile question is, how much are you getting because you’ve got a dog out there, and how much are you getting because you’ve got a person out there walking that transect and looking for scat as well? Usually? So far, I think I’ve said this before, I had a project where I kept track of each of my dogs fines and buy fines for about three months, and each of my dogs was somewhere around 500 samples, and I think I had 12. So, you know, they were definitely more effective than me, but they were also ahead of me. I never got to walk in front because, you know, the dog, the dogs get to go first, as they should. So, yeah, yeah. Let’s see. Is there, are there any like stories you want to share from the field, anything that you know? Yeah, surprised, challenged, frustrated. You Anything else you want to share, just from getting to be out there and get to see, I mean, what a privilege to get to hang out with Finn and Benny too. Like they’re such cool dogs. But yeah,
James Helfrich 57:18
they are. Yeah, no, all the answer. It was really, really cool. I think some of the challenges of this environment, particularly, we talked about the thorn scrub and the just terrain in general, um, the heapr in South Texas, the heat’s an issue, right? We, you know, are at least in war. I’m sure we’ll talk about this next week. But we are limited on the times that they use we can do this. So I think that’s obviously nothing that we can change theoretically about the temperature of South Texas. And the other thing we really had planned for going into is like, hey, we, you know, we need to do really early hours, shorter hours, because the heat overall, I’m sure you talk about this next week. But we had, you know, wildlife encounters. We had to win, as in hogs, that we had to be aware of and wary of, that we didn’t, I didn’t, certainly didn’t anticipate going into, you know, we were like, oh, ticks in rattlesnakes. I was like, we’ll avoid those. But I wasn’t really thinking about really other wildlife interactions. But, yeah, it was, but it was a it was cool environment. Fin and Benny were great. And, you know, they’re great hanging out with,
Lisanne Petracca 58:17
yeah, and I got great pleasure. So I was only out there for a few days. I wish I could be out there every day. It was so fun. But I’m basically glorified admin now, but I got great pleasure out of, you know, when Benny would indicate, you know, in this deep, deep thorn scrub patch, it’s like, James, get in there. I was like, be an assalamu. And like, literally, you have to crawl. At some points, you’re on your belly and you’re like, swimming over the soil to get to these scat samples. So that for me as an advisor, it was hilarious.
Kayla Fratt 58:55
Yeah, I know. Again, I just, I talk about this Guatemala project all the time because it was one of my first, like, big kid conservation dog projects that I got to do. There were definitely a couple times where barley would go, like, way off into the jungle. You know, you could, like, barely see a bit of his orange vest through all the underbrush. And then he’d indicate. And sometimes it would just be, like, my GPS collar would tell me that he had indicated. I feel like, Are you kidding me? Like, I gotta go. Gotta go see what the dogs got. You know, that’s exactly what you want them for and then, but then you actually have to do the follow up. And Lauren is just like, again, y’all, y’all listeners will get to hear from Lauren in a couple weeks. But like, She is truly also just like one of the best scat dog trainer and handlers out there. Oh yeah, yeah,
Lisanne Petracca 59:45
she does not mess around. But she’s also like a really cool yeah, she’s tough, but also so competent and just such a cool person. It was. It was truly like, so great having her down here. With us. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 1:00:01
it was really
James Helfrich 1:00:01
great getting to, like, just ask her, like, I was just asking her questions nonstop half the time, just about, you know, the scat dog world, and then training and dog annoying her stuff. Probably
Lisanne Petracca 1:00:11
so annoyed at having to answer all those questions to every single person who works with her, but she was very gracious and just a great person to have on our team.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:24
Yeah, yeah. We really can’t imagine having done this project with anyone other than her, honestly. Because, you know, I think when we first started, you know, chatting a little bit, I was hoping that maybe I could be the one who got to go out and and had a good heart with my advisor about whether or not I’m going to finish a PhD if I keep doing that. And yeah. Then we our other two most experienced handlers were both already committed to a wind farm job, and we were like, Okay, can we shuffle them around and put someone less experienced on the wind farm and move them? And then Lauren contacted me that she was open for work for the first time in a while. Oh, this is perfect. Like, yeah. Cannot think of anyone better to send out there. Well, yeah, okay, so we’re at an hour. I need to go back to my day. Y’all need to go back to yours. Is there anything else that you wanted to circle back bring up shout out before we go. And then we’ll obviously remind people where they can find out about the spec lab as well.
Lisanne Petracca 1:01:19
Yes, go scat dogs. It was, it was, it was awesome to have y’all down here. And I hope that you’ll come back next year and we’ll get some more scat. Yeah, we’re
Kayla Fratt 1:01:29
already thinking about getting the dogs ready for working around the A, the thorns and B, the cowbells. That’s a teaser for next week the cowbells, but you’ll find out why there are cowbells involved next week.
James Helfrich 1:01:46
Yeah, I’m sure you talk about it. I asked the cowbell person in charge of them was not my favorite part of the project, maybe. But, yeah, no, awesome. Yeah. Just really appreciative to get to work with the dogs. Work with Lauren. Appreciative to the landowners, so East Foundation and then Lugo nada Scotia National Wildlife Refuge, as our two landowners, we worked with both them are really great with with getting these dogs out there. I’m just really excited for the work kind of going forward, and this is going to be a springboard. You know, I talked just kind of about abundance today, but this is going to be a springboard for a lot of other work we’re gonna have going forward, both for my stuff and for everyone else in the lab. So,
Kayla Fratt 1:02:25
yeah, yeah, it’s so cool to get to be a part of something like this. And I’m so grateful that you all reached out to us and that we were able to make it work, like again, even though I didn’t even get to be there, you know, it’s just, it’s so cool to get to be involved in this sort of stuff and like, this is, this is why we’re here, you know, we get to grin and talk about cool wildlife and the dogs and everyone getting to work together, and it’s hard, and there are ticks and it’s hot and whatever. But like that. We love it. It’s so, so great. Um, so, yeah, thank you both. And again, Lisanne, it’s just so impressive what you’ve been able to do with this lab tall occasionally goes on and on about, you know what you’ve been able to do in such a short amount of time with that position and well, someone’s phrases. I pay attention.
Lisanne Petracca 1:03:10
Well, I have been internally screaming for the past year and a half. If it’s any consolation,
Kayla Fratt 1:03:15
I hope you get a good nap soon.
Lisanne Petracca 1:03:20
One can dream, one can dream,
Kayla Fratt 1:03:22
yeah. All right. So yeah, where we’ve got the spec Lab website, which we’ll link in the show notes. Do y’all have any social media you want us to mention or Yeah?
Lisanne Petracca 1:03:33
All right, yep, just the website we got. We’re on X or Twitter, whatever it’s called these days. And come on down to Kingsville and see us in person sometime.
Kayla Fratt 1:03:44
Yeah, K9Conservationists road trip. And yeah, for everyone at home, I hope you enjoyed this episode and you’re feeling inspired to get outside and be a canine conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. You can find show notes and links and everything else that we’ve mentioned in this episode at k9conservationists.org. We’ve also got mugs and T shirts and stickers and our Patreon and our course and all of those great things again k9conservationists.org. Until next time, bye!