Donate
In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Dr. Charles van Rees about preparing for her research in Alaska with Barley.
Science Highlight: None
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Conservation Detection Dog Handler Pack Contents: Part One | Part Two | Part Three
Where to find Charles: Linktree
You can support the K9 Conservationists Podcast by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/k9conservationists.
K9 Conservationists Website | Course Waitlist | Merch | Support Our Work | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok
Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt 00:09
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.
Kayla Fratt 00:28
And we have a podcast review to read finally. So these, as you all know, make me really, really happy. And I wanted to thank Miss Magetta for this review, which says “Found by accident and how lucky for me, I’m not sure how I stumbled across this podcast, but I’m so glad I did. I’m a dog trainer with a great interest in nosework. This podcast has covered such a wonderful variety of topics in a welcoming, accessible way, I spend a lot of time driving, and this has helped pass the time and given me so many awesome rabbit holes to dive down.”
Kayla Fratt 00:55
So thank you for that review. If you haven’t left us a review yet. We really, really appreciate them. They really make me happy. But what makes me even happier, is getting to talk to my friend Charles van Rees. So Charles is back on the show, because I want to talk about my fieldwork in Alaska. And I didn’t want to talk about it alone. And I thought what would be more fun than getting to do it with Charles. So Charles, welcome to the podcast. Tell us what’s going on in your life.
Charles Van Rees 01:20
Hey, Kayla, thank you so much for having me back. It’s it’s a real pleasure. And it’s been nice catching up with you a little bit before the show. And I’m excited to hear more about your last what several weeks now?
Kayla Fratt 01:34
Over over a month now. Yeah.
Charles Van Rees 01:37
In Alaska. Yeah, plenty happening in in my world. I guess the biggest thing that’s been brewing now for several months, and I can finally talk about it, is I’ll be transitioning to an assistant professor position at the Odum School of Ecology at UGA. So staying there, but a pretty substantial increase in responsibilities and functions and what’s going on there. So all these things we’ve been talking about with advisors in graduate school and academic research, suddenly, I’m very much on the PI and advisor side of that, and I’m going to be very excitedly recruiting graduate students, especially starting next year, or starting this fall, I guess. So that’s a whole, you know, super, super neat thing to think about. And I’ve been, you know, spending months, coming up with new ideas and planning all this exciting stuff for how the, you know, major research thrust of my lab is going to look so anyway, a conversation for another time.
Kayla Fratt 02:40
Oh, my God. Yeah, that’s so exciting, and so well deserved. And I’m so excited to see how it all goes. Yeah, carry on from afar.
Kayla Fratt 02:49
So before we get into the actual interview, we’ve got one more thing, which is that I want to give a shout out to our student and patron. And so Anna has been putting in a lot of amazing work with her feisty center and her sometimes too smart Border Collie. And lately and did this really cool thing where she, she has been trying to teach the dogs to find some edible wild mushrooms. And she was having some problems getting the dogs to transition from the dried stored mushrooms that she had been turning them on to wild mushrooms. So she got these getxent tubes, which we’ve talked about before on the show. And then she basically did this like a whole basically a whole home science project of testing impregnation techniques for getting these get sent tubes, which kind of absorb odor, and then you can use them to place it out. And they smell like the thing that she she basically ran this whole experiment at home to try to help figure out how to get her dogs from point A to point B. It was just like, so cool to see her dedication and attention to detail with this project. Like really, really lovely work. And it’s also been really cool to get to watch everyone else in our Facebook group and Whatsapp group who are you know, it’s all of our students and patrons all together, sharing their expertise and going back and forth about the get some tubes and mushroom hunting and like all of the ins and outs of this. And like I am just on the side watching these threads because I have nothing to contribute. This is wow. So yeah, big shout out to Anne.
Kayla Fratt 04:10
And yeah, so Charles, you’re interviewing me today. So I’m gonna shut up for now and you get to read a bunch of questions from patrons students and anyone else who’s in that same group? Got submit some questions?
Charles Van Rees 04:22
Yeah, let’s go I am stoked on this. And I actually I dive is kind of browsing through some of these questions. And these are all all things that I love them anyway, things I would have loved to ask you. Anyhow, so this is gonna be great to start finding out more about what’s going on. So the first one that we I have here is from Ann. And she writes, I think I remember that you had the project decided before Barley was trained on wolf scat. And if that’s right, how do you go about training in that situation? Where you have the projects already, you haven’t experienced and successful dog. I mean, let’s be real. This is barley we’re talking about this is the man himself, but not yet a dog on the target odor ready to go?
Kayla Fratt 05:07
Yeah, so this is such a good question. And it’s funny because again, because I have Barley, I wasn’t super worried about this, but it is something definitely to keep in mind. So I think broadly, it would depend a lot just on your dog’s experience and repertoire so far, and how that’s going to relate to the task at hand. So for Barley, because he’s worked on a lot of carnivore projects, and he’s already worked in a pretty wide variety of ecosystems, I just wasn’t really that worried about, like, if he can find Jaguar scout in Guatemala, and puma scat in California, and he’s worked in all of these other places, and just kind of felt like this project was unlikely to fall into a category that was really hard for new for him. Not that it wouldn’t be challenging, but that would, I wasn’t worried he wouldn’t be able to do it. And I’m really glad I took him this year, because now I have a lot better idea of some of the gaps that Niffler is training is going to fill it because I think if Niffler had been my only dog for this project, I probably would have started training a lot earlier. And B there would have been probably more conversations about contingency plans if he had struggled. You know if this was not carnivore scat, I think, or really, really, really challenging different environment like to say we were finding polar bear scat on the open pack ice or something like something just totally different from anything we’ve done before. There would have been other considerations, but it just given more or less repertoire, it wasn’t super worried.
Charles Van Rees 06:28
So the major differences in terms of the just the situation of the research in terms of the biome, you’re in the types of habitats and the actual sort of target scents and the types of things you’re picking up those, those were all similar enough.
Kayla Fratt 06:42
Yeah, like broadly speaking, carnivore scat tends to be kind of our bread and butter. You know, it’s there’s just not a lot of reason to worry. That there would be like an odor or availability issue, like it’s not something that’s buried or underwater, or like a pathogen or a fungus or something that is just like really, really challenging. Or, like, I know, like Rogue Detection Teams has done projects finding Caterpillar flats. And it’s like, yeah, that would, that would be something that we would probably included more in the project about R&D, you know, like more of the project would have been testing and making sure it actually works versus for this, you know, we kind of we knew enough that we could just make the project like doing the thing, we didn’t have to do a whole lot of like, Can the dog do this?
Charles Van Rees 07:29
And I guess my last last follow up on that based on your initial answer would be what what are the differences between Barley and Niffler? And I guess broadly for listeners, like you know, what, what are the things that you that you think about when you think about different dogs for the these tasks? What made Barley so good for him? Why were you talking about, you know, having to prepare differently for having Niffler on this project.
Kayla Fratt 07:54
Basically, basically, Niffler was just less experienced, he’s worked solely on wind farms at this point. So for him transitioning over to like a dense, dense, you know, temperate rainforest, and maritime environment is just going to be a really different scent picture for him versus anything he’s ever worked in. And I know that Barley, when Barley was kind of moving from project one to two, two to three, and maybe even project three to four, there was a lot more training and, and baby steps and like training wheels that we needed along the way to get him to the place that he looked really, really good and really professional. And then there was a tipping point, somewhere around project three, four or five, somewhere in there, where now generally, he can kind of just hit the ground running and Niffler just hasn’t had that, that life of experience.
Charles Van Rees 08:44
There is sort of like a Yeah, like a number of projects they’ve done where suddenly they start to get the hang of like, Oh, I just have to pick up this new sense situation and this new set of tasks and now I can adjust, okay.
Kayla Fratt 08:56
Yeah, I mean, I haven’t trained dogs yet to say that for sure. But yeah.
Charles Van Rees 09:03
Got it. All right, I’m gonna I’m gonna move on and cut off my own curiosity here. The next one we have is from Tayllor with two “l”s, who asks, How did you choose barley instead of niffler? Which I guess we already kind of did a bit of that but but yeah.
Kayla Fratt 09:24
Yeah, I mean, again, Niffler’s just less experienced and part of it was that also so we’re this project is boat-based so we’re out on like a 25 or 30 foot boat every single day as we’re moving from island to island. And that sounds like a pain in the butt to have two dogs. So you know, Barley’s aging, he’s 10 years old. This might be his last big project. This could be his last field season. I don’t really know how this next year is gonna go for him as he ages. He’s in kind of that, that age bracket. He might work for another four years or it might not. And I really wanted to do this time for Just the two of us. And then Niffler is also needed on a wind farm. So he’s in Wyoming with Rachel right now helping support her and Suki on a wind farm project. And then I don’t really know what I’m going to do next year, honestly, because it’s still gonna be a pain in the butt to have two dogs out here, but I know I don’t think at 11 I’m comfortable having Barley be the solo dog on a project that’s this long and that’s physically challenging. But I’m also not 100% sure I want to have Niffler up here alone yet, so I think I might just have to bite the bullet and figure out how to have two dogs on a boat.
Charles Van Rees 10:31
Okay, stay tuned fans ,for the adventures of next year in Alaska.
Kayla Fratt 10:36
It’s gonna be really annoying. It’s gonna be really annoying.
Charles Van Rees 10:41
I’m looking forward to the pictures of like the sleeping situation and stuff like Yeah. Okay. Next one was also from an Did you do any trials that gave you confidence that Barley was ready before you left? Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 10:57
yeah, we definitely did. Because in contrast to what I said, in response to answer first question, there is kind of reason to be a little worried about training dogs on wolf Scott. In particular, I’ve talked to enough really experienced trainers who have actually had a really hard time getting dogs trained on wolf Scout, because there does seem to be some sort of canid specific communication that happens where dogs will be freaked out by the Sentinels.
Charles Van Rees 11:21
Oh, man. Yeah. Totally tracks, right. I mean, they’re they’re literally the same species. Yeah, wow.
Kayla Fratt 11:29
They’re bigger. Yeah, they, you know, bigger, intact, like territorial cousins. Wow. So I did, I was really careful with the training and how I introduced violated the scouts. And we’re actually doing some other experiments with a bunch of other dogs to see if my technique is measurably better than what has already been published in the literature. So we’ve got dogs divided into, you know, a control group and a treatment group. And we’re like, trying two different training protocols to see if one did with what I did with barley that works really well. You know, is that just barley? Or luck? Or is it actually specifically within the training protocol? Right? Reasonably might be the training protocol. Nice. Okay. Yeah, I
Charles Van Rees 12:14
can see how working working with super dog might make the science hard, because he’s just good at everything. Yeah, we
Kayla Fratt 12:20
do have a lot of dogs that are good at everything. No. It’s not, he’s not totally unique. But then, so what I did at the end was, so I traded barley through all this. And then my friend, Finn, who is an Oregon State University student, as well, who has been doing a ton of volunteering, helping me out on the training side of this project, they set up a bunch of big blind training areas for me. So we went out to like a big park, and I told them to like, you know, walk 10 or 15 minutes that way and start hiding stuff, take pictures of it, make sure you know where it is, but I have no idea. And then we went out and did all of those tests, which is pretty standard for making sure that the dogs are ready to go. But we definitely made sure that we got enough of those going before we hit the field. What we didn’t do a good job of was like on our first days of searching, we didn’t take it super easy to on barley, we didn’t intentionally take him into like, spots of high density of both activity. And that is something that we messed up on. And next year, I’m going to make sure I do a much better job of for niffler barley actually didn’t find a scout on until like, our four of his first day, which was just like, a long time to ask him to look and also on that first day of work, you know, he’s not finding anything, but are we sure he’s not finding anything? Because it’s not there?
Charles Van Rees 13:45
We don’t know. Right? Right. Right.
Kayla Fratt 13:47
And then but then it really picked up and it’s been fine ever since. But that wasn’t like, that’s not great training that’s kind of threw him into the details.
Charles Van Rees 13:57
Yeah, that makes good sense. Let’s see during the training questions here, Lauren was asking. So how did you how did you plan ahead and train barley for potential issues in the field in Yeah, remote Alaska? A question that I had as well. I mean, this is this is, you know, you guys have been all over now. But this is a particularly intense setting. And I would imagine just a very different field circumstance for him even even considering the adventures he’s had.
Kayla Fratt 14:24
Yeah, one of the things that’s actually been really nice here is it’s cold, you know, it’s 50 degrees as a high most days, which is like seven or eight Celsius. So it’s actually a really good working searching environment for the dogs as far as like the environmental factors. And then we did a bunch of, you know, physical conditioning, which I think we’ll talk about in a couple of the other questions. We brushed up on safety skills. I wanted to make sure that you know, he was really up to date on his recalls and his emergency downs or recalls, because what we’re most worried about here are black bears. An emergency down And isn’t likely to help them in a situation with black bears. And then most of the stuff that I was worried about was actually more on my end as far as like first aid and emergency preparedness, which I think we talked about. That’s a different category within all of these questions, but as far as barley goes, it was mostly just making sure he was fit. And you know, he is 10 years old. He is, you know, he’s had an ACL repair, he had, you know, a scary episode of paralysis just over a year ago. So like, really making sure that his musculature and fitness and conditioning were up to snuff was like the biggest thing I was focused on, you know, elderly guy now, like, Yeah, put on muscle the way he used to write,
Charles Van Rees 15:38
right, no, I get that. And, I mean, now that we’re complementing each other for wonderful transitions, good work on that. The next question we had was from my Davi, which was how you prepare both humans and dogs for the physical aspects of fieldwork. And again, this seems like a very demanding field campaign. It
Kayla Fratt 15:59
is yeah, I mean, we basically were just running a lot was the main thing I was doing. I think there are a couple things I’ll change next year, to help get myself more prepared in particular. You know, running even though we mostly trail run is a lot more constant than what our fields are, like, the physically challenging stuff that we’re doing here is climbing up and over slash, which is like when they when they log and then the trees that aren’t worth the cost of removing, right? Those just stay there. So sometimes we’re walking like three or four layers of logs above the ground, and we’re like crawling over them. And everything is covered in moss. And we’re wearing these huge, really, really heavy insulated boots and barley is having to hop up and over these, which is really hard on his hind end. And then we’re like swinging our legs up and overstuffed and like clambering and I’m like, I don’t know, maybe I need to start going to jujitsu, like I don’t know what I need to like learn.
Charles Van Rees 16:58
But this is a veritable obstacle course. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 17:01
Yeah, I’ve
Charles Van Rees 17:02
worked through that stuff before.
Kayla Fratt 17:04
Also, we also walk logging roads, we also walk the beaches, and there are times where it’s just straightforward, but like, my hips were so sore our first couple days, because like, I had the cardio from running. Yeah. And I had the quads, but I did those little hip flexors.
Charles Van Rees 17:19
Right, exactly. Just
Kayla Fratt 17:20
swinging your legs around like I did.
Charles Van Rees 17:24
The leg lifting. If I had to make a suggestion, I’d say you probably need to study wushu
Charles Van Rees 17:31
or ballet. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 17:32
Oh, well, I’m taking the body class next term. So that’s good. Oh,
Charles Van Rees 17:36
look at that. Look at that. That’s, you know, it all connects. Now, we
Kayla Fratt 17:40
also have been joking, Tony. And so one of the other things that’s been really challenging is our boat. So once you get off the boat on the beach, the Bible of the boat is about shoulder height for me, and I’m pretty short, but pretty tall. So then what we’re having to do is barley has kind of learned that he’ll step his front paws out into like that pocket above your collarbone. And then you kind of grab his hardest and then grab his front, his back end. And then you’re kind of like doing this, like, I can imagine you’re doing this with like a medicine ball or a kettle bell, you’re like kind of lowering him down and then and then what’s worse is getting him back on the boat, then you’re trying to lift this like 50 pound dog up to shoulder height. And he’s not right, ergonomically designed to be lifted.
Charles Van Rees 18:25
He’s not ball shaped novel.
Kayla Fratt 18:29
So that has actually been a little tricky. We, I think there might be some fitness stuff that I’m going to work on for myself to like work on being able to do that more safely. And then we’re also working on some ways to modify the boat. Because we haven’t had any accidents yet, but it is like you’re stepping out. There’s surf there surge. You’re on the slippery rocks that are covered in kelp. And like one of these days someone’s gonna fall getting him on or off the boat and like multiple people could get hurt doing it for
Charles Van Rees 18:56
sure. Yeah, I just have this image now of like the eye of the tiger montages with like, you just like throwing dogs over your shoulder at the gym. A pile
Charles Van Rees 19:07
of dogs.
Kayla Fratt 19:10
Tony and I were joking, we should make a fitness and Tony being my field tech on this project. We should make a fitness video where we like cut images, videos of us loading barley on and off with our various techniques because she’s got a different tactic than I do. Oh my gosh, and then doing it with kettlebells or medicine balls.
Charles Van Rees 19:27
Yeah, yeah. And it needs a proper montage theme. That’s yeah, that’s fantastic. Okay, okay. Moving on. This is another one that we actually touched on already, which is cool. But But Anne was asking very astutely about whether there were any special considerations or difficulties in having a closely related canine species, I would say actually the same species scat in this case Canis lupus as the target order.
Kayla Fratt 19:55
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, see I’ve already kind of touched on this. There’s something interesting anecdotes about dogs being afraid of wolf Scout, there actually is a paper that we did as a science highlight a long time ago from Bourbaki at all. And I remember the papers out of Belgium, were three of the four dogs that were being trained to find wolf Scout displayed so much aversion and kind of fear based behavior to the scout, and that they did not complete training. So I was really careful with, or at least progression plan. Yeah. To try to, you know, I talked to Dr. Megan Parker, who has done quite a bit of wolf detection, dog training, she gave me some tips, you know, pick the brains of a couple of different people. And then now we, as part of my PhD, I’m actually putting together a community science volunteer project where people with highly experienced detection dogs can sign up to do to do this. And that will kind of split you between the target group and the control group, and you won’t know which group you’re in and put your dogs through the same thing and see whether or not what I think is going on is going on as far as success of the program. So if anyone is interested in that, and has has a dog that they think it’s experienced enough, we just ask that the dog is able to search and alert to a different target odor in some sort of operational age setting. We’ve got some more specific criteria, but just reach out if you’re interested. And we’ll see if we want to send you a big box. Scott,
Charles Van Rees 21:21
I’m getting started. Okay, that’s super exciting. Yeah, I’m really stoked about it. It’s really cool. Study coming to an issue of methods in ecology and evolution near you.
Charles Van Rees 21:37
Okay, next, we had Medallia again asking about so barley has a lot of experience in his job. Yes, he does. He is the king. Do you think a dog with less experience under their belt, one might say collar would be able to take part in this project if they have the right preparation or training?
Kayla Fratt 21:59
Yes. I mean, yeah, if you’ve got the right preparation and training? Yes, I think so. Okay, sure. Yeah, I think you know, provided you’ve done an adequate job of selecting the dog and then preparing and training the dog. Yeah, I think you put with a much less experience, I’m really excited to see how it goes with niffler next year, and I think I’m going to try to document it. As far as identifying and addressing the gaps that I think he’s got, um, in order to get ready for it because he is a lot less experienced and barley. And there’s, you know, there’s stuff all over the place, it’s like from getting on and off the boat, which we were just talking about. And that requires the dogs being kind of physically comfortable, but some stuff that’s a little scary for them like barley, jumping off the boat into our arms is not something that’s easy for him. And then like the dogs working odor in this maritime environment that’s really really different for them and the odor plays all sorts of weird tricks on them. So there’s a lot to be thinking about. And I am glad that I have the opportunity to do my first season with a dog that I kind of knew would rise to the occasion. And now I’ve been able to identify the things that I think niffler is going to meet practice with so that I can kind of prepare him appropriately over the next like eight or nine months I’ve gotten between getting back for this and taking niffler next year.
Charles Van Rees 23:16
How will this affect me next year
Kayla Fratt 23:18
that he’s turning four in October
Charles Van Rees 23:22
Wow, yeah. Wow. Okay, which I’m WoW
Kayla Fratt 23:28
is younger than Barley was when barley started this job today, which is something I have to remind myself of a lot barley. Like he wasn’t really operational until he was six. And he wasn’t like clearly the superstar he is until he was like seven or eight Sure, sure. Part of that was because of you know, he just started late but also Yeah, maturity.
Charles Van Rees 23:54
Right. Right. There’s time yet for NiFi to I think he’s gonna rise to that level. i Yeah, absolutely. Project for him. Yeah, they will be
Kayla Fratt 24:05
interesting. Yeah. Some training for sure. Go ahead.
Charles Van Rees 24:09
I was just saying I have to come visit him for his next birthday. I had to four is a big one. And you know, he deserves a hug and a tug of war for that.
Kayla Fratt 24:17
He does.
Charles Van Rees 24:20
All right, let’s move on. Let’s move on to gear you’re such a gearhead type of person. You’ve always got all the latest coolest stuff sung to be interested in these guys.
Kayla Fratt 24:30
As much as a very poor PhD student can be
Charles Van Rees 24:35
right? Well, hey, I mean, you know, being able to get this stuff at a good price also is always a skill that some people have. Natasha was asking well, I mean, generally what what gear Did you pack? Which Hey, could have said it better myself.
Kayla Fratt 24:53
So I actually filmed a whole video where I took apart all of my packs and like pulled out Everything I bring into the field Labor Day, and YouTube. So I think that we’re just going to pitch that video. I’ll link it in the show notes and just go ahead and watch the actually divided it up into three videos based on like, because I carry two different packs with me in the field one is like a really cool front fanny pack, very stylish, and then the actual pack. And then I have what I call a possibles pouch in the bottom of the pack, which is kind of like a combined survival first aid kit. So we brought so much here though, like we’re in this little tiny Ford Maverick, because we forgot to rent a truck early enough in the process. Well, actually, we thought we were gonna bring my band sock up here. So we didn’t know we were gonna have to rent a truck until really late in the game. So is this like 80 bitty mini truck. And we were like, the day we were leaving, we’re like still deciding, like, Okay, this actually can’t come with us because it doesn’t fit. And a huge part of that was also again, because we couldn’t bring my van up, which was devastating and very stressful. We also suddenly had to deal with housing. So we ended up for the first month of this project. And for the second, the last month and a half or so, we’re going to be we’re staying in a 10 foot by 14 foot canvas tent. Because we couldn’t find housing up here. I’m currently in an Airbnb, we got an Airbnb for a month, which has been lovely, but otherwise, we’re basically in a tent. Wow also increases the amount of gear you need to bring because like, you know, we had to bring cots up. We had to bring shelving we had to bring heaters.
Charles Van Rees 26:36
Oh my gosh. Right. Oh, everything. Yeah, this
Charles Van Rees 26:41
is just a full on Shackleton expedition at this point.
Kayla Fratt 26:44
Yes. We haven’t eaten our dogs yet, though. For the record. Okay.
Charles Van Rees 26:49
Yeah, well, no, of course. Yeah, of course. It sounds like things are going a little better than that. But
Kayla Fratt 26:54
Correct. Actually, our neighbor just came by and was like, Do you guys want some salmon? I caught two kings didn’t the people I was gonna get him to are out of town and just brought over like a salmon. And I think I’m gonna ask him to marry me. Yeah.
Charles Van Rees 27:08
Well, let us know. Keep us updated if he says yes. Our next one was getting into I think more the major differences of this field setting. Then what you know, you’ve certainly been doing with barley before. Taylor two L’s again, asks, did you change anything in your canine first aid kit?
Kayla Fratt 27:30
This time kid? Yeah. So I’ve been working through this awesome course from gun dog doc who is a Canine Sports Medicine veterinarian who also works and hunts with bird dogs. And he’s got this amazing field first aid course that I’ve been working through online. So I’ve been like literally just I taking notes on what I need to add ever since signing up for that. And we also had him on the show. He’s awesome. So the big things that I added in changed this year was that I did I finally added a tourniquet to my field first aid kit, sort of thing that like I don’t expect to ever need really, we’re not in situations where like gunfire or shrapnel are likely to happen. But also like, Man, I’m gonna be really mad if I don’t have it the one time I need it. I’m mad is actually maybe the wrong word. devastated.
Charles Van Rees 28:19
Right, or lightheaded? Yeah, yes, yes.
Kayla Fratt 28:24
Someone’s having a really bad day. If we need it, no. But um, and then I’ve also added I added a skin stapler, and have kind of learned how to use that now I think I might try to practice on an orange at some point. My sister is in med school and said that’s what they did their first practices of stitches on. Then we also got EMT glue, I just added a bunch more tweezers and gauze and then kind of beefed up our medications for the dogs because basically, we’re prepping ourselves to be the emergency room and the situation we’re often like seven or more hours from help. There’s not a full time veterinarian on this island at all. So we have to get a CAT scan. So unless something is bad enough for a chopper, we’re really really really far from help. And even in that situation. Helicopters can’t fly and land in all situations. So we’re really trying to be like, you know, if anything goes wrong, we are our only chance if it’s time sensitive.
Charles Van Rees 29:27
Makes total sense. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 29:29
Which I kind of that kind of dig. I also I re upped my I’m a wilderness first responder which is like an 80 hour course I took that again leading up to this
Charles Van Rees 29:39
gosh, yeah, that’s serious stuff. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 29:43
I you know, now I remember how to deal with sucking chest wounds and hope I never have to see one.
Charles Van Rees 29:47
Yummy, wonderful. That’s
Kayla Fratt 29:51
the first word that comes to mind.
Charles Van Rees 29:56
So we have we have I would call this a two parter. Coming up. Hear and I really like these these two questions. I wouldn’t thought of these and I think they’re fantastic. Basically, the the tool or thing that you have used more than you thought you would, you know, surprise hero best purchase, and the opposite. The thing that you brought hasn’t been as useful as you thought. These are from Taylor, Meghan and Natasha. Okay, yeah. So
Kayla Fratt 30:22
for the things that have been kind of like our surprise heroes of the project one has been or saw, I’ve got a Borealis folding saw that we’ve used a lot I kind of brought mostly just thinking firewood. And it has been super useful for that one, we’re out at satellite camps. And we want to have a little fire and sit around by the, by the water. And you know, because it’s light out until it’s light on all night, actually, at this point. So you want to be able to have a fire at some point. But also, we’re traveling on roads where we have actually had to need to pull this all out in order to get logs off the road. Oh, sure. Yeah, can get further down. So it’s been really useful barleys harness his work harness is weight bearing and that has been super useful because the only way we’re able to get him in and out of the boat is using that weight bearing. I’ve started carrying a pocket knife. I’ve never been a pocket knife person. This might be surprising to some people, but I’m not.
Charles Van Rees 31:16
That is extremely surprising to me. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 31:17
pocket knife girly. Enough. Yeah. Two more things. We brought these cup proof gloves, which have been really awesome when it’s cold and rainy, just have something a little warmer, but also when we’re moving through doubles club, having something that you can just like grab doubles club with and like most of it doesn’t make it into your hand is really nice. Then the last thing is boot dryer. Oh my god, I love our boot dryer.
Charles Van Rees 31:45
So Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You packed a boot boot dryer all the way up there?
Kayla Fratt 31:49
We sure did. Yeah, I was like this is.
Charles Van Rees 31:54
I mean, really? Yeah. From what you’ve been telling me. That’s, that’s a lifesaver.
Kayla Fratt 31:58
Yeah. I mean, we’re just in and out. We’re literally in and out of the ocean every single day. And this place gets twice as much annual rainfall in Seattle. So nothing. Yeah. Oh, and then yeah, the other half of the question. So thing we haven’t used as much as we thought number one hammock, both Tony and I brought hammocks, and we were so excited. And it is just as see above, it’s extremely rainy.
Charles Van Rees 32:27
At all, yeah, that makes sense.
Kayla Fratt 32:30
We also brought up bulkhead nets, and have not needed them yet. But I’m like a little scared to say that one because we don’t need them. It’s, we’re recording on June 11th. So it’s so good to happen. And then we brought up this poor the bathroom thing that’s like a stall that has both, you can like set up a little toilet inside of it. And then it also could be a changing thing. And then you also could set up a solar shower, we haven’t used it. And then we also brought up a bunch of board games and haven’t used them at all. Partially because our boat captain has Starlink. So we actually high speed internet everywhere we go. So oh my gosh, we’re not spending a lot of time sitting around at Camp playing cards the way that we originally expected. And we’re also kind of sick of each other by the end of the day. So we like to like hang out and play more games together. We both want to like, go to opposite ends of camp and look at our phones for a while. Mm hmm.
Charles Van Rees 33:24
Very reasonable.
Kayla Fratt 33:26
Yeah, she’s one of my best friends in the whole world. And we still, you know, after a couple months of living within 30 feet of each other at all times. Yeah. You don’t need to talk more.
Charles Van Rees 33:37
Yep, totally get that. Okay. And then I guess, a very nice close out to this section here from Natasha. Was there anything that you felt you should have taken? But didn’t? What what’s what’s missing here? You know, what do you what are you thinking about? I like to have the morning they like, you know, it’d be great right now.
Kayla Fratt 33:59
I’m asked because it doesn’t get dark. Oh, yeah.
Charles Van Rees 34:03
What are you doing about that?
Kayla Fratt 34:04
I you can see this and nobody else can. I’m currently in our Airbnb beds. Tony’s got her own room. I’ve got my Shuka from Kenya draped over the upper bed. So I’ve got like a canopy bed going. And I can crawl into my cave there. So that helps. We also ordered sleep masks on Amazon and they’re going to be arriving any day now.
Charles Van Rees 34:25
Thank heavens
Kayla Fratt 34:29
because it is just getting brighter right now like the sun. It does technically set its setting around 10pm and rising around 4am right now but I went out at 2am like a week ago, four days ago to see if the northern lights were out and it wasn’t dark enough to see stars. Right?
Charles Van Rees 34:45
You can’t see him. Yeah, you just get that weird eerie Twilight all night. I can remember that. And I can remember being extremely surprised at how much that screwed is my sleep the entire summers that I went to Alaska Yeah, Because get there soon,
Kayla Fratt 35:00
they should be getting here like today or tomorrow. So that’ll be good. And then we also so, Craig, Alaska where we’re staying is a very small town like a couple of 100 people. But there is a line dancing club that meets at one of the two local bars every tuesday thursday at 530. And along with the other wolf research group from University of Alaska, Fairbanks, we have like infiltrated the line dancing club. We are all like it’s all like septuagenarian ladies. And then like the for PhD student undergrad, like combo, both researchers. So I’m kind of brought my cowboy boots, like dancing twice a week now, because there’s nothing better to do and it’s like it is bringing us life and bringing, bringing us joy. But I didn’t bring nearly enough like town clothes or like those sorts of things. I just like only Brookfield gear. And then if I want to look cute for line dancing class, I can’t open my hiking boots.
Charles Van Rees 36:04
Yeah.
Charles Van Rees 36:08
I’ve been there. That’s always that’s an easy thing to forget doing field work. And then you just look like a weird, Steve Irwin. Dude, everywhere you go.
Kayla Fratt 36:18
Yeah.
Charles Van Rees 36:19
Everyone could tell you work with wildlife no matter what.
Kayla Fratt 36:23
I just finished rereading Maria Mayer’s book, pink boots and a machete and she talks about how she still to this day packs a little black dress whenever she’s going field working. Like you know, I think she’s got something there.
Charles Van Rees 36:36
Yep. Yeah. I think that’s right. That’s that’s sage wisdom. All right. So let’s, let’s zoom out here to maybe a more general view of the preparation for your your, your very own Shackleton expedition with Salman instead of dogs on the menu. Lauren was asking just what type of issues were you thinking of ahead of time? What were the things that you were kind of worrying about and imagining?
Kayla Fratt 37:06
I think the biggest thing I was worried about was bears. You know, even though we don’t have brown bears here. The black bears here can be as big as what we think of as Grizzlies, you know, in a lot of places. They’re just huge, huge. Black bears. exaggeration, but they’re they’re big.
Charles Van Rees 37:23
No, still, that’s Yeah, that’s very intimidating.
Kayla Fratt 37:26
Yeah, but so far, they’ve all been very well behaved. We have seen a couple and they’ve all been appropriately terrified of us and just scooted right off. And then the other thing I was a little worried about was boat safety. I’ve not spent a lot of time out on open ocean, or really like, I’m calm, I’m very comfortable in the water. But I’ve never done like, you know, big fishing stuff or whatever. I grew up on Lake Superior, which is big open coldwater. But anyway, this is just kind of different. And we’re doing it so much more often. So one of the things that Tony and I actually we both did is we signed up for the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association. They have a drill conductor course where we actually learned how to like, put on our survival suits and get into a life raft and like practice putting out fires on boats and practice patching leaks. And like, that was incredibly helpful and reassuring to be like, Okay, now if something goes wrong, you know, all three of us because our boat captain obviously has already done stuff like this, we’re well relatively prepared. And one of the things that we haven’t done yet, but we’ve been meaning to do is actually get him to give us like a half hour instruction on the boat, like if something were to happen, and we needed to be able to back the boat out of somewhere and try navigating home. Like I know how to turn the boat on right now. But I don’t actually know how to like, get us into stuff. And we’re never going to be anywhere near as good as him but it would be nice to be a little bit more capable of moving if something were to happen. He is also like our boat captain is he’s elderly.
Charles Van Rees 39:04
You know, it’d be nice to be able to help and just in case something goes wrong, I’m rambling, but no, that’s those are. Those are fantastic. That makes a lot of sense. On a related note, Taylor asks, What was your biggest fear going into the project coming
Kayla Fratt 39:23
up rain? I like I’ve been What do you mean? I just survived my first Pacific Northwest winter. That was like kind of for me and I was dealing with like seasonal affective stuff more than I ever had before. I was really missing the snow and really bummed out about the winter and like and then right when Corvallis starts getting really nice and starts getting sunny and starts being really lovely. I came up here and I just was worried about basically just being wet all the time and either We’re getting trench foot or just being pissed off all summer. And, you know, I was just worried about like, the impact of it being this gray and this one on my mental health and so far it’s been fine. Turns out being outside with my dog makes up for Brain. I wasn’t sure it would. Yeah,
Charles Van Rees 40:16
yeah. And I mean, even if it’s not the, you know, even if it’s somewhat gray light, it is light all the time. Yeah, that could help maybe.
Kayla Fratt 40:24
Yeah, I yeah, I do think and I genuinely just think getting to be outside and move my body.
Charles Van Rees 40:31
Like, oh, it’s out. Yeah, it sounds so much and all the dark dark throwing.
Kayla Fratt 40:38
Yeah, there’s also a little bit you know, I do have within me the like, upper Midwestern or Scandinavian voice of like, there’s no such thing as bad weather only bad clothing. And if I just wear all of my rain gear, it’s not that bad. So
Charles Van Rees 40:57
so at the end of your of your terrible Pacific Northwest winter, envisioning a whole summer out on this insane adventure. Taylor wants to know what the thing you were most excited about was
Kayla Fratt 41:10
I was really excited to get one on one time with barley. I’m
Charles Van Rees 41:15
so cute.
Kayla Fratt 41:21
Like barley and I were you know, it was like Kala and barley against the world for like years, you know, he’s been with me through so many jobs has been with me for 100% of my conservation on career so far. He’s been with me through more breakups than I’d like to admit. And like, and then, you know, and like niffler and Norbert the cat are both fabulous, and I love them so much. But like, I do kind of miss the early days of Kayla and barley, just getting to like, be the two of us and like, we get each other and this this other way. And it’s been really nice. And I was really looking forward to just having it be me and him and not having to divide my time. And attention.
Charles Van Rees 42:06
The other paths, and it’s like a movie. It’s so nice.
Kayla Fratt 42:09
Yeah, it is like, he’s like this. Yeah, this might be his last field season. And I’m really grateful that I’m getting to like, enjoy that and be just all in it with him. And I know, based on how he’s doing this field season, I actually don’t think it’s going to be his last but
Charles Van Rees 42:27
you know, we don’t know. No, of course, that makes sense. It’s
Kayla Fratt 42:30
just really special. Like, it’s really had hasn’t
Charles Van Rees 42:35
been special for barley, like, Do you sense the the relief of being the only child for a moment?
Kayla Fratt 42:44
I don’t know about that. Exactly. But I will say he’s the happiest he’s ever been in his entire life.
Charles Van Rees 42:50
The pictures are all amazing.
Kayla Fratt 42:52
Charles he’s cuddly.
Charles Van Rees 42:55
I don’t believe that but okay,
Kayla Fratt 42:57
cuddly. He’s like he falls asleep on people’s laps on the boat. He is like soliciting pets. He is tired and satiated enough to actually act like a normal dog, which he has no
Charles Van Rees 43:09
sounds like a changed man.
Kayla Fratt 43:10
It’s crazy. It’s I mean, he’s just so happy. And every day. He sees like the rain jacket come out. And he’s just like, oh my god, we’re going to work again. Like and he just like he, he started barking at me if I’m not fast enough, if we’re on the boat start slowing down, and we’re standing up and getting the gear ready. Today was the first time he actually tried to walk the gameplay out of the boat while the boat was still moving. And I was like, oh, that’s actually not OSHA approved buddy, like get back. So excited. So happy and I keep being a little worried he’s gonna stay GQ when we go back to PhD Val and I go back to instead of doing this, I might be murdered in my sleep.
Charles Van Rees 43:56
Well, that made my year. So thank you for sharing that. No, gosh, no, no. King barley being being like, deeply fulfilled in the most profound way, is one of the most delightful things I’ve ever heard in my life.
Kayla Fratt 44:13
So it’s just I’m so happy to have finally gotten to do that for him. Geez.
Charles Van Rees 44:21
Okay, so what about your biggest challenge? Taylor ones know what your bigger biggest challenge was with this with this whole field campaign?
Kayla Fratt 44:30
Yeah, I mean, before we got here, I think having the van so my vans engine blew up in that cylinder went bad and that ruined the whole engine. Again, and we found out about that at the end of February beginning of March and we were leaving for this project at the end of April. So we went from having housing and a vehicle sorted out to not overnight. Pretty last minute before this project is In a place that this is a really seasonal fishing town, so like, finding housing out here is a nightmare, like they recommend starting. If you need housing all summer, you need to start looking a year in advance. Yeah, so we’re just kind of screwed by that. And that was incredibly stressful, kind of on top of the fact that like, I’m really emotional about them. And like, that’s my first hole. And it’s my car. I’m like, that van has been with me through so much, and she’s been horrible to me. But I also love
Charles Van Rees 45:30
you gotta have a toxic relationship with your do
Kayla Fratt 45:36
with my. So that was hard. It’s all worked out. Okay. But then I think as far as actually being here, you know, it’s raining, we’ve talked about that, it is really remote, which means that it’s kind of boring. But also we’re really tired. So like, neither of the cafes in town have internet, there are two restaurants in town, everything closes around five or six or seven o’clock, there is an aquatic center that goes that’s open till seven. So that’s nice. But you know, it’s kind of like, we get home, maybe at three, maybe it’s six. And we don’t really have anything to do, but we’re also really tired. So. And that’s just kind of how field work is like you’re out in the middle of nowhere, you’re exhausted. So you don’t really want to do anything. But there’s also nothing to do. And sometimes you’re just kind of like, yeah, I don’t know what to do with myself in the hours between getting home and going to sleep because I’m too tired to actually do much.
Kayla Fratt 46:41
Sleep yet. Yeah,
Charles Van Rees 46:43
I mean, you I think you’ve touched upon part of it so far. But I would love a more thorough kind of breakdown of this. Meghan was asking specifically, what does a given day in the field look like? Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 46:56
so we’ve got kind of two types of trips or days right now. So we have about half of our trips are overnight trips. So they’re we’re getting out on the boat, usually by seven in the morning, we’re all loaded up and then we are boating somewhere that might be an hour away might be three hours away. So then we’ve got a couple hours on the boat, then we get to wherever we’re going, we do our search that can usually be 345 ish hours, kind of depending Max, some of our some days like today, what we actually did, we searched for different areas that were probably 45 minutes each. So it kind of depends on exactly how that looks. And then we’re usually then we’re done by early to mid afternoon. And then we’re either commuting home on the boat, or we’re going out and staying at a satellite camp somewhere. So some of these satellite camps have been actual camping, camping, you know, tents and everything. Some of them have been cabins or float houses or Airbnb or for Forest Service cabins, just kind of like we’re begging, borrowing, you know, our way through lodging. And then those days are actually I really liked those days, you know, then I, you know, I bring some scientific papers with me, I bring my journal and we’ve got Starlink turned on for a couple hours. And then otherwise, it’s just kind of like quietly getting our stuff together and going back to bed, the same thing the next day. And then we also have days where it’s just a day trip, we come home and we’re sleeping wherever we’re sleeping, here in Craig. And then at least one day a week. We also have like a computer day where we have to upload all of our GPS data, we have to digitize our data sheets because we’re doing them all on right in the rain paper rather than on an iPad or something that would automatically digitize and then we also have to to book scouts. So we’re collecting whole scouts and then freezing them and then to save myself time back in Oregon. We’re taking samples of those and putting them into PCR students so that they’re ready to just go straight to the lab as they are and that will take a couple hours most most weeks as well.
Charles Van Rees 49:04
That’s like some good like music listening busy work time to that can be very good advisor kind of a brain massage to just do something light like that. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 49:13
Toni and I’ve been listening to this podcast, Normal Gossip, while we listen to it, which is just unhinged stories of gossip from the real world and it’s been really relaxing.
Charles Van Rees 49:24
That sounds like it really fulfills like a deep human need there.
Kayla Fratt 49:28
Yeah, we’re like a lonely listening to people talking about like, crazy stuff happening in their lives. They’re like kickball league or something.
Charles Van Rees 49:37
Yeah. That’s it. That’s okay. Let’s pivot here. Another question from Taylor and Meghan. I’m actually looking forward to your answers to this one. What was your biggest success slash coolest find those sound like different questions to me. Feel free to answer those very separately unless They were absolutely the same thing.
Kayla Fratt 50:01
Yeah, I’m not quite sure exactly how, how to answer these either. So I guess as far as our coolest finds so far, oh, actually, I so I wrote these down, and then I had a cooler find today, off the press, I found an intact sea otter skull today on the beach, with like, most of its teeth still in it, and it’s gonna be really good and really easy to clean up. And I have checked with Alaska Department of Fish and games website, I am allowed to keep it. I found it on the beach. I didn’t kill the sea otter, and it’s already like mostly cleaned. It’s just got a bit of algae on it. So very excited about that. I was really hoping to find one. And we found a couple that are just like part of the skull. But this one’s like in great shape. Why and then earlier this week, we also found a glass ball. So Japan is rather famous for having these glass ball fishing buoys that then will occasionally make their way all the way over here. And we found that
Charles Van Rees 50:59
those things are beautiful. Those are so cool.
Kayla Fratt 51:02
Yeah. So we’ve found two actually, so far this season, Michael, our boat captain found one that’s like almost basketball size. So he’s keeping that one. Holy crab. Yeah. And then this one’s more like softball sized. So Tony is going to keep this one because I’ve got two more summers here plus the rest of this one. So I’m hoping that another one will make its way to me. Yeah. And then we had an island where we didn’t expect to find anything. Basically, people have been trapping there enough that we know a couple years ago, they got probably all of the wolves removed from this island or almost the entire pack. And then they trapped again last winter and didn’t catch any wolves. So we thought that that violent might just have no wolves on it, we’ve actually been finding scat on it, which is pretty neat. And then barley has had a couple of really spectacular finds where it seems like the wolves will try to poop on top of trees or bushes, you know, short, small, shrubby trees. And then the scouts will fall down over time to be like at the base of these trees and just totally invisible from above. And those have been really just like fun and spectacular for him to find. And we’re just like, wow, he never would have thought this was good job. I was always really fun.
Charles Van Rees 52:18
I’m glad there was a barley highlight in there too. Because that’s that was absolutely what I was beginning to wonder. Yes, yeah. That’s so nice. So what about Lauren’s wondering about whether you’ve encountered any unknowns, and how have you dealt with those unknowns while in the field.
Kayla Fratt 52:36
So we’ve had two that I’ve already mentioned. So I’ll just be really brief with them. And then the third one that came comes to mind. So one, getting on and off the boat, it’s just been physically hard. Like, it’s just challenging to do well, and we’re getting better and better at it. But it’s hard. And then housing has been a mess. You know, that the housing situation just living in a canvas tent somewhere this rainy and like during Gales, it’s not fun. But it’s also been holding up really well. And I’m really glad that I have a field tech that I get along with so well. So it’s, it’s fine. Um, but then the other thing and this kind of, I think I was hinting at this when I mentioned earlier that there was an island where the wolves had been trapped, basically, to the point that we didn’t expect wolves to be there anymore, was just really contentious around here. So like, interactions with locals can be awkward. Telling people that you’re a wolf researcher gets, you know, not necessarily the warmest welcome. Sometimes when we’re out in the field, we don’t tell people that we’re looking for wolves. If we have reason to believe that we found a den site or a rendezvous site, we often are like taking care to basically hide where we’re parking, and get in and out. And, you know, like, there’s just a lot of careful language and communication and navigation to make sure that we’re, you know, respecting the fact that wolves are legally trapped here. And that’s fine. But also not necessarily like leading people who want to trap as many words as possible directly to a den site. You know, and like, we’re not from here. So I’m not here to say that people shouldn’t be dropping, but, you know, we do have to navigate that and it can become awkward.
Charles Van Rees 54:20
Yeah, no, that, I didn’t even think of that. But that sounds like a major. Yeah, a major extra preoccupation there. For sure. Yeah.
Kayla Fratt 54:29
Yeah. Definitely. Like, even when we’re like talking with the other wolf researchers, when we’re out at our line dancing bar, you know, I’ll keep I keep having to like, remind myself like, Okay, I’ve had a beard too. So I’m gonna be talking kind of loud, like, I shouldn’t name the island that I’m talking about, as I’m telling them the story of like this really cool find that we had, like, wow, remembering to be vague. And because there have been incidents in the past of wolf researchers here sharing information and then Dan’s being disturbed. Yep. Or even Like, intentionally, like harming the puppies?
Charles Van Rees 55:03
Yeah, no, that’s super thoughtful of you to have that in mind. So on the topic of critters, Taylor was wondering what the coolest animal encounter you’ve had this whole time was.
Kayla Fratt 55:20
So I know we’re like already going long, but I’m getting ready to I promise we’re.
Charles Van Rees 55:24
No, are you kidding? This is? This is such a like a ringer of a question. We got it. We got to cover this thoroughly.
Kayla Fratt 55:30
Yeah. So I mean, there have been a couple of really cool whale sightings we’ve had we see humpbacks, almost every day, which is today, we saw our first humpback, bubble feeding, which was really, really cool. So they actually, you know, they blow the bubbles, and all the bait fish come to the surface, and then they like, come out of the depths and like, you know, Hungry, Hungry Hippo their way through them. It’s pretty cool. And we also had one really good whale sighting where a whale kind of came up to the surface and showed us its tail did like the whole thing and didn’t fall on breach or anything, but like really close to the boat. So we just got a good view of it. You know, whales just, they’re amazing. It’s cool. It’s really cool to get to see whales like that. And then our coolest animal encounter probably was we actually did find a dense site a while ago. And we knew we were getting close to the downside because the density of scouts was just so high like we were finding scouts that were so fresh, we thought they might be hot. And then but like they were that fresh? Yeah, every couple couple of meters basically. So we were like really in it and then Michael our boat captain held. And it just like the forest like,
Charles Van Rees 56:44
erupted with holing man,
Kayla Fratt 56:47
they were everywhere, and they were best. We were on their front lawn, like that. And so we were like, alright, you know, we know they’re here, we, you know, we collected as many scouts as we could, and we didn’t want to go all the way up to the dam. Because this was pretty shortly after the pups would have been born, they would have been like three or four weeks old. And we don’t want to disturb them in that situation. They will occasionally move their dance if you disturb that when the pub so that young. So what we did is we kind of had an idea of where the den might be, and we set the camera a couple 100 meters away. But we did actually get a camera trap set up to where when the wolves are kind of coming and going from there done. They’ll be they’ll be getting photographed. And as we were setting the camera we did have a probably a young ish Wolf, kind of Black Swan, which is my first time seeing a blackish wolf that kind of popped up over the rise and just like looked at us and they do these like, I can’t remember what they’re called, like a chuck bark sort of thing. So they’re howling, but then they’re also barking at us, which is I’ve never heard of bark before. Hello. And it was just it was really cool. We did put barley away in the truck at this point where we’re like, okay, the 45 pounds on specific does not need to be out at this point. They’re not gonna mess with us like they’re, they’re not gonna give us a hard time even though we are like, on top of their den, but like, barley doesn’t need to be out right now.
Charles Van Rees 58:08
And it was just it was just I mean yeah.
Kayla Fratt 58:13
I’ve gotten to crawl into some old dense not active ones but just like trying to crawl in and see if we can find like last year Scout hidden in there. It’s just like it’s pretty cool to like know that it is a well done and that you’re just seriously be in there.
Charles Van Rees 58:26
Wow. Yeah, that’s a big animal. So that’s got to be moderately roomy in there.
Kayla Fratt 58:30
They’re quite roomy. Yeah. You know, like if you were in a survival situation you can do worse than stumbling on a wolf den.
Charles Van Rees 58:37
You can pull Romulus and Remus real quick. So, tied into this next theme then Lauren was asking about, have you had any surprise wildlife encounters or close calls? Yikes. And how did you handle them? Because we know that you are one who handles unexpected situations.
Kayla Fratt 58:59
Thank you. Um, luckily, I would not categorize anything we’ve had as a close call.
Kayla Fratt 59:05
That’s yeah, we do
Kayla Fratt 59:07
all carry bear spray at all times in the fields. We don’t carry a sidearm or firearm or anything. You know, again, we don’t have Grizzlies or brown bears here. So it doesn’t seem like it’s necessary based on conversations with the locals. But we did have one Tony I were out with barley and we’ve kind of separated from Michael and we were like, Oh cool. Look bear tracks and then like oh look komtrax That’s neat. Oh, no. And then maybe a couple 100 meters later. Tony says bear you know and when spook the mama bear and she was she was running off into the woods. We didn’t even see the cub. But I you know, we’ve we did kind of get close enough to spook mama bear that probably had a couple of her just based on the tracks we saw, but she behaved very appropriately. Barley was perfect too. He was maybe 50 meters away from me and he recalled right away and he was off in a different direction than the bear. So it was really kind of a nothing burger, but it was a bear encounter, I guess. Yeah, yeah. The bear stories. That’s that’s all we’ve got. You delivered
Charles Van Rees 1:00:16
and everyone’s also been saved. So that’s about as good as answers we could hope for.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:20
We’re pretty loud in the fields, Tony and I’ve been writing a lot of songs about barley as we work. Oh, good. Yeah. Well expect our first album in a couple of months. Yeah,
Charles Van Rees 1:00:29
I was gonna say I really liked to hear a couple of days if you don’t mind.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:33
We’ve been writing he’s a good boy, Mr. Barley, which is to the tone of He’s a mean one, Mr. Grinch, are you I mean of course. Yeah. And then we’ve also got we’re bringing home our Wolfie otter scat, which is saying to the tune of that bringing home when baby bumblebee song that capsule? Yep, it’s really good, great, really,
Charles Van Rees 1:00:53
you’ve got you got most of most of an EP pretty much ready to go.
Kayla Fratt 1:00:59
Just a couple others, but they’re not quite ready for primetime. But anyway, those are probably diminishing our parents.
Charles Van Rees 1:01:08
I imagine that’s fantastic. Bit of a bit of a 180 here, but so from from Taylor with two L’s returning again. How do you prep the other people on the project to be working to be with a working dog as in, I guess, in the field all the time, with with a with a highly professional four legged individual?
Kayla Fratt 1:01:32
Yeah, so you know, the biggest first thing that we have to talk about is Toy Play. Barley, you know, we’ll bring everyone toys all the time. And we have to make it clear to everyone that, you know, he’s allowed to play fetch, but really only in the context of work, and helping them understand why that’s important, you know, not just, you know, this isn’t just a mean rule that I have, because he’s supposed to only have fun while he’s at work. Like, that is not the point at all. The point is, he’s one bad throw, or one bad balance away from needing an ACL repair, and that ending his career. Yeah, so I’m really protective over over his Facha. At this point, I’m not really as protective over new colors. But barley in particular has to stop that. Um, and then we’ve also had to have a couple conversations about like search strategy and like, modifications that we might make from if they’re used to working in human only search teams, like some of the things that we can or should change because of the dog. Not a lot of those basically, were just able to move faster. And then to limit some dog, you know, making sure that we’re giving him adequate breaks, and the days with the dog are actually shorter than the days would be without the dog partially, again, because we’re moving more quickly. But barley, you know, generally we try to keep his working day to three hours, maximum, he’s had a couple, four or five hour days, but we really try to keep it closer to three. And then, you know, like, one of the other things is, oh, if you find a scout that you’re not sure about any want the dog to run past it, you know, don’t just stand there and stare at it and make it really obvious that you’re curious about it, because that can kind of suggests to the dog that it’s something that should be alerted to, and then it and then you’re not sure why and then the dog potentially is now getting rewarded or thinking that they should be rewarded for an off target scan. So we’ve had to do a little bit of like, kind of teaching them how to be handlers, in some ways when they come across, Bear Cub Scouts will throw us off. Sometimes, where you know, it’s about the right size for a wolf scat. And if it doesn’t have obvious vegetative matter in it, it’s kind of hard to tell if it’s bear or wolf, so then, you know how to stand back from that and let the dog go by without suggesting anything. We’ve, we’ve gotten quite good at it, but it’s, you know, takes practice.
Charles Van Rees 1:03:52
Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot to think about. I hadn’t thought about that. Yeah. Lauren asked, is there anything that you would do differently, if you could, or will do differently in the sequels to this field season?
Kayla Fratt 1:04:07
Yeah, I’m definitely housing, you know, situation and why it went as wrong as it did. But I’m definitely looking forward to doing a better job of that next year, we do have housing, basically locked down for next year, we’re in the paperwork process. So that will be a huge relief. Um, and again, it’s gonna be interesting to see how it goes with two dogs. And then better organization of all of our search areas, our first couple weeks. Basically, what we’re doing is we’ve got about 30 different sites we’re visiting twice. And then we’ve got a bunch of sites, we’re only visiting once. And all of these sites that were visiting twice on our first round, we just wasted a lot of time, you know, going into places that we got there and we got off the boat and we realized like there are no game trails here. It’s all slash, like there’s no way the wolves are coming through here. You know, because there are times where we Get off, we don’t find anything that is interesting. That’s useful data that okay, the welds aren’t here. But then there are also times where it’s just like, even if they’re on this island, they’re not here. So confirming absence in this particular search area is not necessarily helpful because it’s just terrible habitat. So we’ve been really dialing in our search areas and figuring out we’re gonna be able to be a lot more efficient and probably have a shorter season next year. And then I’ve also been taking notes for next year on which sites I want to prioritize early on for niffler to give niffler like a graded difficulty. So like, I would like to start niffler searching on rendezvous sites that are in the Mustang. So we’ll see when the pups are a little older, we’ll have these like rendezvous sites where they all kind of meet up and hang out every couple days. And they will often do that in the Mustangs which are these like giant expansive bogs. They’re so beautiful. I love most gangster all zebra, I love most gags that is a really nice step up in difficulty from a wind farm to a musket. And then from there, we’ll probably take niffler on to the logging roads, which are like the next level of difficulty. And then from there, we’ll take him to the old growth, heavy use trails, and we’re prioritizing, we’re gonna prioritize taking him to the areas with the highest concentration of bulls first, to make sure he’s getting a lot of really easy wins. And in his first year, he might actually never do any of the really hard stuff in like the slash young growth recently logged areas where there’s just not a lot to be found. And it’s really physically hard. Just like really thinking through how to how to set up our our schedule in a way that is great and towards the dogs. And I just couldn’t have done that without having been out here. I didn’t know what order we needed to do stuff. And when we got out
Charles Van Rees 1:06:46
the field season Shakedown is a real deal. I mean, you you can you can be the most honest person and just until you’ve actually been out there and live those logistics it’s it’s very difficult. Yeah. On the topic of field season logistics, and and King barley. Taylor wanted to know, how did you store barleys food on wolf infested islands? How do you store dogs?
Kayla Fratt 1:07:12
Yeah, and Bears Bears and ravens, the Ravens have gotten a couple of our things, they’re there. They stole barleys football, it’s gone forever. Oh, basically brought up a bunch of dog food from the lower 48 Because there is no pet food supply on this entire island. Right, we cannot find pet food here. And then I just brought up those normal like waterproof long term storage containers that everyone has like kind of pale creamy wetlands with the screw tops brought a couple of those up. And then when we’re out on like our satellite camps, we actually store our food on the boat, and we anchor the boat off. And then we have a one man canoe that we’ll use to either go out and get stuff off of boat to bring it back to and from camp or to bring the boat in when we’re leaving or coming from camp. So luckily, we don’t have to do bear hangs, we don’t have any like really complicated sort of storage in camp, we just put it on the boat and then anchor the boat.
Charles Van Rees 1:08:16
That’s great. That kind of reserved the work in a way. Yeah,
Kayla Fratt 1:08:19
yeah, we got to paddle around a lot. complain too much about that. And
Charles Van Rees 1:08:30
so what about, we got a technical question here from Kelvin. And that was what search methodology has seemed the most successful, or what would you recommend?
Kayla Fratt 1:08:42
So I think as far as most successful, the biggest thing has been figuring out these high likelihood areas for the wolves, these areas that we expect to be really high density and then just targeting. And we’ve been able to do that by looking at satellite imagery and kind of overlaying, like, Okay, we want old growth, we want a source of fresh water. The wolves seem to like, you know, peninsulas and inlets, like intertidal areas, with good access, you know, not too steep, you know, so we can do a lot of this from a satellite imagery or for local Anatel.
Kayla Fratt 1:09:16
And then, as far as like, beyond that, the road searches are really the easiest wolves use roads to cut through the forest, you know, it’s to trail for them the same way it’s a trail for us. So the road searches are probably our most successful. And if we had limited time, or satellite imagery was really bad. I think just targeting roads makes a ton of sense. And that wouldn’t be the case in a less dense environment. You know, if we were further north, where there were trees are not as much of a factor like on a matching tundra. I know what we’d be doing up there.
Charles Van Rees 1:09:54
Yeah, that would be that sounds like it’d be a whole different ballgame.
Kayla Fratt 1:09:56
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not on that project. But yeah, cuz it’s pretty straightforward, you know, we and we’ve been getting really good success. The other thing they do seem to really like is a lot of areas where there is like you’ve got a good beach. And then you’ve got all the growth that comes up to the beach, there’s a lot of times a trail just inside that. So we’ll go and anchor the boat at one end of like a crescent Bay, and get out. And then just, we can basically, this is what we’re doing all day. Today, we’re like, peering into the cedars. And if we can see that there’s a nice opening, go in there. And then there’s often a game trail we can find, we follow that until it peters out, or filosa blowdown that spits us back out onto the beach. And we just kind of walk around that and then try to get back into the woods and we’re kind of, on and off these really nice how to use game trails that the wolves are using. It’s just like, cut across these bays.
Charles Van Rees 1:10:49
Yeah, you’re just walking like wildlife at that point, right? You’re just yeah, you’re going with this wild landscape.
Kayla Fratt 1:10:56
What is something that I need access to? And how do i What’s the easiest way from here to there? And that’s what they’re doing?
Charles Van Rees 1:11:02
Yep. Yeah.
Charles Van Rees 1:11:05
So I’m gonna I’m gonna let Mahdavi take us home here with, I think an absolutely stellar last question, which is what has been your favorite part so far? And I might add the addendum to this, maybe we already know the answer. But I’d also like to know what barleys favorite part has been so far.
Kayla Fratt 1:11:26
I mean, we’ve just had some really spectacular days here, like the days where the sun peaks out a little bit, and you can like look up without getting rain in your eyes. And these intertidal search areas where you get to kind of beach comb as you’re working our cell fun, but also just like Paul did today, I was just cheering over barley, like, he had some absolutely spectacular finds today, he was working so well, we’ve got such a nice rhythm like we have this amazing fine today we’re we’re, we’re walking on the beach, because it was a blowdowns, we kind of got spit out onto the beach. And at the at the root ball of the tree that had blown down barley kind of pauses, and he casts his nose up. And he’s just kind of like looking up for just a second, it lasted like two seconds. And it looks back. And I saw him doing that. And it’s like, okay, he’s got odor. So then we like walk forward until we find the next place that we can enter the woods. And I was like, alright, buddy, let’s go find it. You know, like, let’s go, let’s go figure out what’s there. And he just like you launch into the forest. And like, 30 seconds later, he had a scout, like, he just, you know, and we were able to work through that. Together, I saw that he had caught odor, he was able to trust me and like, knew that we needed to leave older and go further away from it in order to get back to it. And then as soon as we found that opening in the woods, he was like, Alright, I’m back on it, you know, like, we’re able to, like trade off who’s leading and who’s following so seamlessly, and it just feels so good. And I think that’s probably his favorite part, too. I mean, yeah, that
Charles Van Rees 1:13:05
just seems like a shared flow state. Yeah, it’s so
Kayla Fratt 1:13:09
cool. I mean, it’s, it’s like dancing. It’s like, you know, we’re just like getting to move through the environment. And like, I’m able to use my eyes and what I know about the satellite imagery, and like, you know, my prefrontal cortex, and he’s using to, to, like, like, we’re both navigating the world with something that the other one cannot see or fathom. And we’re able to, like, bring those things together and find just so many scouts are also at like over 400 Scouts.
Charles Van Rees 1:13:42
Right, like,
Kayla Fratt 1:13:43
it’s been insane how much we’re finding. And it’s just, it’s so cool. It’s so fun, Joss.
Charles Van Rees 1:13:53
Well, that’s, that’s about as bright
Charles Van Rees 1:13:54
and beautiful note to end on as we could have got.
Kayla Fratt 1:13:58
Gosh, yeah. Well, yeah, I guess now I get I have to do our outro. Now, do you want to try our outro? Why don’t you do our outro
Charles Van Rees 1:14:06
I can, I would love to do an outro and just throw everyone for a loop here.
Kayla Fratt 1:14:12
Well, I was thinking about making you do the intro and just seeing if like everyone dropped off because they were confused about which podcast it was.
Charles Van Rees 1:14:20
Listen, if the people want it, I will do it. How about that? We will we will give them a chance to speak next time.
Kayla Fratt 1:14:30
Well, thank you all so much for listening. I hope you learned a lot and are feeling inspired to get outside and be a current canine conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. You can find show notes, donate to K9Conservationists, and join our Patreon at k9conservationists.org. Until next time, bye!