Wildlife cameras snap shots of Calgary's urban critters
Data collected will help the city plan parks and neighbourhoods to avoid conflicts with wildlife
From deer and moose to birds and bobcats, most Calgarians get a glimpse of the animals we share the city with from time to time.
But a new program from the city is tracking how our fuzzy and feathered friends use Calgary's public parks and forested areas to help the city make better decisions around conservation and reduce harmful interactions between humans and wildlife.
Chris Manderson, urban conservation lead with the City of Calgary, says the city has set up nearly 70 motion-activated wildlife cameras in areas animals use to get around the Calgary.
"We're interested in healthy urban ecosystems, healthy parks. A big part of that is how do wildlife use them and how do thy move," Manderson told the Calgary Eyeopener.
He says the cameras are in 12 parks across Calgary with a focus on the west and north sides of the city. Most of the animal activity inside city limits is happening around the city's rivers while a lot of the wildlife is coming to Calgary from the west through Springbank, the Paskapoo Slopes and the Weaselhead Flats.
"We don't need cameras to know we have wildlife in the city, that's pretty easy. But where they move is what we're interested in. So [the cameras] have been set up in a way that will help us give a sense of how they are using our spaces and where they're going."
Tens of thousands of pictures of passing animals have been captured by the solar-powered cameras and the city is just starting to go through all of the collected data.
Manderson says any pictures of humans are immediately deleted, so any Calgarian worried that they may have been candidly captured on camera doing something odd in the urban wilderness can put their fears to rest.
"There's certainly a wide variety of behaviours, let's put it that way," Manderson said with a laugh when talking about people caught on camera.
"We screen out all pictures of people and dispose of them, I'm not even allowed to see them," he said, adding the city went through a lengthy privacy assessment before setting up the cameras last spring.
Who's who in the urban zoo?
The cameras have been busy snapping shots of Calgary's usual wildlife suspects — like white-tail deer, moose and coyotes — but the project has already helped confirm the presence of a masked bandit the city has had suspicions about for sometime.
"We've got photographic evidence of raccoons throughout this city," Manderson said. "We know they've been here for probably about 25 years, but seeing them in Fish Creek and in the Weaselhead and all the way up into the Panorama area this summer was interesting to see."
Manderson says the city is still working to see if the cameras have documented any large predators lumbering through the city, like when a large grizzly bear was spotted in Calgary's southwest in September.
"We're not certain yet because we haven't gone through all the images but that's one [species] we're paying some attention to," he said, adding there have also been no confirmed cougar pictures but "we know they are in town."
Get involved with some citizen science
Because the cameras are motion-activated and can be triggered by anything that crosses their lens — like waving grass or falling branches — Manderson says one of the cameras alone has taken around 20,000 images.
With so many photos to go through, Manderson says the city will be launching a "citizen science" initiative on the volunteer research website Zooniverse to enlist the help of Calgarians to "crowdsource" the identification process.
"We're hoping in the next week or two to have this up … You can log in and you can help us identify the images," he said.
Data on animal activity in the city reported to 3-1-1 is also being worked into the project to give the city a better understanding of how animals get around town and reduce the harm done to wildlife in Calgary.
"They're here, they are using not only our parks, but they're in our communities as well," Manderson said. "Maybe it'll give us insight into reducing human-animal conflict when building new communities."
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With files from the Calgary Eyeopener