“Naked hiking is getting really popular,” Robin Steenweg, a PhD student working on a remote camera study, said with a laugh after being asked about the strangest thing he’s seen while looking through photos captured in Jasper, Banff, Kootenay, Yoho and Waterton Lakes national parks.
Steenweg was at the Jasper Legion last week talking about his remote camera research as part of the Wild Jasper presentation series organized by Parks Canada.
Steenweg, who is attending the University of Montana and formerly attended the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, used his time slot to show images captured by Parks Canada’s remote cameras. (Sadly, the audience only saw those taken of animals. But, they did also get to watch Steenweg explain to a young girl why people choose to hike naked.)
The images shown included shots of grizzly bears rubbing on trees and wolf packs, cougars, goats and lynx walking down trails.
There was also a series of photos showing a wolf pack walking down the Cascade fire road in Banff. As part of that series, “we see this wolf and he turns around, and we think ‘Huh. What’s he interested in?’ And then he pauses, moves on and we see that he’s being followed by a grizzly bear.”
There is even an image that shows the wolf and the grizzly within the same frame. According to Steenweg, it’s not everyday researchers see two species in one photo. “This photo does not happen,” he told the 25 people who gathered at the Legion. “You do not get two species like this on the same photo. It’s pretty cool.”
The photos, though, are more comedic than climactic, as the grizzly bear stops its pursuit in the lefthand corner of the frame and instead rubs its back on a tree.
“Clearly something of malice isn’t going on,” said Steenweg. “That makes sense. Grizzly bears don’t commonly eat wolves. We know that, so we don’t really learn a lot from things like this, but it definitely makes for interesting stories.”
What Steenweg and Parks Canada are learning from remote camera photos is how different species interact with each other and their environments and how communities of large mammals change due to human activity and development.
Currently, photos are being collected from upwards of 250 cameras across 22,000-square-kilometres of land in Southern British Columbia and Alberta. Within that area, there are five national parks, three provincial parks and other provincial lands.
With the data collected during his PhD studies, Steenweg hopes to answer three questions: how can we best use remote cameras to monitor changes in the distribution of grizzly bears; how would climate change, human development and activity and interspecies relationships interact to affect these distributions of grizzly bears and of other large mammal species; and which species need additional protection under the conservation paradigm of a particular umbrella species? (An umbrella species is a species that’s protected and, in turn, indirectly ensures the protection of other species.)
His study of grizzly bears and other carnivores began in 2011 and is set to continue until 2015, although, cameras have been up in the park for much longer than that. There is potential for the cameras to remain as a long-term monitoring project.
To learn more about Steenweg’s research, visit the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation website, at and click “Current Projects” on the lefthand side.
