Tony Burkhart: 10/01/2013

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Golden Eagle and Deer Story By Jason G. Goldman

For the original full length story, click here - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2013/09/25/golden-eagle-versus-deer-eagle-wins-photos/

On December 15, 2011, conservation biologist Linda L. Kerley was conducting a routine check of a camera trap that had been placed in a small forest in eastern Russia. She regularly visited each of her cameras to swap out memory cards and batteries. But it was different this time when she came upon a deer carcass just a few meters away from the camera. Something “felt wrong about it,” she said in a prepared statement. “There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died.”

Kerley, who works with the Zoological Society of London, and her colleague Jonathan C. Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society study tigers. Together, the two zoological organizations have been working together to monitor Amur tigers, also known as Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), for almost twenty years. As part of their work on the world’s largest cat, the researchers placed camera traps throughout the Lazovsky State Nature Reserve in Russia’s Far East. Whenever an animal passed in front of one of the cameras, an infrared sensor activated and caused the camera to snap a photo.
Given the lack of prints in the snow it was clear that, whatever killed the deer, it wasn’t a tiger. She would have to wait until she could look at the photos stored on the memory card to see if they held any answers.