University Place

Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you David Drake. He's a professor in the Forest and Wildlife Ecology Department here at UW Madison, and he's also a state wildlife specialist with UW Extension Cooperative Extension. Tonight, he's here to talk about the UW Urban Canid Project. That's foxes and coyotes, or, as he will pronounce it, coyotes. Is that correct? Either one. Oh, good.

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That are roaming around cities all over the Midwest now. Roaming around cities all over Wisconsin, and including this place. I remember the first time three years ago that I saw a red fox over by the Porter Boathouse. It's a stunning thing when you first see it. It's a great thing to have our cities rewilded in this way. Tonight, we get to hear about how David is studying not only the wildlife denizens, but also us-- the citizens-- and how we maybe are getting along a little bit better than we used to. Please join me in welcoming David Drake to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

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All right, thank you so much. I just found out-- I thought I had until 11 o'clock to speak to you tonight.

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So I just found out that I have 15 minutes. So we're going to kind of speed through a lot of stuff and just skim right over a lot of details. But thank you very, very much for having me, and thank you so much for taking time out of your life to come and listen to what I have to say tonight. Just for my own interest, by a show of hands, how many of you have heard about our project? Good. Okay. And the reason I ask that, we'll cover more of this later on in kind of the public engagement portion of this, but it's becoming very important to us that many, many people within the city of Madison hear about this project. I'll explain a little bit more about that in just a little while. I want to acknowledge Marcus Mueller. So Marcus is the graduate student on this project, and I probably could not have chosen a better graduate student, in retrospect, than Marcus for this particular project. He has been a phenomenal graduate student in the way he goes about this work and the way he interacts with the public. And when we do a lot of our urban wildlife work, interaction with the public is probably one of the most important skills that we can manage because explaining what we're trying to do and getting the public's support is extremely important and very critical to what we're trying to do. And then we'll talk a little bit more about that. And that statistic in the parentheses there, over 300-plus volunteers have been active with our project. Okay, to give you a little background, the idea that I want to give you a little ecology in both the species we're working with, and then we'll talk about our study area, talk about our methodology, talk about some of the preliminary results we're finding, and then we'll kind of wrap it up with some questions and answers as we go through. Okay? And I've got some props too. About maybe a third of the way in when people normally start nodding off, I'll bring out the props that keep your interest piqued. Okay, so our first subject here is the coyote. I pronounce it "ky-oat because I'm lazy. You can also pronounce it "ky-oat-ee"if you want. Sometimes you occasionally hear it pronounced as "yote" but that seems a little odd to me. So I pronounce it "ky-oat-ee" or "ky-oat." This is a native species to Wisconsin. It's native to America. And, as you can see from the range map here, historically, the range was primarily down into the southwestern part of the United States. But these animals are unbelievably adaptable, and they have expanded throughout just about all of North America. And we'll talk a little bit about... There probably is not a city in North America where coyotes are not living. So, as well as anywhere else across the countryside. Really interesting animals. A male is about 45 pounds. That's the largest that they'll get. We've trapped two males that have maxed out at 36 pounds, and that's a pretty sizable animal. A lot of the animals I've captured are probably mid to upper 20-pound range, something like that, females and then some of the males. They are a pack animal, so they operate as a pack. They will defend territories, typically. And around here, in more urbanized areas, we think pack size is probably roughly on the average of five to seven individuals, something like that. Typically, you have an alpha male and an alpha female, and they are the ones that will mate. And then they'll have subordinates in that family size or in that pack. Some might be previous year's young, and they will help to raise the pups, defend territory, and things like that. And I will tell you this, other than the Isthmus region of Madison and directly downtown, there's probably not a spot in Madison where either there's not a pack of coyotes established as territory or coyotes are tracking through areas of Madison. They are ensconced within the city. Very, very well established. So I talked a little bit about the pack mentality. They operate as a pack. They do defend territories. However, you can also get these lone runners. So sometimes you'll get individual coyotes that will start running off on their own to either establish a pack or they've been chased out of the pack for a reason. They have to go off on their own. And so the more common thing is that pack, but you will occasionally see runners. And then, if you see an individual coyote, a lot of times when they hunt, they do hunt as individuals and they sometimes will hunt as pairs, but just because you see an individual doesn't necessarily mean that that animal is a lone runner. That animal is most likely part of a pack and is just out hunting or defending the territory, exploring around. So right now, they are starting-- About April, May is when they start to give birth to pups. Typically, four to six, five to seven pups, something like that in the average litter size. Gestation period is a little bit more than two months. And the pups will stay with the parents for at least the whole summer, and then occasionally, if they do get kicked out of that range or that territory, they'll get kicked out the beginning of fall, and then they'll have to go establish their own territory. But there's some thought that in urban areas that pack size and the territoriality is not as great within that individual pack. And so that they might absorb those animals a little bit more frequently or commonly than perhaps coyote packs in rural, more natural type areas. We'll talk a little bit more about their diet and their habitat in just a minute. But let me move on to the fox, our next species of subject here, subject matter. Red fox are maybe a third of the size of coyotes. So a large red fox is 15 pounds. You know, maybe the size, the weight of a fat cat you might have at home. They're taller than a cat. Typically, the animals we're capturing are in the 12- to 13-pound area. Can I interrupt this program? - Yes. We need to swap this out. Sorry about that. That's okay. Okay. Can you hear me okay? All right. Okay. Excellent. And so they are much smaller than a coyote. They are not organized in as hierarchical of a pack as a coyote is, but they're more of a loose family group. And so you'll get maybe a male and a female that are mating, or sometimes you'll get a male and a number of females that are in that pack or in that family group. A lot of times a family group is also organized as the male and female and then the young from last year that are helping to raise this years kits. And so it's kind of an interesting dynamic that they're not quite as organized or quite as strict a pack as a coyote is. They certainly do operate as a group, even though more of a loose family group. And again, sometimes you'll see them as pairs, but it's more common to see them as individual animals running as they go along. And they also do defend territory. We'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. And you can see, amongst carnivores, they are the most widespread carnivore in the world. And this is all-- They are, again, a native species to Wisconsin and to North America. They were introduced primarily for fox hunting down in Australia, and because of that, they're on the list of the top 100 invasive species because they don't belong in Australia and they really have taken over. And fox are really adaptable animals, as are coyotes, and they're very good at breeding a lot of times. And so they are, in Australia, they are not a wanted species down there at all. Both of these species that I mentioned are very adaptable. They're opportunistic animals. And one of the reasons that allows them to move into cities is because they're both habitat generalists. And so they can utilize and live in a wide range of land uses and land covers. So they are more of an open type animal. So they will utilize woodlots and forest edges and things like that and wooded components on the landscape, but they're not strictly adhering to a forested landscape. And so they will run through more of a wooded habitat, pasture, shrubby area. Certainly they'll move into urban-type areas. They'll be in agriculture areas, things of that nature. We also have gray foxes in Wisconsin, but gray foxes are a tree species. So they are tightly associated with forested areas. We think red fox more as an open land species. And coyotes kind of run that gamut between kind of-- You wouldn't find them necessarily in an interior part of the forest, but they will be on edges of forests, shrubby areas, pastures, and things like that. So when you think about areas like Madison and a lot of cities, especially that suburban fringe of the city, that fragmented, very scattered landscape is ideal for these animals. And that's one of the reasons that they're able to adapt and do very well in urbanized type areas. The other reason they do very well is we think of these animals as carnivores, and they certainly are meat-eaters, without a doubt. A lot of their diet is meat. But they really are omnivores. So they'll take advantage of nuts and berries when available. They'll eat insects. They'll eat vegetation, vegetables, and things like that. And that omnivore diet, or that very wide range in diet, also allows them to be very flexible in where they live because they can choose a bunch of different types of food based on what's available there. And they are also opportunistic. An interesting thing about these animals, we have done a little bit of scat analysis on both coyote and fox where we've collected scat, or the poop, dried it out, and then we had an undergraduate student--

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Do that. It was a learning experience, okay?

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And he's paying good money to do this.

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So we start picking apart the scat to figure out what they're eating, and a colleague of mine at Ohio State University, Stan Gehrt, has got the longest running urban coyote project in the world down in Chicago. And for 15 years now, he's been studying urban coyotes in Chicago, and he's done some diet studies down there as well. The interesting thing about these animals is even though they are living amongst us in this human dominated landscape, a majority, and sometimes a vast majority, of their diet is still very natural. It's what you would find them eating out in the countryside or more natural areas. So they'll eat, you know-- Certainly coyotes in urban areas, we call them the top or the apex predator, they certainly can eat deer, but they really subsist on rabbits, squirrels. We've seen one of our fox has brought back muskrat, domestic chickens. There's a lot of backyard chicken coops in Madison. So those of you who have chickens, beware. Squirrels, rabbits, you know, mice, voles, occasionally coyotes will take pets. They will occasionally, both these animals will eat trash. They might eat out of your compost pile, but they're not sustaining themselves on that. They, again, they're opportunistic, and they'll take advantage of what's available to them on the landscape. So, because of their diet, general natures, and their habitat generalists, they're very easily adaptable to city-type areas like we have here in Madison. And I should say, Stan Gehrt and some of his work with urban coyotes, when he started looking at urban coyotes in Chicago, he started looking at them in the forest preserves on the far outskirts of Chicago. And he is now tracking coyotes, and coyote packs are established inside the inner loop of Chicago, and they live there year round and full-time. And so they are extremely adaptable type animals. All right, so for our project, we've got-- We think of our project in a couple of phases. We're in our first phase here. We're into our third year of this project, and we've got some specific objectives for this first part of our project. And we continually are finding things we want to keep answering And, like any good research, we've got more questions than we have answers, which is a good thing. But the first thing we're looking at is looking at the interspecific interaction. That interaction between coyotes and fox. And this is the crux of Marcus' thesis. So, typically, the distribution of fox on the landscape is completely dictated by where coyotes are or they are not. And, typically, coyotes out in the countryside, if coyotes can catch fox, they will kill that animal. Not to eat it necessarily but to limit competition. And so a lot of times in the country, where you have coyotes or a lot of coyotes, you typically don't have any fox or you have very few fox because coyotes are kind of dictating where those fox are. So what we're looking at here in the city, and our working hypothesis, is that these animals were actually able to get along in the city. And so we are looking at spatial overlap where they're ranging. And we're also looking at temporal overlap. So are they in the same place at the same time and same space? And so that's kind of the teaser. I'll talk to you a little bit more about what we're finding out. But the hypothesis that we're working on is that these animals, that predator coyote, being predator, and fox being prey, that predator/prey relationship is relaxed in this urban area because the resources that they have available to them are so abundant. Think about how many rabbits you've got in your yard or squirrels, habitat type places where these animals can live. Because there's this abundance of resource that theses animals were able to share the resource, they don't necessarily have to compete for the resource. And so coyotes aren't trying to exclude fox from that area. And so that's the first thing we're looking at. That's probably the most academic or ecological of our objectives. Every animal we catch, we collect different health data on them. And so we're trying to understand how healthy these animals are, or not healthy they are. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. And then, last thing we want to do is we are doing our darnedest, partly because I've got an Extension employment and I thoroughly enjoy interaction with the public and engaging the public, but we're also trying to engage the public in order to raise awareness that these animals are in the landscape, educate the public about why they're here, and then increase tolerance because we're not going to ever get rid of these animals so we better figure out how can we live with these animals. And this becomes especially astute, or acute, excuse me, when we have things like what happened last fall in the east side of Madison where we had a pack of coyotes, and there's still a pack there, but they attacked and killed four dogs, four people's pets. And they attacked a fifth dog, and that dog lived. As you can understand, I'm a pet owner, and if my pet got attacked and killed by an animal, I would be upset and our family would be upset. So there are certainly times where we don't-- All the interactions aren't always positive, and we want to try to limit those interactions as much as we possibly can and make as many positive interactions as possible. But also increase the peaceful coexistence between us and these animals. And it's pretty neat to have these animals on the landscape, and our, at least us, we would like to have them here rather than not have them here. So we're trying to engage the public in order to allow that to happen. So here's our study area. And it is bounded, more or less, by the west part and the south portion of the Beltline here. And then we go up along Lake Monona. We don't actually catch animals up in the Isthmus, but our animals certainly track through the Isthmus, fox in particular, and then we're bounded by the lake right there. Now, just because this is our artificial boundary of what we decided that our resources can support this study area, we've got coyotes sometimes that when the lake is frozen they're cruising all the way over to Maple Bluff, or they're moving across the lake, up to the north side of the lake over there. And they'll come back, but certainly they do move outside of our study area occasionally, and we have to go find them. And I'll talk a little bit more about that and give you a story about that in just a minute. Okay, here's some show and tell stuff. So there's two ways typically you would catch these animals. One is using a foothold trap, and that is a spring-loaded trap that has got a pair of jaws, and the jaws close on the foot, and it holds the animal there in place. And trapping, one of the things we're doing, we invite the public to come out, checking traps with us all the time. And we are trying to educate the public about the value of trapping from both a research but also a management tool. And when we think about trapping, especially a lot of us are, you know, 85% of Americans live in urban areas. And our interaction with the natural world is dwindling quickly. And if you look at the statistics about the number of people who trap or the number of people who hunt, it's going down at a rather dramatic fashion annually. And so when we start mentioning about trapping, especially trapping in very urban areas, understandably people kind of raise their eyebrow like, what are you doing? And so we really want to talk about trapping, and trapping is not what it used to be. There's a lot of research that's going into trapping to develop best management practice to promote the humane capture of animals. Even if you're going to kill that animal for the fur resource, if that animal is not in good shape when you get to it in the trap, the fur resource is not going to be in very good shape. So people are starting to understand this, and a lot of research has gone into making sure the traps are humane. So when we think about foothold traps, and even those catching that animal by the foot, I can up my fingers in there and it might bruise my fingers, but it's not going to break my fingers. And it really doesn't hurt the animal. You know, the animals, they're just caught there. So we could use foothold traps or we could use what's called cable restraints. We only use cable restraints for a couple of reasons. Number one, most of our trapping occurs between November 1st and the end of this month, March 31st. So we're trapping mostly in the wintertime partly because the snow is down on the ground and it's much easier to find these animals, their tracks, and where they're moving so we can understand where we need to set traps and things like that. And in the wintertime, obviously, the soil is frozen. With foothold traps, you have to dig those traps into and underneath the soil. And it's just too difficult to do that. The other thing we do with these traps, this part of it here, this is a ground anchor and we've got a drive bar that we just take a hammer and we push this in through the soil. And sometimes we have to take a one-inch carbide tipped drill and drill through the frozen soil in order to drive this through; Sometimes we don't. This year, we didn't have to do it at all this winter. That's how warm it was. So, from my left hand down to my right hand, that will anchor this trap in the ground. Okay? It's much easier to get this anchor into the ground than to dig a foothold trap into a frozen soil. So that's one of the reasons we use cable restraints. The other reason we use cable restraints is for the benefit of pet owners. Because dogs, even the dogs-- And where we trap, a lot of times we-- Most of the time for foxes, we trap in people's yards because that's where foxes are found. Most of the time for coyotes we trap in more natural areas or green spaces, like Picnic Point, Olin Park, Arboretum, things like that. And those types of areas people are walking their dogs, and even though they're supposed to have their dogs on leashes, they don't; Not all the time. And dogs are going to track the same place that fox and coyote do because they're all in the canid family. So we use this type of trap because we're in an urban and in case a dog gets trapped. It's much easier and less traumatic to the pet owner to get their dog's head out of this than to get their dog's paw out of a foothold trap. It's not for the benefit of the animal. It's for the benefit of the pet owner. So here's how this works. This is a trap for a fox. I'll pass these around in just a minute. But we would drive this into the ground. So, legally, the trap has to be anchored so when we catch the animal it cannot leave the trap sight. So this would be in the ground. Legally, there has to be a swivel on here so that-- There has to be at least one swivel from here up to the relaxing washer or the noose up this way. The trap has to be labeled with who set the trap. So we've got that on there as well. And then, some people think of these as snares, but snares are illegal in Wisconsin. Snares are typically more of a killing trap because what happens, that animal gets it around the neck, it never relaxes, and the animal essentially cuts its airway off with that snare. So snares are not legal in Wisconsin. This is a cable restraint. And what makes this legal and different from a snare is there's a little piece of metal right here called a stop. Well, that stop prevents the washer from getting too tight on that animal's neck. So the animal can never cut its airway off. The stop also prevents deer. Sometimes deer will put their foot through here or leg through here. If that deer's leg is through there, they can get their leg out. Okay? So we have trapped over, probably over 3500 trap nights in the last three years or so. And when we talk about 3500 trap nights, for example, we just shut all our traps down yesterday. But yesterday we had 22 traps open. Okay? On Monday night. So that'd be 22 trap nights. So you add that up and that's how we get to 3500 trap nights or over 3500 trap nights. So in over 3500 trap nights, we've only caught six non-target animals. We caught two deer, and we caught four raccoons. We've never caught a domestic dog. And we don't want to catch anything other than red fox and coyote because if we do catch something in here, it wastes one of our opportunities. Okay? And we've got to cut this trap off the animal, and the trap's no longer any good. So we typically don't want to catch anything other than what we're targeting. So I'll pass this around. And essentially what happens is this would be anchored in the ground, and the only thing that'd be above the ground is from my right hand to my left hand. You can see this is for a fox. This is for a coyote. And you can see how much larger that diameter is. Okay? That's how much bigger a coyote is. And typically what would happen is we would set the bottom of this loop much lower to the ground than we would on the coyote restraint because that coyote is moving along, his head is higher off the ground. So what will happen is the animal is coming along, this is on a support wire here that just holds the noose, or this diameter where we want it to be, and then the animal will come along, doesn't see this, puts its head through here, and once its shoulders touch the cable this will tighten up. And this animal will start fighting against this. Again, it's anchored around. It can spin around so the wire can't kink. And the animal will just spin around, spin around, spin around, knock all the vegetation down within the radius of this. It'll sometimes dig. And then, eventually, it realizes it can't get out. And once it starts relaxing, this relaxing washer then relaxes around the neck. So this is very much analogous to a choke collar you might use walking your dog. When your dog is pulling, that collar is tightening up. When your dog relaxes, the collar relaxes. Same principle with this. And every animal we've caught has been laying down or sitting down when we catch it and when we come to it at the trap sight. Kind of looking at his watch like, what took you so long to get here?

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So we do everything, obviously, by the book. We honor and observe all trapping regulations and laws Especially in an urban area, we are under a lot of scrutiny, as you can imagine. We want to make sure that we're always demonstrating good best management trapping practices, that we're demonstrated in the most humane treatment of the animals. We want these animals to live for a long, long time so we can collect a lot of data on them. So if you want, I'll pass these around. They are a little bit dirty so if you don't want to touch them, feel free not to do that. And you can just kind of see what they look like. Okay? All right. So, that's the cable restraint, and here's what it looks like set. Right here. Okay? And so if we're out and about, you won't typically, unless you knew what you're looking for-- And yesterday, as a matter of fact, we usually flag every trap that we put out because they're hard for us to see. And yesterday there were two traps that the flags flew off on them in the vegetation. It probably took me 15 minutes to find those two traps, and I knew generally where they were. So they're not easy to see. Not for the animal or for us sometimes. And then this is just an example of some places we trap. So this is right up in Picnic Point there. This is Dejope dorm, if you know where that is on campus. We caught a fox in the cattail marsh behind Dejope dorm. This is Muir Woods right here. Liz Waters dorm is the largest dorm on campus. We caught a fox there, and we caught a coyote back there one time. And the coyote we caught was about 10 feet off of the bike path, and people were going back and forth and never even saw the coyote. And I know they didn't see the coyote because if they had, they would have called the police or somebody else, and we would have been notified. So these animals, you know, when they're trapped, they feel vulnerable, and they just kind of hunker down because they don't want anybody to see them. Okay, so here's what we've caught so far. We've caught about 17 coyotes. We've caught 10 fox. And so that would just give you an idea about what we're doing. And typically, this year we've been much better about trapping than we were last year. Last year, we weren't sure where the animals were, and so we just broadcast traps in different places because we were just trying to catch animals. This year, we've got a much better sense about where these animals are, partly because we're getting smarter about what we're doing, but we've got more animals on radio collar, and so we know where they're tracking and gives us a better idea about where to trap. So I mentioned, for example, that there might be five to seven coyotes in a pack. Once we go in and we trap a pack site, we will typically, if we get a collar on two of those pack animals, we'll stop trapping that pack because we don't want to burn collars. And let's say there's seven animals in the pack, those seven are going to be doing generally the same thing those two are going to do. So we just pick a representative two. Hopefully we get a male and a female, but typically after we get two animals, if we trap more, we'll just ear tag them but not put a radio collar on them. And so I'll just walk you through the methodology here. So that is one of my favorite pictures up in the upper left. A student that was out with us-- We do invite the public to come out trapping with us to walk the traps. And we've probably had over 350 people come out with us, 300 people, 350 people come out with us the last three years. It is a ton of fun. Trapping is a lot of fun in a number of ways. Number one, it's fun to see if you're smarter than the animal. Most of the time we're not. But it's also, the anticipation every morning. It's like Christmas morning. You get up, you're like, well, did we catch anything today? And then you walk the trap line, and you don't catch anything and you're like, God, we're stupid. And so but you get to try again the next day. And so it's fun to share that with a lot of people, and it's a great way for us to interact with the public and kind of talk a little bit about what we're doing. But that was caught, that animal up there, he was caught in somebody's backyard just about two blocks east of Rimrock Road and about three blocks south of the Beltline. So over the Nine Springs E-Way. And that was a 36 pound male. He was just a big ol' boy. So once we catch the animal, we'll estimate weight, and then, after we've estimated weight, we draw an-- We actually use a combination of two anesthetics. One of us will come in with a pole noose that is on a rigid pole, but we've got a plastic coated cable that we can adjust the tightness on. And one of us will control the head of the animal, and the other one will go and will give the hand injection of the anesthetic dose into the rear leg. And then we'll remove the pole noose, and we'll just back off for about 10 or 15 minutes and let the anesthetic take hold. And then, once we're comfortable with the animal that is under the anesthesia, then we'll come back. The first thing we do is muzzle the animal. So just in case it does wake up unexpectedly, we can control the animal without us trying to get bit or not get bit. And then, after that, we kind of do a general overall assessment. We look at the eyes. We typically will put lube in the eye because the eye doesn't blink, and a lot of times it's open and we don't want the eyes to dry out. We'll do a general overall body assessment. We look at the teeth to see how good the teeth are, but also to kind of put them into an age category or juvenile or adult. And then we start collecting health information. We'll take about 6 CCs of blood out of one of the front leg veins. We'll take a cotton swab, and we will swab, gently, one of the nasal passages. And then we'll take a second cotton swab and we'll gently swab the rectum. And then a lot of times they defecate at the trap site so we'll collect the feces. If the don't, we'll do a fecal grab through the rectum, and we'll collect feces that way. So with the serum, what we're doing is we're spinning that down to get-- I'm sorry, with the blood we're spinning that down to get serum. And if these animals have been exposed to diseases, their immune system will develop antibodies to fight off that disease. The antibodies will show up in the serum. So what that tells us is at some point from when we caught that animal and since that animal's been alive, at some point in that history of that animal it's been exposed to disease A, B, or C based on what the antibodies are in the serum. So that gives us one point in the animal's disease history. The swabs, as those animals, if they're carrying disease or virus, they'll shed those through either the nasal or the rectal area. And we'll do a PCR or genetic tests and swabs, and that gives us what they're currently carrying. So now we've got two disease points in that animal's life. With the feces, we're primarily looking for heartworm, but we're also looking for other intestinal parasites and things like that. And so that's what we're doing with all the health data we collect. The other thing we do is every 10 minutes or so we check rectal temperature, respiration, and heart rate in the animal to make sure that it's handling the anesthesia okay and things like that. So a lot of times if we have the public with us, we'll put them to work. They'll collect, you know, write down data for us, or if the public's really irritating us, we'll put them on the rectal thermometer.

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Or something like that. But we'll give them the stethoscope, and we'll have them actually go out and collect data for us or help us collect data. Okay, so my other prop here is a radio collar here. And so what we'll do next is we'll-- I don't have a picture here. I've got a picture in a subsequent slide here. But we'll put a colored plastic ear tag in each ear of the animal. And that animal's got a unique color combination so that we can identify that particular animal. And after we do that, then we'll put either the VHF collar. This is the coyote collar. This is the fox collar. And, again, these came off of animals that got killed, both hit by cars, and they stink. So if you don't want to touch them, I understand. But they smell. I had these one day on my desk in my office. I was like, is that me that stinks? And finally I realized it's the dang collars. And so they don't smell very good. But what happens is each collar is sized to that individual animal. And what we'll do typically is we'll size it so we can get two fingers comfortably between the collar and the animal's neck. And this will sit underneath the animal's throat like this. Then the antenna runs off the back side, like that. There's a battery. We don't have the battery in here now, but typically we have a battery on there. That prevents the collar from transmitting. We'll take the battery off. The battery for the collar and the transmitter sits in this epoxied case here. And then, if you look here, there's a frequency. So we're on, this collar is 150.753 MHz. So just like you might dial in the college radio station on your radio, 91.7, to get that station, if we want to find this particular animal on a receiver, we'll dial in 150.753, and then we'll find this animal. So you can take a look at these two right here. Both of these collars, they're about $300 a piece. We are now starting to try to only purchase, instead these are VHF collars where we actually have to go out, every time we want to find the animal, we have to go out and find it on our own with a receiver and an antenna. We're trying to only buy now GPS collars that bounces off the satellite. And GPS collars are coming down in price. They're still about five times the cost of one of these collars, but, over the life of the collar, it's a lot cheaper to collect the data because I don't have to hire somebody to go out and collect the data. And Marcus, I don't if you've ever seen Marcus. He's about 6'4and he's a pretty fit individual, and he is very, very expensive to feed.

laughter

And so if I cut Marcus out of the equation, I'm in good shape here. We just get the data off the satellite. So that's what we're trying to get. The other issue is that with the GPS collars we can collect data every single hour if we want. So we can get much more refined data, which is better for us. And so after we do that, after we've got the collar on the animal, we've collected all of our information, we cleaned up the area, we back off the animal, we give it a reversal drug, and then we stay at the trap site until that animal is up and moving away under its own power, and then we collect all our stuff and we leave. And then, for the first five days, three times within the first five days we go out and we find that animal and make sure, number one, that it's alive but also that we know where it is. Excuse me, so we can start tracking it. And, after that, we'll track the animal once a week in five-hour blocks of time. And so we'll go out for five-hour blocks, and that five-hour block of time will rotate through the 24-hour clock week to week to week, so we're not always going out at the same five-hour time. And what we'll do for that five-hour time, we'll find the target animal that we're looking for once an hour for five hours, but then we'll spin through all the other radio frequencies to see what other animals are in the radio range of that particular animal. And so, essentially, we're trying to catch every animal for a five-hour block of time every week. And so you can understand how labor intensive that really is because what we have to do is, essentially for each animal, we've got to find them from three different angles because we triangulate. And where these lines cross, that animal is in the middle of that line. Now, we're not so concerned, we don't need to know exactly it is in, you know, the back corner of this person's yard. We just need to know it's generally in that yard. So we're not overly obsessed about the specific location, but we do need to be pretty accurate with our triangulation. So it can get to be a pretty labor intensive process. But that's, essentially, the methodology we go through. All right, so now here's some of the preliminary data I'll start sharing with you here. And I will say this, just when we start thinking we've got this system figured out, we realized we don't have anything figured out. And so a couple things. You'll start seeing some trends in the next, as we spin through some of these maps. But just to orient you here, this red dot is a male red fox. He's no longer alive. He got hit by a car. And that's-- Most animals in the urban area, they're mortality is by car. And a five-year-old fox or a five-year-old coyote is a very old animal. These animals, a fox, one fox lived in captivity until about almost 15 years of age. A coyote lived 25 to 30 years of age, something like that. So they can be long-lived animals, but there's a lot of risk in these urban environments. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the risks in the rural environment too. So this is over the course of maybe a two-week period, something like that. So and then the pink and blue dot up there, the pink dot is what we think was the alpha female in the pack of coyotes up at Picnic Point, and the blue dot was the alpha male. And so it was interesting last year, Marcus was out tracking, we had the alpha male collared, and we didn't have any other animals in this pack collared. So Marcus was out tracking this animal, and he comes back to do the triangulation at his desk in the evening, and he realizes that the blue dot is where one of our traps is. And Marcus-- So every morning, every 24 hours, we have to check traps. So first thing in the morning, we go out and check traps. So Marcus says, I bet we caught him at that trap site. So we go out there, and we didn't catch him, but we caught the alpha female, and they were tracking together. And he was hanging out with her at the time that Marcus pinged him, and then he took off. And so we caught her. And so, interesting-- A couple things to look at about this. The coyotes, and this is true, this is definitely the trend we're seeing and this is what Stan Gehrt sees in Chicago, coyotes are very tightly tied to urban green spaces. Okay? So, again, Olin Park, Arboretum, Picnic Point, things like that. They spend most of their time in these green spaces. They certainly will move outside the green space, and they will certainly move between green spaces, but they are really tightly tied to these green spaces. So look at that. Look at this box, on the other hand. The fox are in the very, very developed landscape of the city. The other thing to notice is how tight these movement patterns are for the coyote. The fox, over the course of maybe a couple week period, you know, he's moving four, five, six, seven miles, something like that. So when we first started this project, we knew of 17 fox on campus composed of two families on campus. And so I thought, boy, the fox, they're just everywhere. You know? And so now what we're starting to realize, there aren't that many fox in the city of Madison. And what I think is going on is I think coyotes have colonized or moved into the city much earlier than fox have. I think fox are a more recent addition to the city. And one of the reasons that we think there are not as many fox in the city is remember fox are territorial. If there are other fox setting up in this city, this animal will not be able to range as far as he's ranging. He'd be walking across other territories, and he wouldn't be allowed to do that. The other thing, like I said, just when we start thinking we've got something figured out, this past December we caught a male fox and a female fox two days apart in Lot 34 right here by Carson Gulley. They were tracking together. We've got another fox over in Resurrection Cemetery area over here. Okay, so we've got a male fox over here. We've got two fox, a male and a female, on campus. The male and female are tracking together all the time. The male, about three weeks after we catch him, he gets killed on University Avenue by a car. All three males we've caught on campus, all of them have gotten killed within a mile of each other on University Avenue. So he gets killed on University Avenue. About two days later, the fox at Resurrection Cemetery, that male, he is now sidling up to the female. So that also starts to tell us that there is territoriality, and the reason we didn't see him over here is because that male was keeping him out. Okay? So keep your eye on the maps as we go through. But this trend is holding true that the fox are much more far reaching in their movements, and they're much more tied to that developed landscape. And that's why we trap in people's yards because that's where they are. That's why we trap in the urban green spaces for coyotes because that's where they are. Okay, so keep in mind the other thing, that first objective is we want to start understanding if that predator/prey relationship is relaxing. And what we're trying to look at is interactions between fox and coyote in terms of spatial and temporal overlap. Now, keep in mind, the fox is the vulnerable one in that relationship. The fox, if he or she feels vulnerable, they're not going to be there where that coyote is. But watch this now. So this is a male and female coyote. The purple and aqua dot. This is another fox. This is a different fox than you saw of the red spot. Okay? So this is not the same time, but that fox is overlapping in space with the coyote. And there's no way in heck the fox does not know the coyotes are there. Absolutely the fox knows the coyotes are there. And the coyotes, eventually, if they don't know at the time, they know that the fox is coming through there. So they prevent them. Coyotes can prevent that if they wanted to. And it's interesting to keep in mind that out in the countryside where fox are, that's dictated by where coyotes are or are not. So this is kind of interesting now that we're starting to see this spatial overlap. And, again, look at just-- Again, we're in the developed landscape. Far ranging movements for fox. We're up in the urban green space. Much tighter movement for coyotes. So that trend is holding true. Here this is a coyote pack in Owen Park, if you know where that is over on the west side. Okay, so we caught-- Oh, let me go back. This is interesting. Let me go back to this. Okay, so just when we think we've got this figured out, this year what happens, we had two females, we had the alpha female and the subordinate female and we think the alpha male out of the Picnic Point pack collared. I think it was in January, just a couple months ago. The alpha female gets killed over in Shorewood Hills neighborhood one night. She gets hit by a car. And how the heck that happens, Shorewood is 25 miles an hour. And I know when I come through there, the cop is definitely watching whether you're going 26 miles an hour or not. So how you can't avoid the coyote and how the dang dumb coyote can't avoid the car is beside me. But the alpha, we think that she was the alpha female. So she gets killed by a car. So two days later, the subordinate female Marcus is out tracking, and he can't find her. And when we can't find an animal, they'll just start driving in ever increasing circles, like this, to try to find them. And so Marcus is out on the west side of Madison, out on Mineral Point by the Beltline. And all a sudden he gets a faint ping on the frequency for that subordinate female. So he keeps driving west. She has moved about 18 miles west, and she is out on County Road P between Mount Horeb and Cross Plains. Wow. So Marcus finds her out there on a Wednesday. This is the first long-range movement we've seen since we've been sighting these animals. Why all the sudden she moved, we've got ideas, but we don't know. So she's found out there on Wednesday. On Friday I get an email from the DNR that she got shot by a farmer out at Cross Plains. And it's legal for him to do that. And I went out and talked to the farmer. He was nice enough to say, Hey, we found this animal with a collar, it's got ear tags, you know, we just want to alert somebody. So I went out and talked to the farmer and he showed me where the coyote was, and I got the carcass back and we did a necropsy. But that's the first gunshot mortality we have there. And the farmer is certainly legal to do what he did, and he was very, very nice about it. Very, very nice about it. But that was interesting. And all a sudden she took off and started moving. Okay, so here's Olin Park now. So we had three coyotes out at Olin Park collared. And so the yellow and the aqua are the coyotes. The red is the fox. And the fox we caught over off of Old Sauk Road by St. Thomas Aquinas Church in somebody's front yard. So this fox does occasionally cross the Beltline, but we were finding the Beltline is a pretty impervious perimeter for these animals. They don't cross the Beltline too frequently. So this fox is kind of squeezed between the Beltline and the Olin Park pack of coyotes right here. And keep in mind, the Olin Park pack of coyotes, in 2009 and 2011, also attacked and killed pets. So they have demonstrated some natural aggressive tendencies like you would expect out of coyotes. So all a sudden now, we're seeing coyotes come into the fox range, we're seeing fox come into the coyote range. And this is the lion's den, so to speak, of coyotes. And there is no way in heck the fox doesn't know coyotes are there. So keep in mind, again, the fox is the vulnerable one in this relationship, and there's way in heck that fox is going to be going into coyote range if it feels vulnerable. Do coyotes take turkeys? They will, but what they're probably more likely to do is take turkey eggs or maybe the poults because the big turkeys are a pretty formidable opponent. And the males, they've got these big spikes on the backs of their legs that they know how to use pretty well. And so with a lot of these animals that they could certainly take a deer, a coyote could take a deer if they want, but they risk getting kicked in the head. So why not go and get an easier meal that doesn't risk your safety, like a rabbit? So that's what we're finding a lot of times is they certainly could eat turkey, but they probably don't too often. And when we go out to Olin Park where we're trapping, we'll see turkeys, we'll see coyotes, and we'll see turkeys maybe 10 feet away. And the turkeys don't seem to be bothered by it at all. So now we're starting to see some spatial overlap here and some occasional temporal overlap as well. All right, so here's just another map. And now you're starting to see, look at this, the fox comes right into the middle of the pack there. The pack is going out toward where the fox is. And so we're starting to see some overlap there. This is the most interesting part of the story to us, and we have, in three years now, we have documented one coyote kill of a red fox, and that's it. Okay? So, as I was mentioning, that predator/prey relationship we think is relaxed. It probably isn't gone altogether. But look at this. So, if you know where Tiedeman Pond is over in Middleton, this is that little triangle of grass just to the east of Tiedeman Pond. This is a male fox. This is a male coyote. In one night, the same night and for about a two-and-a-half hour period of time, these two animals stay in this little triangle of habitat here. And they're anywhere between 20 and 200 yards from each other for the entire two-and-a-half hours. And, again, the fox is the vulnerable one. So if that fox felt any threat, there's no way in heck he's hanging out there for two-and-a-half hours. So we think that we're starting to be able to document that this predator/prey relationship is relaxed, which is a new ecological trend compared to what you'd normally find out in the country. And so urban wildlife is really, really interesting. All right, so that's kind of what we're finding in terms of movement, spatial and temporal overlap, and things like that. I'll talk a little bit about some of the health stuff we're finding. So, our hypothesis was either, number one, that these animals are going to be pretty healthy, and the reason we thought that might be the case is because every animal we've caught, they're in very, very good body condition. I mean, they're not hurting for meals. And typically the more nutritionally healthy you are as an individual the more healthy your immune system is and the more healthy you are from a welfare standpoint. So we thought maybe these animals are going to be pretty dang healthy, but, alternatively, they may not be that healthy because there's a lot of contact between other animals. Raccoons are just essentially a walking germ.

laughter

So there's a lot of interaction between raccoons. There's a lot of interactions between dogs, humans, other vectors of disease and things like that. And to give you an example of raccoons, this is something else that is just flabbergasting me, and now I want to start finding some money to investigate this. We're trying to figure out where fox dens are right now because we want to collar every single kit in the litter of a fox kit, fox family, and we want to collar every single pup in a coyote litter. So we've got cameras on den sites, okay? And so there's a den site over at Hoyt Park, and there's two raccoons and a possum using the same den entrance together. And over off Segoe Road, underneath this woman's house, underneath her sun room, there's a pair of raccoons that are living in that den, but now we're starting to see a fox pop out of there. And so this is something that is also very interesting. I'm curious about why are these animals tolerating each other because, again, raccoons are very, very feisty animals, and those animals will eat just about anything. And I would think that the possum litter and the fox litter probably would be vulnerable to raccoon predation. But they are sharing dens. We haven't seen them raising a family in those dens, but they certainly are using the same den at the same time, which is really curious. But that's a possibility for disease transmission. So what we're actually finding with these animals is they're generally dang-gone healthy. Some of the coyotes and fox have been exposed to parvovirus, so the antibodies for parvovirus or distemper, canine distemper, have shown up. Some of the fox have shown up with lepto, leptospirosis, and lepto is a bacteria. So lepto is one of those diseases that can jump from fox to humans, so it's a zoonotic disease. And if it shows up in humans, typically it shows up as flu-like symptoms, things like that. So there are some diseases that we should be concerned about for our own domestic pet health, as well as for our own health. But, for the most part, these animals are really healthy. But what's really curious to us is that we caught three coyotes in December in the Arboretum. All three of those coyotes had heartworm, and all three of those coyotes had lyme disease. And one of the coyotes had-- So we have vet students that come out with us, and it's good training for them that they get to handle wild animals. They draw the blood for us, they take all the health samples, so they get experience doing all of that. And they're very good at what they're doing, and they've been trained, you know, very well. So one of the coyotes we caught, they could not register a heartbeat through the stethoscope and they thought, well, what's going on here? So they actually started getting the pulse off the femoral artery of the leg. They processed the health samples. That animal's heart is so occluded with heartworms is the reason they couldn't get the heartbeat. So it was really interesting that these three animals are showing up with heartworm and they're showing up with lyme disease, and we've had a couple other coyotes show up with heartworm. None of our fox have shown up with heartworm, and none of our fox have shown up with lyme disease. Now, in the literature, it's a little bit mixed. Some people suggested in the literature that fox are not susceptible to heartworm, but some people have also said, yes, we've documented it in fox. So there's mixed message on that. But what we think is going on here is because coyotes are hanging out in these urban green spaces where you have really good tick habitat because you've got tall vegetation and you've got really good mosquito habitat because you've got standing water in the landscape, they're more susceptible to tickborne diseases, like lyme, and mosquito-borne diseases, like heartworm. We think that one of the reasons the fox are more healthy relative to heartworm and lyme disease is because they're hanging out with us. And in that developed landscape, water runs off the land much quicker into the storm sewers. We don't tolerate mosquitoes very well, and so we like to get rid of mosquito habitat. Occasionally, the city will come through and spray for mosquitoes. We also have very short lawns. So we don't have this tall vegetation. We don't have very good tick habitat because we also don't tolerate ticks very well. And so we think that fox are not as susceptible to lyme and heartworm, in particular, because they're much more closely associated with human beings. And so that's something we want to start exploring and check that out. Again, like I said, there's a lot more questions than there are answers, but it's kind of interesting some of the trends we're starting to see. Okay, the last thing is that engagement piece of the puzzle here. As I mentioned, we are trying our darnedest to engage the public, to raise awareness, raise knowledge, increase tolerance, and that's one of the reasons I asked you how many of you have heard about our project. So this is one of Kennedy's neighbors right here. We caught this fox right here in Kennedy's backyard. Right there. In his neighboring backyard. This is down at Olin Park. The assistant superintendent for Madison Parks lives in the house at Olin Park. So his family came out with us and helped that day. We have our undergraduate and graduate wildlife students who come out, learn about trapping, learn about canid ecology. This was an undergraduate student. She's one of the vet students who's helping us now. We've got a list of 40 veterinary students who come out with us to help get experience handling wild animals, drawing blood, things like that, in addition to all the public we have coming out. So we've got a Facebook page. We've got, you know, over 2200 people on our Facebook page, and that's one of the ways we pump out a lot of information. Things like that. So we are trying very, very hard to engage the public, and it's very reassuring to me that I saw so many hands go up. But if you can, spread the message because we are trying to get as many people as possible to hear about what we're trying to do.

And the reason is this

this is a coyote that we caught this summer in Research Park on Mineral Point and Rosa Road. Okay? This animal, one of our technicians was tracking the coyotes that were coming out of Owen Park down to Research Park, and we kept seeing coyotes that were not collared. So we set some traps and caught this animal. Well, it turns out, this animal belongs to the Owen Park pack. He was just out on his own in Research Park. So this is what the ear tags look like, up there. And one of the things we're trying to do, again to engage the public, is we've got an online citizen science reporting form called the eye iNaturalist program. And essentially what that is, is you can go online, and if you see a fox or coyote, you can go to our iNaturalist page and we ask you to report the location, the time, and the date where you saw that animal. And then we've got some questions there. Did you see ear tags? Did you see a radio collar? Excuse me. We also ask questions about how close were you to the animal? Did the animal notice you? If it noticed you, did it move off or away from you? If you tried to scare it, did it move away from you? Because what happens with these animals in the urban areas is they habituate to us, they lose their fear of us. And once that happens, especially with coyotes, that's where the negative encounters start taking place because they get bolder and bolder, and they start getting aggressive toward pets. Thankfully, they're not aggressive toward human beings, and it's unlikely they're going to be aggressive toward human beings. But we're trying to monitor that so we can get out ahead of it and be proactive and put out alerts to the public through our Facebook page or through other ways that, hey, there might be a coyote in the area that is showing a little bit too much habituation. If you see this animal, you know, be aware, scare it out of the area, things of that nature. But the other thing we're trying to do is by ear tagging each individual animal, it allows us to set up a population estimate between tagged versus untagged animals. And so we can get an idea about how many animals are on the landscape because we get asked that question all the time, and right now our confidence intervals are between one and a million. It's not very tight confidence interval. So we're trying to tighten that up as much as we possibly can. But the other thing that we want to try to do, you can see there's a radio collar on this animal, the other thing we're trying to do is get the public to report as many ear tagged animals as possible. And we want to overlay the public observations on our iNaturalist page with the radio locations of the animals and see how well they overlay. If they overlay really, really well, what we're probably going to start doing is not radio collar at all. We're just going to trap, ear tag, collect health data, and let the animal go and then rely on the public to start reporting to us where these animals are, and then that will feed into a different phase of research. But it'll be a lot more cost efficient for us and a lot more effective to use all of your eyes versus having us going out, individual animal at a time, scanning for that animal on the landscape. So, as I mentioned, we're interested in pup dispersal. You know, three years ago we knew of 17 fox on the campus of Madison, on the Madison campus here. Now we think there's only two or three. Well, what the heck happened to all of them? We know at least eight of nine of those kits got killed by cars, but what happened to the rest of them? So we want to kind of figure out what happens with these animals. Do they start dispersing, mortality rates, things like that. And then we want to start looking at more behavior stuff. So I think it'd be interesting to find these animals, you know, visually sight the animal, and then observe that animal as people are around. Do people notice the animal? Does the animal notice people? If people notice the animal, what's their reaction? You know, how close do they get? What's the animal do? And things like that so we get a better sense about what's going to happen when we start interacting with these animals in the landscape. The other thing about that behavior question is why in the world are fox sharing dens with raccoons? You know, for example. There's a lot of interesting behavior that is going on in the urban environment, I think partly because there's just so much abundant resource and there's a lot more tolerance between these species because they don't necessarily have to compete for the resources, they can share them. But we want to start investigat- ing that a little bit more. And then I would be remiss if I did not talk a little bit about how to peacefully coexist with these animals. So let me just end on that really quick. One thing we talk a little bit about, and when we talk to the public, especially on the east side where the pet attacks occurred by the coyotes, you know, we talk about lethal removal of coyotes is certainly a tool in the toolbox. But if we wanted to expend a considerable amount of effort and money, we probably could catch every single coyote in Madison and kill every single coyote if we wanted to. But it is going to be a very, very short term solution to the problem because what happens is coyotes from the surrounding areas will start moving in to fill that vacuum. The other thing that happens with coyotes, in particular, is the more mortality they suffer, the more they start reproducing. And it's called compensatory reproduction. So it's going to be a very short-lived solution, and we may end up with more coyotes than we started with. So we talk a lot about the fact that if it is necessary to go in and lethally remove an individual coyote, by hopefully ear tagging enough coyotes we'll know which animal is acting overly aggressive, and that's the animal that needs to be removed, and we don't take anymore coyotes off the landscape than we have to. But what we really stress is non-lethal management. And one thing includes don't feed animals outside. Your animals or wildlife, okay? And don't feed them directly by don't feed a pet outside. And a lot of people might be feeding the animals indirectly and not realize it. So if you have bird feeders, you are most likely feeding coyotes and fox one way or the other. They might be actually eating the seed out of the feeder, but more likely is that seed is dropping on the ground, it's attracting small mammals that are eating the seed, which is the prey base for fox and coyotes. So you're actually, there's sort of a conveyor belt of food going out there. If you've got barbecue grills and your grill is open, they might come lick whatever you were grilling on the grill. Or if you've got a grease pan, that, you know, is pretty dang, it smells pretty good to me so I can only imagine how good it smells to them.

laughter

And the reason is this

So it's things like that. Don't feed animals. Don't have attractants in your yard that's going to cause that animal to come to your yard, or if it does come to your yard, it's not going to hold that animal in your yard any longer than that animal needs to be there. So that's one thing. Keep your pets vaccinated. We talked about canine distemper and parvovirus. So that can be, actually, your pet can get sick by contact with a diseased coyote or fox. But if your animal is not vaccinated for parvo and has parvo, it can also get naive fox or coyotes sick. So it goes both ways. Keep your pets vaccinated for the sake of your pets and animals. Keep pets on leash or in an enclosed area. And if your yard backs up to a green space, most of our animals are moving at night, primarily, although they are also active during the day occasionally. If your yard backs up to green space and you're concerned about coyotes, you should not put your dog out by itself at night. You should be outside. Even if you've got a fenced yard, you should be outside with that animal and be vigilant of that animal. Keep your dog on a leash if you're not in your yard. And one thing we really want to stress is seeing a coyote or a fox on the landscape should really be a pleasurable experience, and we want people to really, really enjoy seeing that animal because it is a treat. And they are fascinating animals. There's no doubt about that. So what we really want people to do is enjoy watching those animals from a safe distance, and, after a couple of minutes, just wave your hand, scare that animal, haze that animal, but scare the animal out of the area. And the best thing we can do for these animals to coexist between us and them is put a healthy fear of humans into these animals. Okay? So when they see us, they move away from us. And that's going to be the best thing that we can do. But we have to do it as a community. We can't just one person can do it and nobody else does it. So think about that. All right, and the last thing, just we want to thank a bunch of people, but if you want to follow us on Facebook, it's an open Facebook page. You do not have to be a Facebook member. You can just Google Facebook and UW Urban Canid Project. We usually put up something at least once a week. Usually multiple times a week we'll post new stuff up there. A great way for us to share information with you. We communicate a lot of times, so we put out a post a month or so ago saying, Hey, Madison, we're looking for fox dens. If you know of any fox dens, please contact us. So we're getting information from you as well, which is very helpful to us. We have a website, which has got more information about the ecology of these animals. That's where you can find our iNaturalist page. And I'm going to put a shameless plug in right now. We are constantly scrounging for money for this project. So we established through the University of Wisconsin Foundation a gift account specific to this project. So if you want to make a donation, you can do that through our Facebook page, or through our website. It is tax deductible. It's not a shady thing. And we will use it specifically for this project. And then, if you want to get involved, if you do see a coyote or a fox, we'd encourage you to report it through our iNaturalist page. You can find our iNaturalist page through our website. It takes about 30 seconds, at most, to register, and once you've registered once, you don't ever have to register again. And then you can upload your sightings through your iPhone or your smartphone. You can do it through your computer at home, whatever the case might be. But we're trying to funnel all the observations through our iNaturalist page. If you want to come out trapping with us, you're welcome to do that. If you want to come out and see how we track the animals, you're welcome to do that. It's a little bit harder scheduling for tracking. Much easier to take you out trapping. But we're happy to work with you on either one. If you have an interest, we'd be glad to involve you and have you come out and see what we're doing. So, thank you so very, very much. I really appreciate it, and I'm happy to answer questions or, if you have to go, please don't feel hesitant about getting up and leaving.

applause