It’s Wolverine Wednesday!

The season’s wrapping up and the final results are in!  Great job everyone! Even though this year’s effort was supposed to be a scaled back effort, I am very impressed with the number of citizen scientists we had participate!

First a big thank you to all the many volunteers who made this possible! And there are quite a few of you to thank. In fact the number that we would like to most celebrate is that we engaged 90 volunteers who contributed 1140 hours to this project!

Well, our photo warriors finished an initial sorting of 21,812 photos and we have some preliminary results! A word of caution in using these numbers. We feel confident that the presence or absence of species from a particular station is accurate. But determining the number of unique individuals of any given species who visited any given station is beyond the expertise of our volunteers. Hey, most martens, or fisher, all look pretty much alike, right? The expert biologists at Idaho Fish and Game (IDFG) will be able to make a better determination of the final numbers based on their trained eyes and on DNA analysis.

A Quick Look at the Numbers

• We engaged an estimated 90 volunteers.
• Of those volunteers, 17 were students working directly with their school groups or classrooms.
• Volunteers gave a total of 1140 documented hours
• Of those hours 1008.5 were spent in the field deploying and monitoring Wildlife Camera Stations
• The remaining 131.5 hours were primarily spent reviewing photos, handling logistics such as bait preparation and training.
• Sighting included at least 14 Marten, 5 Fisher, 3 Ermine, 13 Squirrels, 5 Gray Jays, 2 Stellar’s Jays, 4 Whitetail Deer, 1 Elk, 2 Moose, 2 Bobcats and 1 Northern Goshawk!  These were from the 17 stations our volunteers set. Check out the pictures!

Next Year and How YOU Can Help

We hope that the enthusiasm for this project will carry over to next year with the same number of, or more, volunteers.

• If you were a volunteer during this season, we will contact next season with more info.
• If you would like to add your name to our volunteer list for this project, send an email to mustelids@scotchmanpeaks.org
• Consider making a donation to FSPW to support our project next winter!