Wildlife Tracking, Bushwhacking and Conversing with Squirrels
by Aimee Lorefice
My first glimpse into the life of Lou Kamenka, Canmore biologist, geologist and wildlife tracker, is a dirty one. A truck full of dirt. A dusty old dog. The feather of a great horned owl sways close to my face and there’s a spider crawling on it. This is a proper entry into one more of the many lessons I have learned about Bow Valley life.
The first lesson I still haven’t grasped completely: a walk is actually a hike. Dress accordingly. But later I will learn a much more useful piece of information: wolves will go for your Achilles; cougars, your neck.
In spite of feeling a little out of place in the presumed living room of cougars, wolves and bears, being out in the woods with Kamenka, a serene soul at home in the unobstructed wilderness, is a calming experience.
“Living out here is like living in a natural history museum,” he says with a slight smile, moving with a solid stride and pointing out animal footprints with his walking stick. “Tracking wildlife is like learning you’re A B Cs.”
This certainly holds true for Kamenka, whose grandfather moved to Canmore about 100 years ago and whose father lived off the land and worked as a blacksmith at a local mine. It’s difficult to deny. Just about any day is a good day to be hanging out in the woods.
April is transition season — a difficult time to track animals, but an interesting in-between time for the inhabitants of Three Sisters Creek, where Kamenka has brought me on this lovely Sunday afternoon for a guided tour through the trees. We are heading toward the south-side primary wildlife corridor. We’re here to track wildlife.
Biologist Lou Kamenka examines an ungulate track discovered in the mud near Three Sisters Creek.
There are a few key things to look for when you’re tracking. Kamenka teaches his students to begin by determining the animal family. Once that is narrowed down, according to numbers of toes and the shape of the track, along with various other factors, the member of the family can be determined. Gait is taken into account, the depth of the track and the distance between each. From there, the tracks are read for further information about the animal’s travelling patterns and behaviour.
There are a few key things to look for when you’re tracking. Kamenka teaches his students to begin by determining the animal family. Once that is narrowed down, according to numbers of toes and the shape of the track, along with various other factors, the member of the family can be determined. Gait is taken into account, the depth of the track and the distance between each. From there, the tracks are read for further information about the animal’s travelling patterns and behaviour.
Markings on trees and random surveys of animal excrement are also a significant part of the tracking process and they help complete the picture. But to track wildlife most productively, you’d get down on all fours and take roughly four hours in the morning or the evening daylight when shadows are cast, and slowly scale only a mile’s worth of wildlife habitat.
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A walk in the woods: a lot can be learned about a species by following in its footsteps. These ungulate tracks follow a trail near Three Sisters Creek.
My friendly guide goes beyond the call of duty educating me on much more than tracks and excrement. I learn about natural remedies for headaches, cuts and birth control. I learn how to identify most trees and how a lodge pole pine reproduces. I even meet a few old quartz sediments from Lake Louise. By the end of the walk I could feasibly eat an afternoon snack off the land and almost translate a squirrel conversation.
“Put that down. That’s mine,” Kamenka says, mimicking a squirrel, after he drops a branch with two pines cones attached to it back on the ground where he found it. “I worked hard all day for that,” I add sympathetically. We keep walking.
By this time we’ve finished our somewhat steep descent along animal-beaten trails and we’re almost back where we started. We saw where deer bed down for the night. We stared up at a cliff where a cougar might have easily been staring back down at us. We saw white-tailed deer and mule deer tracks, bear tracks and fingerprints on Aspen trees, and pine cone remains from a squirrel’s dinner. But except for a few standard squirrel and bird sightings, no wildlife. It’s clear they know how to hide.
Kamenka covers 25 kilometres a day in the winter. He says tracking is a little more labour intensive than other forms of analysis but it gives a more complete picture.
“You have to be very consistent in collecting your data. The more you’re out the more you start seeing things. It becomes your backyard and you observe things a lot better.” However, he adds, with nature’s constant shift and ongoing development activities, the information gathered is obsolete within a few years. Major changes have occurred in this area as development has crept up the sides of the valley.
We finally step out from the wooded land of the toe-stepping ungulates and curious cats onto the cement. I feel a bit like Alice walking out of Wonderland. I ask my guide about infringing development and he refrains from getting political or from harping on what some Canmore people consider a doom and gloom situation for local wildlife. He does take one for the animals though. “If the animals could put their paw up and vote, they’d say, ‘let’s not touch this place’. The wildlife would love to have downtown Canmore back.
“As far as trying to turn this into a pristine valley, it’s not going to happen.”
My “walk” with Kamenka was a three-hour feast of nature’s kingdom and Canmore’s natural history. I recommend it. But, by the end, I was more than ready to make my way back to the valley floor for a coffee and to scale my warm spots for ticks.
Aimee Lorefice is a Canmore-based journalist with a keen interest in cougars and other wildlife that thrives in the Bow Valley.
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