The Predator-Prey Project
WDFW ungulate research scientist Melia DeVivo warned us, “wildlife doesn’t respect working hours or weekends.” She receives a phone notification every time a deer stops moving or a trap triggers, day or night. But none of us could have imagined all the challenges that come with a global pandemic when we first started exploring how to tell this story over a year ago.
Besides Covid-19, our main shooting window was also unseasonably warm. Deer are particularly unmotivated to enter a trap for a snack when there’s plenty of natural forage to be found. So during our week working with the ungulate team in northeast Washington, we didn’t catch a deer until the last two hours we had on the ground. They normally process three or more a day. Luckily, we live in the Okanogan study area and could move quickly when a cougar entered a trap just down the road. We also figured out how to do long-lens, socially-distanced interviews. This was simply one of those projects where, even though we knew the mix of scenes and characters we needed, getting them in-hand proved a steeper climb than anticipated.
But it wasn’t all uphill. The Predator-Prey Project is incredibly visually rich, even without the charismatic megafauna. Sarah Bassing, one of the UW graduate students contributing to the project, has been deploying long-term camera traps across a huge geographic area. Her archive provided an invaluable visual record of the complex mix of wildlife that share these landscapes year-round. Researchers have also placed over 200 satellite tracking collars on wolves (see our recent film, How to Count a Wolf), cougars, deer and elk. Each of those collars reports the animal’s location every four hours, and the map tracks quickly resemble an enormous plate of spaghetti. Working with carnivore scientist Brian Kertson, we extracted two months from 2019 with two predators and two ungulates, and slowly traced their paths in a data visualization that wraps up the film.
As spring comes to Eastern Washington, WDFW researchers and graduate students are now closing out five years of data collection. Figuring out what it all means is the next step. And with wolves recolonizing more and more of the state, understanding complex predator-prey dynamics in landscapes where people also live, work and recreate is a critically important task. So despite sleepless nights and formidable challenges, the data from The Predator-Prey Project will undoubtedly shape how the agency will manage and conserve wildlife for years to come.
