In between a busy school schedule this spring, I have been spending some time evaluating and purchasing equipment for the coming field season. This has brought up a number of interesting considerations. Much of what I've been looking at has been informed by a great offering at UMN: a hands-on course in animal capture, immobilization, and handling. I've posted a bunch of pictures and video clips from the course here.

Here are a few equipment issues and how we've decided to handle them. If you happen to read this and have any comments or suggestions, we'd love to hear your thoughts so just drop me a line.

Camera Traps:

Currently, the project has 6 working "Camtracker" brand camera traps and 6 "DeerCam" traps. While these have served us well (see the little guy to the left for example ), we are determined to take advantage of some of the newer (and now quite stable) digital camera out there. A friend recently tried some of the new Moultries with very good results.

Of all the options out there now, we have decided to use plain old standard VHF collars. By most accounts, in an area that is open and easy to get around like Thale Noi, these will give us more accurate positions than either GPS or satellite collars. They're cheaper too!!

Marking/Tagging:

After capturing fishing cats (and potentially other carnivores) we will use colored ear-tags to mark individuals with unique left/right combinations. This should improve our ability to recognize individuals and overall improve the data we can get.

- Namfon, April 2008