Elbroch on tracking big cats
Ecologist and master tracker Mark Elbroch says "there's nothing esoteric" about what he does. "It's really just looking for signs that betray the passage of an animal. And knowing where to look."
He's looked at scat “for years and years and years,” and still comes across specimens he just can’t identify.
In a 2011 population survey of snow leopards in Nepal, genetic analysis showed that 52 of 71 scats identified as snow leopard in the field came from another carnivore (probably fox, dog, wolf, or lynx), even though the highly trained field team followed an exacting protocol.
Nearly every project that relies on scat to study the diet of felids ends up mixing felid and canid scat, says Elbroch, who’s studied lions in California, Colorado, Patagonia, and now, as leader of the Teton Cougar Project, in Wyoming.
