During the winter of 2012 MBI partners established 86 forest carnivore 'bait stations' in the Idaho Panhandle and northwest Montana.
A bait station consists of a piece of meat (beaver, deer, elk, or moose) secured to a tree. 12 gunbrushes are placed under the bait and attached to the tree. These function to snag hair from animals as they climb the tree to eat the bait (see below). We also place a motion activated camera on an adjacent tree to capture photographs of the animals visiting our stations. Download this map to see the red outlined 5x5 kilometer grids which each had a bait station. We used images from the cameras and DNA from the hair to determine we had 21 species of wildlife visit our stations in 2012. The map shows where we detected fisher, marten, wolverine, and lynx.
Gunbrush with hair from a forest carnivore visitor. DNA analysis will tell us which species left the hair.