We live, for better or for worse, in a society with an eye solidly fixed on technology and even I, a traditionalist and modern Luddite, find it remarkable the insights that technology has provided. Drones with infra-red capabilities allow us to see much more than the human eye can. Wildlife cameras provide a window into behaviour we had no inkling of. Audio monitors give us ears even when we are not in an area. Environmental DNA means we don’t even have to see an animal any longer. Truly, these are valuable tools. But, a caveat if I may: they are not the panacea presented by their proponents. Here I would like to explore our reliance upon these to the exclusion of putting people in the field. And I suspect from the title of this blog alone, you can see where this is going.
In a previous life, during my PhD defence a committee member asked why I thought the methods I was using in my research were no longer in widespread use (and this was true, they were somewhat passé,… I always have been a day late and a dollar short). It was a penetrating question and my response was that science proceeds not linearly or logically, but instead in response to technological developments. The tool leads the way rather than the question leading to development of the tool. Fast forward a (large) number of years and witness the rise of wildlife cameras. Today, many studies are based around solely putting this technology out; to the extent that some recent work in the Northwest Territories used three hundred(!) cameras. The tool has become the focus and the question secondary. The same can be said of drones, LIDAR, eDNA… name the technology. When all you have is a hammer…
But, and importantly, what do we miss when we focus on the tool rather than the purpose of the work?
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For the last three months I have been conducting a general wildlife survey of a large property on Vancouver Island. I have had five wildlife cameras out continuously; from these what can I say with confidence is living there? My cameras have photographed black bear, blacktail deer, and humans.
Okay, so now I know there are bear, deer, and people on the property. But, over this same time, in several field visits and around 20-25 hours on the ground I have seen or found evidence of: bear, deer, squirrel (both red and gray), red legged frog (a species at risk), barred owl, great horned owl, raccoon, otter, four woodpecker species, and a nest of a wren requiring protection, among many songbird species. In discussion with tenants living on the land it is pretty clear cougar are present, either a young male or a female with young – one tenant recently lost a dog to a cougar. Further, my hours in the field, paying attention to the habitat and also what I was not seeing or hearing (recall the May 2022 blog “Seeing the absent”) indicate to me an absence of all reptiles and very low abundance of frogs; to this point only a single species. In full disclosure I also have cover boards out for reptiles and am conducting auditory surveys for frogs which are confirming the absence. I found a road killed garter snake off of the property but nothing within the area of consideration.
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The point of this example is that the cameras – and I should mention I am experienced with cameras and can set effectively – have not only merely confirmed what I already knew to be present, but I actually found the bear sign and saw the live deer before the cameras captured the images. I knew the area was used by people by the mountain bike trails throughout the property. Therefore 450 camera-days of effort have added no information I did not already have.
Does this mean we should do away with wildlife cameras or other technology? That is not at all what I mean to imply. These tools are phenomenally useful, but they should not be relied upon as the only method for surveying. They need to be a component of a larger study design that incorporates multiple methods. To rely on one or two methods is to reduce our already opaque and biased window of environmental conditions to a mere sliver of knowledge. We need to always put the purpose of the work ahead of the technology – and then select the best methods to meet the purpose.
There is, quite simply, no replacement for knowledgeable and skilled people in the field. In my case above, I would say that I have seen or inferred at least ten times the number of species that the cameras have detected. There is one more critical point to make to this argument though. Nearly all of my observations and inferences – and these inferences are very important to guide future development and protect areas – were made while I was focussed on looking and listening for animals. With few exceptions, they were not made while I was out setting wildlife cameras or laying out cover boards. When doing these activities you are focussed on the work (and often trying to accomplish as speedily as you can; “efficiency” seems to drive everything). Being focussed on a task at hand makes you blind to things around you. The observations I made were by moving slowly and concentrating on what I was doing, not being distracted by trying to do multiple tasks while in the field. For example, I found the wren nest while sitting still taking a break; I heard an awful lot of racket and driven by curiosity found adults going in an out of a cavity in an arbutus. I would have completely overlooked it if I had been “busy”.
For those of you that have followed my blogs over the last couple of years, you know that I am a traditionalist. Here I advocate putting time in the field and using technology to support your work rather than guide it. This position is not a nostalgic hearkening back to previous times; it is simply the only way to collect good data. Technology, no matter how good (including AI), cannot replace your ears and eyes. We can, and should, use it to complement what we bring, but when the tool becomes dominant to the project purpose the information declines. This is the little-recognized cost of technology.
Sean Mitchell
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