the full complement of native carnivores

If you don't have a top predators

suddenly you find you have an overpopulation

of ungulates for example elk and deer that they might

feed upon. My name is Roger

Christophersen and I work as a wildlife biologist here North Cascades National

Park

It's a scent lure

that will call in or attract

black bears. Actually we get a lot of other carnivores

I should just say carnivores in general. It's not so bad [smells terrible!!!]

This is the hard part.

[There are] primarily three ingredients

cattle blood, fish

fertilizer, and fish oil and then it cooks for like a month

in the sun and it gets really "odiferous!"

Carnivores have wide-ranging territories

and they need to move across the landscape

to promote genetic flow. (Reading instrument)

944 meters yeah okay 944 meters to go

We made it

So we're at this site

and we're going to off-load some gear and

set up a bear corral which is basically just a

box around

four or five trees that we can set up a barbed wire

system to snag some bear hair. You increase your odds at getting hair

if you spread these apart a little bit. Our next step

is to build this debris pile in the center of the corral

Okay this is what we call a remote

digital camera and it's

triggered by motion and heat. Okay now we're going to pour this

scent lure and the idea is again to

attract the bear into this site. We got this debris pile and it might think that

there's some kind of

dead animal or a carcass underneath and they become curious and then

sniff it out. Meanwhile might get a photo of the animal

and hopefully it leaves behind a tuft of hair on the barbed wire.

We can extract DNA from the hair samples that we collect.

And we can sort of see

who is related to who and how distant that relationship is or how close it is.

So imagine you have the highway here and you have a north side and a south side.

And if these two populations are very distant,

for example, genetically that might

suggest that this highway acts as a barrier

They're not getting the genetic exchange that they need

Carnivores are

at the top of the food chain. They are the major predators

and having them all intact

makes for a complete, whole, ecosystem

and it keeps things in check, keeps things in balance

It's just a legacy I want to leave behind

It's a personal legacy to leave these places at least the way I found them

so that my nieces and nephews and your

children in the next generation can at least experience and see

what I saw.