In honour of Parks Canada’s Wildlife Festival last weekend, caribou biologist Layla Neufeld shared one of her favourite wildlife encounter tales with The Fitzhugh.

She recalled a time when she was working on a research project in the Yukon, in an alpine environment similar to that of Jasper National Park. Neufeld and the other researchers were trying to put data loggers on marmots to study their reproductive success.

“The first thing to do was actually catch the marmots, and it took a little while for everyone to figure out how to do this,” she said. Soon enough, the group discovered that human urine attracted the animals. “It has nitrogen by-products in it, so they would just get crazy about urine.”

Turns out pee is a marmot delicasy. “They would come lick it up,” Neufeld said. “If you peed on the ground they would absolutely dig and dig and dig, destroy large parts of anything that smelled.”

So before the researchers went out trapping, they would collect their “bait.”

“You would have to pee in this Nalgene bottle and carry it everywhere you went, so you wouldn’t waste a drop,” Neufeld said. “And then set the traps with some vegetation and then pour pee all over it.”

Though it may sound a little goofy, there were restrictions to the practice. “We were discouraged from urinating on anything that was vegetation, so you had to always urinate on a rock so marmots wouldn’t tear up the ground,” she said.”It ended up being a pretty big deal because we were trapping with urine and marmots figured out it was a really good source of nitrogen, so we definitely had rules about where to pee and not to pee.”

The trick worked better than they would have guessed. “It took a little while to figure it out, but by association and watching animals and learning, it ended up being the absolute best bait,” Neufeld said.

Did she perfect the technique? “There is certainly some art to peeing on rocks, we’ll leave it at that,” she added with a laugh.