Two University of Alberta students are wrapping up a four-year cougar study in an area adjacent to Jasper National Park after capturing, collaring, and GPS tagging 44 cougars in the province.

Aliah and Kyle Knopff have been studying cougars in a 15,000 square kilometre area, centered in Nordegg, spanning west to the Jasper National Park boundary, east to Rocky Mountain House and south to Caroline for their Master’s and PHD degrees.

Kyle, who has been working on his PHD, has been studying cougar prediction behaviour while Aliah, working on her Master’s, is studying cougar habitat in areas that have a lot of human development, and human opinions on cougars.

“What I’m trying to understand is if it’s possible for humans and cougars to co-exist,” Aliah says.

After spending three years in the field, the two are now at their desks, finishing up their reports.

Aliah says she is trying to understand what the habitat requirements are for cougars and how they are responding to human development. She says she knows they can live in at least moderately developed areas such as the area around Rocky Mountain House, where there are a lot of recreational properties, acreages and agricultural land in a small town.

“So we know, because they seem to be doing very well out there, so what I want to understand in addition to what the habitat requirements are in those areas, is how people feel about coexisting with cougars. Human perception is a big component of wildlife management.”

Aliah ran a survey, asking people how they valued cougars, their tolerance levels to them, and how they think they should be managed.

Still working on analyzing that data, she says that most people in Clearwater County value cougars quite a bit. “They think that their presence on the landscape is important. But, they don’t necessarily want cougars in their backyard, they do have a sense of fear regarding cougars, which is justifiable.”

“It’s very interesting, the positive perspective on cougars and value for their continued presence in Alberta was quite a strong response and surprised me how strong of a response it was.”

Aliah says to run a survey like that in Jasper would be a little different due to the number of transient people and tourists, but she says it’s still important to understand the perspective and knowledge of recreational users of areas with cougars. 

“The conflict of human perception of wildlife can really give influence on how management is conducted and what management actions are taken. So understanding both local perception and especially the areas like the parks where there’s lots of tourists, the tourists perception and common knowledge base (is important).”

She says the information centres that the parks have are really valuable ways to gain information.

Based in Nordegg, Aliah and Kyle spent three years, mostly in the winter, tracking cougar tracks with dogs that would chase the cougar up a tree. After tranquilizing the cat, they would put a GPS collar on it so they could track its movement, find out where it goes, and why it spends more time in some places than others.

According to Aliah, cougar-catching success is very weather dependent and very luck dependent. 

“It really depended on the snow condition and having a cougar cross the right trail that we drove by so we can find the tracks,” she says. “There would be times when we would catch a whole bunch of cougars in a few days and then droughts when we wouldn’t catch a cougar for a month or six weeks, so its very dependent on the weather and luck. We did 44 individuals over the three years, and we caught several cougars multiple times to replace collars.”

Aliah and Kyle are now in Edmonton where they hope to finish their writing their theses in the next few months.