Network of trail cameras captures Syracuse’s secret urban wildlife (photos)

A coyote sniffing around Shove Park in Camillus. A wild turkey strutting in Syracuse’s Westminster Park. A fisher prowling the back nine at Drumlins Golf Course. A gray fox in an East Side backyard, gnawing on a tree nut.

These are just a few scenes from a network of about 50 trail cameras operated by the New York Natural Heritage Program, a SUNY College Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) program funded primarily by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Think of the trail cam network as a low-fi version of Wild Kingdom: Syracuse Edition.

John Vanek, a zoologist at ESF specializing in urban ecology, helped install the trail cams last fall to capture photos of eastern gray squirrels “across the entire rural/urban gradient,” he said, from the forests to the streets.

Squirrels are a “model organism” for studying wildlife evolution in an urban environment, said Vanek. He placed 20 trail cams around Syracuse, including various city parks and cemeteries; another 20 in rural areas as far away as Otisco Lake; and 10 in wooded suburban corridors, such as the Woodchuck Hill Preserve in Manlius.

The trail cams revealed that a higher percentage of black-furred—the scientific term is ‘melanistic’—gray squirrels live in the city rather than rural areas. But why?

SUNY ESF trail cameras capture Syracuse wildlife

Fisher carrying a dead gray squirrel at ESF's Lafayette Field Station.SUNY ESF

Vanek hypothesizes that melanistic gray squirrels stand out a lot more in the forest compared to their common gray squirrel cousins. That makes black squirrels more likely to be picked off by predators in rural areas, and less likely to become lunch in the city.

So the next time you notice a black squirrel in your yard, that’s a product of natural selection.

The trail cams revealed something else: life is tough for Central New York’s squirrels no matter what color they are or where they live. When squirrels aren’t snacking on croissants in a city park—yes, that’s on camera—they’re being snacked upon by coyotes, foxes, and fishers. That’s all on camera, too.

The trail cams gave Vanek the hard data required to prove his hypothesis. He plans to publish the results of his squirrel study soon.

Meanwhile, the trail cams are still rolling, capturing thousands of mostly humdrum but sometimes dramatic photos of Syracuse’s secret urban wildlife.

SUNY ESF trail cameras capture Syracuse wildlife

Coyote carrying a fawn in Oakwood Cemetery, on the southeast side of Syracuse.Photo courtesy SUNY ESF

Two photos in particular surprised Vanek.

Taken last June from a trail cam mounted in Oakwood Cemetery, the first photo above shows a coyote with a newborn fawn hanging limply in its jaws. The second photo below, snapped about an hour later, shows a coyote trotting away with the fawn’s dismembered leg.

SUNY ESF trail cameras capture Syracuse wildlife

Coyote carrying a fawn's leg one hour after it was photographed taking the fawn into the brush.Photo courtesy SUNY ESF

“I know it happens,” Vanek said. “It’s just not something you’d expect to see on camera.”

The timeframe in which coyotes target newborn fawns is very narrow, Vanek explained. In late spring, when fawns are born, coyotes will methodically scour “linear features” like hedgerows or wooded corridors common in suburban areas, Vanek said, looking for places where mom deer park their babies while they forage on your rose bushes.

“So that was really just luck,” said Vanek, “having the camera at the right time in the right place.”

Camera traps, as Vanek calls them, have revolutionized urban wildlife ecology. Trail cams have replaced old research methods, which often involved trapping live animals in snares. Few researchers today even know how to set foothold traps, Vanek said.

Moreover, outside of rural areas, people are far less tolerant of what seem to them to be an inhumane practice akin to fur trapping, Vanek said.

“Camera traps really let us see things that researchers probably never got to see in the 1970s,” when ESF was a pioneer in the field of urban wildlife ecology, Vanek said. Take coyotes, for example. Fifty years ago coyotes were spreading across the urban/rural divide in Upstate New York. But without camera traps to record their movements, researchers saw only their tracks.

SUNY ESF trail cameras capture Syracuse wildlife

Gray fox with a nut in its mouth in a backyard near the Montessori School of Syracuse, on the city's east side.Photo courtesy SUNY ESF

One of the biggest surprises to come out of Vanek’s trail cam research is the prevalence of gray foxes, the secretive, tree-climbing cousin of the devil-may-care red fox. Eighty percent of the trail cams pointed at greenways in Syracuse have recorded gray foxes, Vanek said, usually at night because the animals are nocturnal.

In fact, trail cams have captured as many photos of gray foxes as raccoons and opossums, Syracuse’s top three urban carnivores, Vanek said.

“If you don’t have a camera trap out, you’re never going to see a gray fox, or very rarely,” Vanek said. “Whereas you might catch sight of that red fox running across the road, or in your back yard.”

In terms of human behavior, Vanek learned that trail cams are more likely to be stolen in rural areas than in the city. His working hypothesis is that most city dwellers don’t know what a trail cam is, whereas folks in rural areas have more experience with trail cams and perhaps know their value.

Someone once stole a trail cam mounted in Burnet Park, Vanek said, but they later returned it after deleting the memory card.

SUNY ESF trail cameras capture Syracuse wildlife

Red fox carrying an opossum in Pratts Falls County Park near Pompey.Photo courtesy SUNY ESF

ESF’s trail cam network will remain in place for at least one more year. Data collected from it is shared with the Urban Wildlife Information Network, a partnership started by the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago that serves as a clearing house for urban camera trap networks across the U.S. It’s a goldmine for urban wildlife ecologists like Vanek.

“We can analyze the data together and look at broad patterns because we’re not looking at an individual city,” Vanek said. “And that broadens the number of species we can monitor and track data on instead of just squirrels.”

Data from ESF’s camera traps haven’t yet appeared in any scientific publications. But it’s only a matter of time before some researcher, somewhere, poring over tens of thousands of photos of Syracuse’s urban critters, finds evidence of a certain behavior, or a population trend, or maybe they just pause to chuckle at a squirrel scampering across the leaves with a stale croissant in its mouth.

Steve Featherstone covers the outdoors for The Post-Standard, syracuse.com and NYUP.com. Contact him at sfeatherstone@syracuse.com or on Twitter @featheroutdoors. You can also follow along with all of our outdoors content at newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/ or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/upstatenyoutdoors.

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