All sorts of creatures make their home in the wooded areas of the Grafton campus, including deer, beavers, coyotes, flying squirrels, and the occasional bobcat with her kittens. Although most of these animals rarely cross paths with humans, students in the Master’s in Conservation Medicine (MCM) program at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine have been using wildlife cameras to catch glimpses of their lives. 

One particular coyote has been a frequent visitor to the area. When Chris Whittier, D.V.M., Ph.D., V97, director of the MCM program, first spotted her on a wildlife camera, she was limping badly and clearly had an injury to her upper leg. A year or so later, the animal reappeared missing the leg, but otherwise seemingly healthy.

“It’s always fun to get these secretive glimpses of wildlife that we rarely get to see, but it’s even more gratifying to see MCM students and alumni using our training to secure externships and jobs as these tools become more and more commonplace in wildlife research and conservation,” Whittier said.

“We saw this three-legged coyote over and over again,” said Alexia Goodman, VG20, who is now the chair of the conservation law enforcement program at Athens Technical College in Georgia. She is using a similar camera set up to train her students in Georgia. “It was cool to see how resilient this animal was—we saw evidence that it was hunting effectively.”

Most recently, the coyote has been showing up on the wildlife camera in Whittier’s own backyard, several miles from campus. He even saw evidence that she was nursing a litter of pups last summer. 

“It’s incredible to think she even produced a litter, being three-legged,” Whittier said. “This is one of the rare cases where we can actually see and track an individual with a particular health issue, and see it change over time.”

Camera traps can help researchers monitor population changes, look for rates of certain diseases, or simply see who is living in an area. As part of the MCM program, students learn how to set up and use wildlife cameras to answer research questions and effectively manage the thousands of images they collect. Since 2019, Whittier and his students have also contributed some of their data to a national camera trap survey called Snapshot USA, which aims to track to the abundance and distribution of different mammal species in the U.S. 

“Snapshot allows us to compare similar habitats across the U.S., look at predator-prey interactions, and see how shifts may occur in the species diversity of an area over time. It’s such a diverse set of data that you can really do a lot with it,” said Kellie Carter, VG21, who is now an instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. 

Carter and her current students have two camera trap sites set up in the Reno area, contributing data to Snapshot and serving as the basis for other research projects. Carter is particularly interested in the wild mustangs that appear frequently at one of her sites (and occasionally dislodge her cameras by rubbing up against them). She has been able to follow the progress of an individual horse with a cancerous growth and she hopes that her students will be able to track how the animals are using state park land and if that may be disrupting other species over time.

Camera traps can also help researchers evaluate the effectiveness of different wildlife interventions. Alexis Sigillo, VG24, is a rabies technician with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working to keep the disease from spreading, particularly in Cape Cod. She is using camera traps to monitor the distribution of an edible rabies vaccine intended for raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and other susceptible animals. 

In the spring and fall of 2024, Sigillo strapped PVC pipes to trees around Plymouth and Barnstable counties and baited them with small vaccine packets that had been coated in fish oil and fish meal. (“It smells horrendous, but raccoons love it,” she said.) She set up two cameras at each of 12 bait stations to collect both photos and videos of anything coming to investigate. 

“The goal is to see how animals are interacting with the bait station—if they’re coming back, if one animal is eating all the bait, if raccoons are coming in a family group,” Sigillo said. She still has a lot of photos and videos to sort through before they can reach any conclusions, but “it’s been really fun to see the raccoons reach in with their little grabby hands to manipulate the bait and bite it.”