Bobcats and Bird Flu: Research Insights Emerging from Cornell

[00:00:00] Jennifer Bloodgood: Of the 16 animals we tested from the first season, nine had been exposed to some sort of avian influenza virus. They had been exposed and been able to survive that exposure.

[00:00:16] Brett Barry: That's Jenny Bloodgood, wildlife veterinarian at the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. She's been collaborating with Cornell graduate student Haley Turner, who's researching the abundance of New York's bobcats. GPS collar tagging is one aspect of that effort, and with an anesthetized bobcat in hand, the team is taking advantage of that opportunity to collect biological samples. On today's show, Bloodgood and Turner reveal their findings, including the recent discovery of avian influenza [bird flu] in New York's wild bobcats. I'm Brett Barry, and this is Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast.

[00:01:02] Campbell Brown: Kaatscast is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and The Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past as you watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2025 events, visit hanfordmills.org.

[00:01:39] Brett Barry: So let's start with the basics. Could you please introduce yourselves and tell us what you do and where you are?

[00:01:45] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yep, I am Jenny Bloodgood. I am a veterinarian with the Wildlife Health Program for New York State, so I work with the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, which is half of the partnership that makes up the Wildlife Health Program, and the other half is the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. At Cornell, I'm also an assistant professor of practice in the Public and Ecosystem Health Department.

[00:02:09] Haley Turner: So my name is Haley Turner. I am in the second year of my master's at Cornell University. I am in the Department of Natural Resources and Environment, and I've been working on a project that's funded by the Department of Environmental Conservation, so I've been working on estimating the abundance of bobcats for the past two years.

[00:02:31] Jennifer Bloodgood: So with our partnership with the Department of Environmental Conservation, we really focus on Native New York Wildlife Health, so we do general surveillance for diseases or other things that may affect wildlife health, and we monitor trends in those diseases to identify potential emerging threats to populations or just keep track of ongoing threats.

[00:02:56] Brett Barry: How did bobcats take the stage here? What drew you to researching bobcats of all of the wildlife that we have here in the state?

[00:03:04] Haley Turner: So this was a really great opportunity to look at the health of bobcats because, as I mentioned, the DEC had this objective of understanding the abundance of bobcats in New York State, and so once I was tasked with this project, I looked into the veterinary college here to see who I could rely on for help with this project because we specifically had an aspect where we were deploying GPS collars on bobcats, and that was a component of estimating their abundance, and so this is something that I had never done before where I physically handled animals, and so I wanted to have a licensed and experienced veterinarian on the project, so I reached out to Jenny, who was very excited to work on the project and said, "Hey, I have all these ideas of biological samples that we could collect while we're working on bobcats." They are a very elusive species, so when you've got funding to work on them, it's a great opportunity to take these, you know, extraneous samples that otherwise you would only get off of, say, deceased bobcats that you find.

[00:04:19] Brett Barry: So the larger research is about bobcat abundance in New York State?

[00:04:23] Haley Turner: Correct.

[00:04:24] Brett Barry: Can you tell me a little bit, Haley, about the history of bobcat populations as you know it, and how that's changed over the years, and why reevaluate it now?

[00:04:35] Haley Turner: Absolutely, so bobcats were nearly extirpated from New York by the 1970s. There was unregulated harvest, and, in fact, the government considered them a nuisance species, and so there were actual bounties placed on bobcats, and when trappers would harvest a bobcat, they'd turn it in, and they would receive payment for that, and so by the 1970s the strongholds of bobcats in New York were in the Catskills, in the Taconic region and in the Adirondacks, and so since then bobcats have been recolonizing some areas of New York State. However, the DEC has used harvest totals [so that's the total number of bobcats harvested each year] to basically have an index of abundance where they look at how many bobcats are harvested and figure out what the population is looking like, so we created this project to be able to finally estimate bobcat abundance not using harvest-based indices.

[00:05:41] Brett Barry: So explain how you're doing it.

[00:05:42] Haley Turner: The primary component is we put out about 329 camera trap stations across New York State, and that's in five different study areas, and a camera station consists of two trail cameras. Some people call them game cameras, where they're just passively monitoring the animals that walk by, and so we have all these stations where we've got cameras facing each other, and that's so that we can get a good look at both sides of the bobcat because bobcats actually have distinct inner leg bars on their bodies, which we can tell the individual bobcat from, and that goes into our abundance model. Additionally, we put out a short-distance scent lure in between those two cameras so that if a bobcat or any other animal that's walking by is, say, within 50 feet of the cameras, they might smell that scent and then get curious and maybe increase the chances that they come to check it out and we get a photo of them. Bobcats are very much like domestic cats in that they love shiny things, so we actually would also hang CDs from trees that would potentially get their attention [if it glinted off of the sunlight or moonlight], and so we just targeted bobcats for this species, but I will say we had a ton of bycatch species that we caught on camera as well, and so that was the first component, and then the second component, as I mentioned, was deploying these GPS collars on bobcats, and so we have two summers' worth of this camera trap data where we collected images over summer 2024 and summer 2023, and then we put out GPS collars on bobcats in winter of 2024 and winter of 2025.

[00:07:30] Brett Barry: So the GPS collars, you can't just stand by the CDs that attract them and grab the bobcat, so how do you trap and collar a bobcat?

[00:07:38] Haley Turner: Yeah, I wish it was that easy. I put my own traps out to try and capture bobcats, but I am no expert trapper, and so what we did is we paid licensed trappers in New York State to trap bobcats for us, so they would put their own traps out and then contact Jenny and me when they captured a bobcat, and then we'd immediately respond, go out there, and deploy these GPS collars, so it definitely wouldn't have been possible for us to do this without some of these trappers, some of whom were real whizzes at catching bobcats.

[00:08:14] Brett Barry: So the wildlife cameras, you're able to tell which bobcats are coming back because of these leg bands or barring, I guess the black bars on their legs, which are kind of like fingerprints?

[00:08:25] Haley Turner: Exactly, it's just like fingerprints. You're not gonna see any two individuals that have that same shape, basically, of the leg bars.

[00:08:33] Brett Barry: And then how did you determine what a good sample size would be for collaring the bobcats if you don't know what the overall population is?

[00:08:41] Haley Turner: Yeah, that's a great question. We looked into doing simulations, and so I basically would simulate fake data, but based on real expected parameters that we would see, so like how many bobcats do we expect are in the population, and then I would take that information, create a fictional data set, and then see how many camera traps I needed and how many collars I needed to deploy in order to detect that abundance.

[00:09:10] Brett Barry: And so the sample size is...

[00:09:12] Haley Turner: So for the collars, we actually purchased 20. We just only got 16 out, so we have an additional four collars that we could put out in the future, but also, just checking with the data we already have, our models will converge with that wealth of data we got from the camera traps and then that additional data that we got from the GPS collars.

[00:09:35] Brett Barry: What does the collar do? I don't know if it's "does" or "do" because we're talking about data. What do the collar data tell you?

[00:09:40] Haley Turner: We put these collars out in the winter when we were doing the trapping, and we first just had the collars during that winter season collecting one location fix per day, so every day the collar would collect the location of the bobcat at that precise time, and then starting April 1st, those collars switched to collecting a location fix every two and a half hours. We did this because we wanted to save battery on the collars so that they would last during our survey period, and so the data that we're getting from these collars is fine-scale movement on how those bobcats are moving during our camera trap period, because we wanna know how bobcats theoretically would be moving across our camera trap arrays. It's just part of a movement scale parameter, essentially, that gets put into our abundance model.

[00:10:33] Brett Barry: This study, tell me again when it began and when you expect to wrap it up and have all the data that you are hoping to get to, I guess, partially inform the DEC [how many bobcats are in the state and best practices for management, hunting, trapping, all that].

[00:10:49] Haley Turner: Yeah, exactly. I started this master's, I believe it was January of 2023, and I am actually wrapping up results now, so very soon I should have all the results ready just in time for me to defend in June.

[00:11:05] Brett Barry: And not only that, but it becomes important data for the state, right?

[00:11:11] Haley Turner: Absolutely, yeah, the state has these objectives that they have for each of, you know, their game species, and within those objectives, they also have strategies of how they want to monitor these animals, and one of their strategies was to create a project basically where you could estimate abundance without using harvest indices, and so within that more specific strategy, the overall objective was to be able to have a good estimate of abundance from which to make management decisions.

[00:11:41] Brett Barry: Are you at a point that you might have some indication or be able to tell us what the population health is of our New York State bobcats, or are we not there yet?

[00:11:51] Haley Turner: Not there yet, but you could stay tuned.

[00:11:54] Brett Barry: Okay.

[00:11:55] Haley Turner: I will say that some things we've seen are that bobcat density seems to be driven by wetlands, and we do know that bobcat abundance is increased in the southeast of the state, so like I mentioned, we had these strongholds of, like, the Catskills and the Taconic area, and that does stand true through today.

[00:12:14] Brett Barry: Yeah, just anecdotally speaking, I've seen more in the past year or two than I ever have, and by more, I mean, you know, one or two a season, but that's a lot. They're elusive, so seeing one at all, I think, is uncommon.

[00:12:30] Haley Turner: It is. I have actually only seen bobcats through this project, and never just organically have I seen one while walking in the woods.

[00:12:38] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:12:38] Haley Turner: Same.

[00:12:41] Brett Barry: So let's now talk about what else you've discovered through this research. It gave you the opportunity not only to tag a number of these animals but also to test them, so what kind of tests are you running, and what has that shown?

[00:12:56] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yeah, so we've been really fortunate to be able to tag onto this project. Like Haley mentioned, I'm always—if we're gonna be sedating an animal for something, we should go ahead and collect as many biological samples as we can and learn about the animal's health, so we collected blood on everybody, and we also collected feces and any ectoparasites that we found, so ticks or fleas, and we also collected hair, which we haven't done anything with yet, but we could use that for genetic testing or potentially some stable isotope studies.

[00:13:31] Brett Barry: What came back in those blood tests?

[00:13:33] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yeah, so we collared 16 animals, like Haley mentioned, but we were actually able to collect blood from 26 animals, so we had a few more animals captured that weren't able to be collared for one reason or another that we were still able to collect samples on, so I have some updated data for you, but we looked for Cytauxzoon felis, which is a protozoal disease of cats. That's where the name "felis" comes from. We also looked for feline leukemia virus, which you may have heard from domestic cats [Toxoplasma gondii], and then we looked for canine distemper virus, parvovirus, and avian influenza virus, so we kind of ran the gamut here, and the way that we chose these things was looking at things that we know can impact bobcat health in other areas, like potentially canine distemper virus or parvovirus, emerging things that are really interesting going on in the environment right now, like avian influenza virus, and then some other things that potentially could be shared between domestic cats and bobcats, or even between bobcats and people. For example, Toxoplasma is a zoonotic disease, meaning that it can be shared among wildlife and people, and we found exposure to a lot of theses things, so some of these diseases we tested directly, meaning we looked for the actual pathogen itself, and then some of them we were doing what's called serology, so we were looking for antibodies to the disease. For Cytauxzoon and for feline leukemia virus, we were looking directly for the pathogen, and we actually did not find it in any animals, which is great. Good news for the bobcat population. For Toxoplasma, though, we found 22 out of 23 animals that we sampled for that parasite had been exposed to the parasite at some point in their lives. Cats are the definitive host for Toxoplasma gondii, meaning that their cat species are the only ones that can shed infective oocysts, or, like, the egg version of that parasite, back into the environment to infect other animals, so it's—that's an important thing to note—that almost all of the bobcats that we looked at had at some point had Toxoplasma gondii. They may not have had it at the time of testing because we were looking at antibodies and not the actual disease, but that could have population-level impacts because we're seeing it in so many, so many animals.

[00:16:07] Brett Barry: And so they can transfer that to other non-cat mammals, but those non-cat mammals can't pass it on again?

[00:16:14] Jennifer Bloodgood: They can shed the infective oocysts in their feces and infect other animals that way. The animals that become infected can also still infect other animals, but not through feces. They have to be eaten, so they're called intermediate hosts, so when, for example, a mouse or something is exposed to the infected oocysts from the bobcat or the cat species, they do become infected and can develop neurologic disease and then be eaten by a bobcat or some other animal, and that animal becomes infected, but they can't shed the parasite in their poop and infect animals that way, but Toxoplasma is the one a lot of people have heard from through their cats through owning a domestic cat because it's the reason that you should actually clean out your litter box every day to prevent infection in people.

[00:17:08] Brett Barry: What made you decide to test for avian flu? Obviously, a bobcat is not a bird. You must have had some suspicion that they would be susceptible to it.

[00:17:18] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yes, so our lab, the Wildlife Health Lab, in our partnership with DEC, has been following avian influenza. This current outbreak of the H5N1 strain since it came to North America. The first detection in the US was in late 2021, and we first detected it in New York State in early 2022. We first detected it in a mammal also in early 2022. It was actually April, I believe, and it was a red fox. Early on, it seemed like red foxes were being infected. That was what you kept hearing about as far as mammals go, but then this virus has continued to kind of evolve and what's called spillover, going from its sort of normal avian hosts to a mammal host. It has spilled over multiple [many] times into mammals, lots of wildlife, so if you go onto the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA website, you can see all the many different mammal species that have been infected with avian influenza. We were interested to see, you know, bobcats. We know that they do eat birds, and based on what Haley told us earlier, they spend time in wetlands, and carriers of avian influenza virus are typically waterfowl, so your ducks and your geese, so that sort of habitat overlap, and then also the dietary preferences of bobcats could predispose them to avian influenza infection, so that was why we set out to look for antibodies to avian influenza in our animals.

[00:18:56] Brett Barry: And how many did you find that were either actively infected or, judging from antibodies, had had it in the past?

[00:19:05] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yeah, so, so far we've tested 16 animals. We're waiting on a second set from our second season of testing, so it'll be interesting to see the updated numbers and how that could have changed through time, but of the 16 animals we tested from the first season, 9 out of 16 had been exposed to some sort of avian influenza virus, so there's a more generalized test that looks for antibodies to influenza A virus in general, which avian influenza is, and then there's more specific ones where you can actually look at antibodies to those particular proteins, the H5 and the N1 in this case, so in our animals, we had four that had been exposed specifically to H5N1, and the interesting thing is I'm saying "exposed" because we looked at antibodies in these animals, and we had them in hand to be putting the collars on them for Haley's study, and they were healthy animals, seemingly healthy animals, so they had been exposed and been able to survive that exposure, but we did have one animal that after collaring it and it being healthy and antibody-free for avian influenza, after about five weeks it died, so Haley got what's called a mortality signal on the collar so she knew it had died and went out to collect the collar and the animal, and she was able to find the animal and retrieve her collar, and she brought the animal to the animal health diagnostic center, which is where I work at the vet school with the Wildlife Health Lab, and we were able to do what's called a necropsy, which is the animal version of an autopsy, to figure out why the animal died, so we worked with one of our pathologists, Dr. Gavin Hitchner, on that, and he was able to determine that the bobcat died from avian influenza, and it had only been five weeks since we had sampled the animal, and it had not been exposed at that time, so that means that it got avian influenza in that five-week period and died from it very quickly.

[00:21:21] Brett Barry: Do you think that animals know when they're sick or when their companions are sick and give them the space they need to recover? It's a hard question to answer because you're trying to get into the mind of another species, but what do they do to take care of themselves when they're infected with something?

[00:21:38] Jennifer Bloodgood: I think yes, individuals do often know when they're sick or infected with something that's not treating them right, so they will often seclude themselves from other animals and sort of hide away to try and get better. It's what I imagine they're doing, at least I think, in a lot of species, and it is species dependent. It depends. Your compatriots may or may not help you along. They might actually try and put you out of your misery, depending on the species, so I'm not sure where bobcats are on that continuum, but they're relatively solitary, so I imagine they wouldn't be helping each other out.

[00:22:18] Brett Barry: Haley, I know you're a person of science, but were you emotional at all retrieving that animal?

[00:22:24] Haley Turner: I was. I love animals, and, you know, I care about the species of animals, but I also care about individual animals, so our GPS collars have VHF [very high frequency], so I was using what's called a receiver, which looks kind of like a walkie-talkie that I carry in my hand, and then I have it connected to an antenna that picks up that VHF, and I can hear basically beeps from the collar that get stronger or weaker as I look for this bobcat, and one of the emotions I had was also frustration because I found this bobcat in a very scrubby wetland area, and it took a lot of time to actually pinpoint where that cat was, and so I'm basically on my hands and knees crawling around in the scrub while also trying to carry an antenna, so it's kind of a difficult recovery process sometimes. I was hoping that I would find the bobcat, and maybe it had just been still for a while because the mortality sensor that Jenny mentioned—what it does is it detects when a bobcat hasn't moved, or at least when the collar hasn't moved, for over 24 hours, so I thought, you know, it would be unlikely that something's not wrong with this bobcat, but maybe it's not dead. However, I will say the place that it died in was really beautiful, so I found it inside of a hollowed-out tree trunk in the middle of this really beautiful, peaceful wetland. You can't hear any traffic there. It's just birds and other wildlife, so it definitely died in a peaceful place, which did bring some solace, you know, having to come to terms with the fact that one of our study individuals died, and it was an individual we had in our hands. It is tough, but it did die in a beautiful place.

[00:24:17] Brett Barry: Yeah, it sounds like he or she knew what was coming and found a place to...

[00:24:21] Haley Turner: To hide it out.

[00:24:22] Brett Barry: Yeah, so you didn't know at that point what it had died from. What precautions do you take to protect yourself?

[00:24:30] Haley Turner: Yeah, so this includes when we are doing captures, the same precautions that we take when we're gonna recover a dead bobcat. We wear gloves, we wear surgical masks, and then I also have a biohazard bag that I'll put that deceased bobcat in so that, you know, no viral loads can, you know, get out into the air as I'm carrying this cat or get onto me or my clothes, and those are the same kinds of things we do when we have the bobcat in hand and we're putting a GPS collar on it.

[00:25:02] Brett Barry: So based on these numbers from this sample, do you see avian influenza as a major threat or just one of many pathogens that these cats are already dealing with?

[00:25:15] Jennifer Bloodgood: I think we don't know yet the way that the study works and the number of animals we trapped and were able to get our hands on. It's really almost impossible to say without a multi-year study following the same animals or trapping almost every bobcat in the state, so we know that out of the 16 we were able to sample and test, nine were exposed to influenza viruses, four were H5N1, but we don't really know how that extrapolates to the population as a whole, but we do know that the one animal died from it, so it is a pathogen of concern that can kill bobcats. We do know that multiple animals survived infection too because the collar data was still going months and months after we sampled them, and they had antibodies, so we know that they lived for months and months at a minimum, so that's important too, to realize that bobcats can fight off infection and go on to live a theoretically normal life, so I kind of see it as one in a set of many, so we looked at basically everything our entire group could come up with. We were like, what could infect a bobcat, and what could, you know, affect their population? And we came up with this list of diseases to look at, and, you know, we found exposure to a lot of different things, so I think just knowing that bobcats are facing a lot of different challenges, not only from habitat loss and climate change and things that all animals are facing but also some of these diseases as well, including emerging infectious diseases that are zoonotic and of one health importance, meaning that they are important to animal, human, and environmental health.

[00:27:06] Brett Barry: What factors are at play in how animals like bobcats are able to fend pathogens off or not? Like some develop antibodies, and they go on to live a long, healthy life. Others succumb to it. I guess the same could be said for humans, right?

[00:27:20] Jennifer Bloodgood: Right, it's hard to know. We can extrapolate from other species, certainly things like immunocompromise, so an older animal or a really young animal may be more susceptible to certain diseases. An animal with an underlying infection may be more susceptible to having a secondary infection, but we don't know, you know, how long antibodies last in a bobcat, for example. We don't even know that for humans, for some diseases, how long antibodies last and are protective. It's really just trying to learn as much as we can with the data that we've got, compare it to studies from other places, and try and put together as much as we can to better understand what they're facing.

[00:28:07] Brett Barry: If it gets to a point where there's a higher level of concern for the health of the overall population of these animals, are there any remedies? Is it possible to vaccinate them or to intervene in some way?

[00:28:20] Jennifer Bloodgood: So vaccination of wildlife is an interesting topic for sure. So there are vaccines available, for example, for avian influenza, but for some species, for example, poultry, it's a highly political and contentious issue. But a good example with wildlife is the California condor, so they have successfully vaccinated California condors for avian influenza. The problem is that it constantly evolves and mutates, so we're familiar with this, right? With influenza viruses in people, our seasonal flu, we have to get the flu vaccine every year because it changes every year, so the flu is doing the same thing in wildlife. To stay on top of vaccinating wildlife, you would have to vaccinate them at least yearly, and we don't know how the vaccines behave in these animals, so it's really hard to predict without doing studies on bobcats or, you know, their closely related species, like domestic cats, to know what a vaccine would actually do in those animals.

[00:29:27] Brett Barry: I just asked about human intervention in terms of a remedy. What role do humans play in this to begin with? What have we done, or maybe not? I'm asking, not knowing whether or not human impact has a role in all of these diseases that we're now seeing.

[00:29:43] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yes and no. So avian influenza would likely be occurring anyway without human influence. So waterfowl do carry influenza viruses, and when they come in contact with other species, these viruses can change and mutate, but things that humans are doing certainly aren't helping the situation, so habitat loss is a great example that I talked about earlier. The less habitat that there is for wild species to be isolated from, for example, a large poultry farm, the more often these animals are gonna come into contact with human-made environments, so the classic example is a poultry house that has a wetland or a pond right next to it, often a man-made pond, so we are attracting waterfowl to be right next to our poultry houses, and that is the perfect mixing vessel for an avian influenza outbreak in the poultry house, so humans do definitely contribute to disease spread, other diseases as well, but avian influenza being the example here, they definitely do add to the issue, and there are things that we could do better, such as biosecurity at poultry farms, even biosecurity at our own homes, and, you know, when we're taking care of our domestic poultry, if you have backyard poultry, for example, or making sure your bird feeders are clean and not too close to your backyard poultry if you do have them. I don't think people want to spread avian influenza, so I think a lot is just about public education and making sure that people know the best practices.

[00:31:31] Brett Barry: With all your work with bobcats and your interest in this research, what makes bobcats unique as a species here in the state?

[00:31:42] Haley Turner: Bobcats are the only feline that we have left in this state. The only native wild feline. We used to have mountain lions, and those have been extirpated for a long time now, and so bobcats are, yeah, the only wild breeding population of cats that you'll find in our state, and I think that makes them really special. As we've already mentioned, they're elusive, and I think just being able to catch a glimpse of one is really exciting, or I imagine it is since, like I said, I have not yet. They're really interesting creatures. They're generalists. I've been really interested in these kinds of opportunistic feeder animals, where basically they'll eat a large, varied diet of prey, and so it's kind of cool when you look through nature photography. People who target bobcats, you'll see photos of them with snakes in their mouths with birds, as we've talked about [rabbits, mice, rats, all of the kinds of things that can become pests]. I think that's another reason why they're a special species is they can help keep some of those prey populations in check.

[00:32:58] Brett Barry: I know some Catskillers who would debate you about that mountain lion statement. There's quite a raging debate here among some about the presence of mountain lions.

[00:33:10] Haley Turner: I will just say that, as far as I am aware, we do not have a breeding population of mountain lions in the state, so, you know, a mountain lion is a huge animal. They have huge home ranges, and you will get mountain lions straying far from their primary, you know, living area, so if somebody told me they saw a mountain lion, I'm not gonna debate them on that, but I will say with the evidence we have, I feel confident to say we don't have a breeding population of them. We also, you know, deployed so many camera traps and have seen no mountain lions on these. I do have a lot of folks that, when they find out I'm studying bobcats, will show me camera trap images that they're unsure of what the species is and often say, "This could be a mountain lion," and in those instances it's always been a bobcat. I think it's just really difficult to tell the scale of the animal on a camera trap. The ones that I use in my backyard can come out quite blurry sometimes, and so I think there's some difficulty in identifying the species that you're capturing.

[00:34:23] Brett Barry: Maybe they're just not attracted to CDs.

[00:34:26] Haley Turner: Maybe I'm repelling them.

[00:34:29] Brett Barry: They like vinyl.

[00:34:29] Haley Turner: Which, you know, that's okay. I don't really wanna come across one organically in the woods alone, maybe.

[00:34:35] Brett Barry: Are there other species [you're either one of you are in] actively researching at this time?

[00:34:40] Haley Turner: Well, the DEC is interested in, I think I mentioned earlier, a range of their harvested game species, and so with this bycatch data that we have on camera traps, we'll be able to look further into a lot of different species [like wild turkeys, red fox, gray fox, coyotes, fishers], so, you know, in the future we'll take a look into the occurrences of those species across the state as well.

[00:35:10] Brett Barry: Anything else that either one of you would like to add that maybe I didn't ask?

[00:35:14] Haley Turner: You know, it's a pretty cool study that we got to look into, like I said, a species that—it's an elusive species. We don't often have it in hand, and so when we do look at viruses infecting bobcats or other elusive carnivore species, it's usually the animal is already dead, and then, you know, that's not a very good random sample of how the population is looking, so I think that's a really special part of the project, and I think it just highlights the importance of monitoring these diseases, especially when we have so many unanswered questions. I think it's just really important to continue to monitor and strive to answer these questions.

[00:35:57] Brett Barry: How about you, Jenny? You've been at this for a long time.

[00:36:00] Jennifer Bloodgood: Yeah, no, I wanna basically echo what Haley said and just sort of amplify the partnership aspect. I think it was really great to be able to bring together biologists and veterinarians to come at this problem from many different angles and to work together on such a cool project. It was really special.

[00:36:20] Brett Barry: What did you find most surprising?

[00:36:22] Haley Turner: You know, not coming from the wildlife health side of things. The avian influenza did surprise me, and the death from avian influenza really surprised me, and just that these creatures get so many diseases and often are very hardy and probably a lot hardier than we are but do get sick and die from these kinds of hot-button viruses that we hear about.

[00:36:48] Jennifer Bloodgood: That's a good point. I feel like bobcats and just other wildlife in general are so much tougher than people. They can really handle a lot and still make it in life, so it's pretty impressive.

[00:37:01] Haley Turner: We'd be out on some of these captures just shivering and thinking these bobcats live out here, and we are with our hot hands in our pockets just really cold.

[00:37:13] Brett Barry: Haley, what's next for you?

[00:37:19] Haley Turner: So next for me is hopefully a PhD. Things are a bit up in the air with funding right now, probably for most folks who, you know, work with government-funded work of any kind, but I'd like to be doing a PhD and continuing this avenue of trying to, you know, monitor New York State's animals in this framework of using camera traps so that we can have this nice, passive, non-invasive way of collecting data.

[00:37:49] Brett Barry: Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:53] Jennifer Bloodgood: Thank you.

[00:37:53] Haley Turner: Thank you. It was great getting to share this. I feel like it's not something you get to do all the time, so thank you for your interest.

[00:38:04] Brett Barry: Bobcat populations struggled in the early 20th century primarily due to unregulated hunting practices and bounties paid on the misguided perception of bobcats as a nuisance species. Legal safeguards were implemented in the 1970s, including the Federal Endangered Species Act and statewide regulations on hunting and trapping. Cornell's research team is working in collaboration with New York's Department of Environmental Conservation to estimate the abundance of bobcats across the state and to better understand the challenges they face. Many thanks to Haley Turner and Jenny Bloodgood and to Garth Avery, who engineered our recording session from Cornell's broadcast studios. Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast is produced at Silver Hollow Audio in the heart of the Catskill Mountains. Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts and keep in touch at kaatscast.com and on Instagram [@kaatscast]. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.