Monday, June 20, 2011

High-tech Montana bear trap phones home

If you think the bears Ryan Alter catches in his traps are cool, you should have seen the skunk. Alter has built a bear trap that sets itself, takes mug shots and phones home when it catches something. It's undergoing its third season in the field with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear managers. "The nature of what we do is: You don't know until you look," said Alter, whose East Missoula-based Alter Enterprises builds high-tech gizmos for field biologists. So it wasn't too surprising when his trap's onboard camera got shots of a Condon-area skunk sneaking bites of the deer-haunch bait last fall. The basic grizzly bear culvert trap has been around for decades. It's a big aluminum tube with a sliding door at one end and a baited tripwire at the other, mounted on a trailer so it can be towed where it's needed. Alter added cameras both inside and out, with satellite uplinks that feed the images back to the trap manager's computer in real time. He linked that to a set of solar-powered battery mats that generate enough power to run the electronics even on a cloudy day. And he's working on a sensor that will read the computerized identification chips that biologists are now implanting behind captured bears' ears...more

1 comment:

POKEMON said...

NICE…. ^_^v…..

:) :) :) :) :) :) :)
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