Lucas Brehaut was hoping there’d be a lot of interest in his research, though it might be a case of “be careful what you wish for.”
Seemingly every animal in Newfoundland’s wilderness wants to know what he’s up to — and they’re not always gentle with his equipment.
Brehaut, a wildfire research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, is studying how forests in Atlantic Canada regrow after forest fires. Though the region is cooler and wetter than much of the rest of the country, forest fires are getting more common.
After a forest fire hit south of Grand Falls-Windsor, N.L., in 2022, he set out to understand how forests might regrow on a planet when temperatures are rising due to climate change.
To do that, he and his team needed to lug 19 open-top chambers (OTCs) through the forest and set them up around seedlings they’d planted. OTCs are like mini greenhouses, and look like clear hexagons with an opening at the top. They can increase the temperature anywhere from one to three degrees, mimicking the effects of a warming planet. Brehaut’s study is currently in year three of five.
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Brehaut says he expected some difficulties — the treks of up to a kilometre in difficult terrain, and the infamously dour Newfoundland weather, for example.
But in September 2023, on one of his regular check-ins, he ran into a problem he didn’t expect.
“That’s when we started to notice that some of these greenhouses had some visitors, and might not have been as strong as I had hoped,” Brehaut said.
Those “visitors” included caribou, moose, black bears, wolves, rabbits and owls. Brehaut found out who the culprits were because of cameras set up around the sites that were originally meant to look at snow depth over the winter.
Out of 19 sites, 11 have sustained damage at some time or another. And the animals wouldn’t just trample the greenhouses — some made off with the temperature sensors.
“The greenhouses had been completely obliterated. And by obliterated, I’m talking broken, smashed to smithereens,” Brehaut said.
“There were certain times where we would spend more time at a site finding the temperature sensors than we would actually measuring the seedlings themselves.”
In Brehaut’s case, four — not 13 — is the unlucky number.
“I have a site that I specifically call the problem child. Because every time I went to that site, it was damaged in one way or another,” he said.
“It’s site number four, but I call it ‘The Problem Child.’ Every time I walk to it, I know that it’s going to be challenging.”
But the animals aren’t always smashing — they’re grazing. Brehaut has seen moose and rabbits go into the greenhouses for a bite to eat. They even occasionally manage to get through the top of the greenhouses without damaging anything.
Brehaut isn’t mad, just disappointed. He hopes that the animals are enjoying themselves, even if it’s at the expense of his research.
“You see the amount of joy that, potentially, a black bear is experiencing by actually sitting in a greenhouse and playing with that plastic, and taking that temperature sensor and moving it,” he said.
“Yes, the research gets damaged to some capacity, but we’re in nature. This is their habitat. We are only visitors to this spot.”
That’s exactly why some animals are so keen to mess with equipment, says Kaitlyn Gaynor, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia.
“If someone puts something weird in your backyard, wouldn’t you want to go investigate it?” she said.
Gaynor, who studies the impacts of human disturbance on animal behaviour, said intelligent animals are especially curious about anything novel in their environment. After all, it could be a new source of food, or it could pose a threat. This boldness and willingness to explore could have been an advantage as species evolved.
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Bears are a great example, Gaynor says.
“It’s in their nature to be curious about whether new objects are resources to be exploited,” she said.
“They’re these generalist omnivores that will eat a whole bunch of different things, and so when they see something new, the first question is like, is this food?”
Also, there’s the smell factor — we stink.
“Often these objects we leave behind have our scent on them, and so our scent might attract animals to these places and to these objects,” Gaynor said.
She added that researchers can lessen the effect of research on animals by getting in and out of the field as quickly as possible, by leaving as little scent as possible, and by obscuring or camouflaging research equipment.
Animals interfering with research is a worldwide phenomenon.
Gaynor has seen a lot of it during field work in Mozambique.
“Baboons are always coming up to the cameras. We get a lot of great baboon selfies,” she said.
“Hyenas just want to chew on everything, so they’ll chew on our research equipment.”
But the worst offenders are the elephants. They like to knock down trees and feast on leaves, which is bad news for research equipment.
“Elephants are also just highly intelligent, and curious, and very large and destructive,” she said.
Gaynor said animals are her biggest cause of equipment loss or failure.
“It’s not that the electronics go out, and it’s not that things get stolen by people, it’s that animals tend to be a little bit destructive.”
But, to be fair, Brehaut has also had issues with that most destructive animal — the homo sapien.
“We’ve had some visitors accidentally run over these sites in the winter,” he said.
“We have an extremely snowy winter in Newfoundland, and snowmobiles basically went over one of my plots.”
