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Don't get political....

read it again.... awww heck ill help you "I have said it before this Kevin Richards guy does not have to interact with these animals directly in any way shape or form to accomplish anything regarding conservation" ergo concordantly i never questioned his accomplisments regarding conservation, merely stating that he could have accomplished the same thing without putting the animals lives in jeopardy by having direct physical contact. He does the direct contact for his own selfish reasons, the animals do not need his human cuddle time in fact they would be better off with out it and that is not debatable IMO

Yea i think it was meldrum. Me and some buddies are headin up to the blues later this year for a backpacking trip. Hopefully the BFs are around lol

I worked six plus years for an portable rock crushing outfit as an heavy equipment operator, crusher operator, and watchman depending on the job here in Oregon. We crushed rock for private landowners, commercial pits, private timber companies, and the Oregon Department of Forestry. In that time I have seen a lot of wildlife in and around the rock/gravel pits. Especially when I'm the crusher operator sitting up in the doghouse it gets really boring. So I would look around a lot to stay awake. I've watched a badger dig in our reject pile. I've watched coyotes, hawks, and a great horned owl catch rodents as they ran for their lives across the pit floor. I watched a deer pretend it was a mountain goat on a 40 foot ledge and fall to the pit floor. After hours I've watched a bobcat walk from one piece of equipment to the next and even on the conveyor belts. I've seen deer and rodents at every rock/gravel pit I have worked at. So I think if a rock/gravel pit is in a bigfoots home range/territory and has cover around it, a food, mineral, or water source it's possible a bigfoot would check it out.

I don't know that I have ever stopped to consider a goal for being here. This thread feels like a different version of the old: "This is a Bigfoot board, why are you even here if you don't believe in Bigfoot?" Pardon me if that is not your intention here. I have certainly seen you express that sentiment in other threads. Perhaps this is just your attempt at gathering that information in one spot. My original "goal" for coming here was to learn more about this phenomenon. This was before I had made up my mind about the subject. I had admittedly not really spent much time or thought on it and when one watches Finding Bigfoot one might get the impression that Bigfoot was a commonly known and accepted animal to science. So I went searching. Searches will lead you here. This place is a great jumping off spot for learning about Bigfoot. You can get recommendations on reading, sites to view, videos to watch, etc. And so I did. You will also get introduced to Bigfooting in general. And then that is where things started to slide down hill. It turns out that bigfoot was not, in fact, a recognized animal and that Bobo and Matt and Cliff just make stuff up on national tv and no one calls them on their crap. That was one of the first things I realized. So after much reading and watching and seeing the circus that is Bigfootin' , I came to my own conclusions about the alleged animal. I still remain interested in the social construct however. It still intrigues me that so many grown adults take this as seriously as they do when it seems patently obvious that no such creature exists. This is my first exposure to this kind of thing. I have never been one to read up on UFOs, or Lake Monsters, or Conspiracy Theories, or any fringe topic. I had always found the tin foil hat crew to be rather odd, but never gave them a second thought. I always thought bigfoot was a cool idea, but never tried to really find out more. So while no question lingers in my mind about the existence of bigfoot, I do still find that I stick around. My goal, I guess would have changed from seeking an answer to a question to now engaging in the debate from a skeptical point because, as I mentioned, I think Bigfooting is not a productive influence at all.

That's right. You don't find BF, they find *you*. They approach you on their own terms, not the other way 'round.

Kitakaze and all, The Rowcliffe model is theoretical. The relationships of the model were developed using scientific principles and it was tested/vetted in an enclosed animal park with known abundances (but a limited number of animal species). Thus, I am cognizant that we can’t draw firm conclusions from this model. I liked this model because we don’t have to recognize the individual animal and still estimate animal density (if the cameras are placed with enough distance to each other and followed the specified methodology). Nevertheless, models are used all the time to understand problems and to figure out the bounds of possible solutions and how the key variables of the problem affect the outcome. In this particular case, I was trying to figure out how many camera-trap days are required to capture Bigfoot, if you assume that BF is a real animal. I thought that this is the first question somebody should answer before attempting a camera-trap survey for BF. We all agree that there is no data on BF, but we can always bound the problem and analyze. We don’t know the weight, but we can use a ceiling and a floor based on ranges reported and Fahrenbach’s work. We don’t know the animal day range, but we can use a ceiling and floor based on reports or analogies to known animals. The density relationship to weight are based on empirical data from many mammalian species, but I acknowledge that they don’t include BF data. However, again I looked at a range of equations to avoid anchoring and estimated a range of densities. Using ranges for the 2 key parameters of the model, we end up with camera-trap days required that are reasonable and not impossible (< 10,000 camera-trap days). A very interesting observation from this model is that the higher the animal day range, the higher the likelihood of camera capture and the less cameras you need. Personally, after doing this work, I was surprised by the results because I was expecting millions of camera trap days required to capture BF. If you believe these results and assume that project Forest Vigil and OP followed the methodologies Rowcliffe outlines, then you would expect capture. However, I don’t know what methodologies were applied for FV and OP. In the Canadian Rockies Carnivore project and Bobcat study in South Cascades, while they did not use Rowcliffe model (that was not their objective) they used very robust methodologies and I believe exceeded the 10,000 camera-trap days. (I did not calculate to check). I consider the BF Density post, to be a first attempt at bounding the problem. BF proponents should attempt to estimate density since this helps understand the problem scope. The allometric scaling equations are all I had. I acknowledge that the upper-bound estimate of camera-trap days required could be wrong. Would I bet my salary that 10,000 camera-traps are sufficient to capture a BF? No, I am not that confident on this model and don’t have any experience setting camera-traps to really understand the field issues/problems that divide theory from practice. I wish others with more expertize in wildlife biology that do this kind of work for a living will jump in and develop a more robust theoretical model. On the other hand, a key conclusion from that model that is supported by their test results, is that animal density could be estimated from camera-trap rate. So the ratio of BF density to Bear or cougar density, should provide an estimate for camera-trap rate expected for BF (given the obtained trap rate for bear and/or cougar). This assumes that BF behaves just like any other animal and does not have special abilities or powers. Also, it assumes that none of the more speculative reasons for lack of detection apply. BTW, I am not a wildlife biologist. I am just an engineer who builds statistical models of real world problems and find the camera-trap modeling problem fascinating. My conclusion on all this discussion is that we have a mystery (lack of BF capture on camera-trap studies) that is hard to explain if BF is a real animal.

Kitakaze, Thanks much for re-introducing this topic in 2014 (for those of us who missed it in 2011). I agree with you that the fact that wildlife monitoring organizations (in US and Canada) that used camera trap tools/methods in areas considered to be BF habitat and found no evidence is of concern to those who believe BF is present there. I had the same concern last year when I realized that BF Research organizations (Project Forest Vigil, Olympic Project, and Bluff Creek Camera Project) had not had any success despite the high number of camera-trap days used. In addition we need to add the thousands of game cameras that are installed by hunters all over North America to look for patterns in their target animal (deer, bear, etc.) that also have not captured any BF photo. This lack of success with game cameras is an issue that needs to be addressed as opposed to dismissed. Camera traps have proven to be ideally suited for detecting rare and cryptic species that an observer may rarely, if ever, encounter. Thus, it is a fair question to ask if BF is real how come camera-trap studies have not captured it. However, failure to detect a species in a camera trap is not proof of its absence. To brainstorm on possible reasons why BF was not detected, I will deconstruct the problem into 2 parts: probability of availability and probability of detection given that it is available. P (D) = P (A) x P(D|A) For detection to be zero, then either of these 2 probabilities has to be zero. Possible reasons for the probability of availability to be zero: 1. BF does not exist 2. BF exist but was not available in the area sampled with camera traps Possible reasons for the probability of detection to be zero given that BF exists and is available in the sample area: 1. The area covered by camera trap cells (or sample sites) was too small relative to the range area of BF. 2. The cameras were placed too close to each other and despite the high camera density, the survey did not cover a large and diverse enough habitat 3. Cameras were placed in a straight line fashion or following a creek/game trail/ridge line instead of covering a grid (does not have to be random distribution). 4. The habitat features that were targeted (based on species of interest in the wildlife study) to place cameras is avoided by BF. 5. BF prefers to move on roads and human trails and not in game trails or wild areas, thus camera-traps placed in wild habitat will miss them. 6. The BF communities have sentries that monitor every hiker that gets close to their home range and when humans install these odd objects, they avoid them. 7. BF (like most primates) is an arboreal species and is hard to detect on ground-based camera traps. (This is a wild claim and I throw it in the pot just as part of the brainstorm. I recall reading in one of Paulides books about NorCal that BF’s were scouting the area from above on the redwood trees). With regard to the 7 possible reasons for lack of detection given availability, items 1 thru 3 are methodological reasons applicable to any species and reasons 4-7 are speculative reasons particular to BF. (BTW, I am not a proponent of those reasons, I am just brainstorming. I am excluding reasons that seem farfetched like conspiracy theories or dimensional portals). I read the Canadian Rockies Carnivore Monitoring Project report (see link below) and it is very impressive. They certainly followed and established best practices on the use of camera-traps for wildlife monitoring. They followed the best methodologies available for establishing the presence of multiple species. Thus, if they did not detect BF and BF is claimed to live in those Canadian National Parks, then the reasons for no detection must be the more speculative ones and not the methodological ones. http://www.cfc.umt.edu/heblab/Projects/Steenweg%20etal%202012%20PC%20Report%20remote%20camera%20occupancy.pdf I also read about the work that Shiloh Halsey and GP Task Force did on modeling the Distribution of Bobcats the Southern Washington Cascades, and believe that he also used the best available methods. Halsey’s dissertation will be available in August 2014 (see link below). I look forward to a more detail review of his methodology. http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/996/ http://www.gptaskforce.org/our-work/conservation/wildlife-tracking/fisher-habitat On the other hand, the Cascades Carnivore Project is not that comprehensive with regard to camera-traps. The report said that they did not have camera-traps in every sample station that collected hair samples from bear and martens. Their focus was on DNA testing of collected hair samples and not on developing occupancy statistics purely on camera-traps. Thus, it is not clear if the camera-trap methodology used by the Cascades Carnivore Project could be used to conclude that lack of detection of BF with camera traps was statistically sound. With regard to the BF organization studies, however, I am not familiar with the details of the methodologies used and thus don’t know if they were designed to the standards of wildlife biologist to increase the probability of detection (of any of the mammals present). I wish Project Forest Vigil had issued an analytical report describing all the animals that were captured in their cameras as a function of camera site and day, and more information on the distribution of the cameras (how far apart, cell distribution, camera density, etc.). This would help in comparing methodologies between them and wildlife monitoring organizations. Jamie Schutmaat from the Bluff Creek Camera Project wrote on his Facebook page (see link below) that he is creating a catalogue of all the animals captured on the BC Project since they started in 2012. I look forward to that report, since it will provide some calibration with bear and cougar population estimates from the CA DFG and that will provide insights into how well the BC camera-trap methodology is representing that habitat. https://www.facebook.com/BluffCreekProject

It seems that people who have actually been watching them, associating with them, and have been subjected to their numerous antics for years, are far more qualified to determine their degree of human-like characteristics than someone who doesn't even believe that they exist! How can someone who doubts their existence even HAVE an opinion, & why should it be of any use to anybody else???