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I'm doing a project for them on PNW Watershed and am maybe 40 or so pages in so far. I'm finding extraordinary a high % of reports in very close proximity to stream/creek/river headwaters, why that is i have no idea. Doing the Klamath basin first but i boo-booed there as we don't have much current activity in that area and may switch focus up to them and Puget Sound where there is lots of current activity, and that may yield genuine results on more nests hopefully. It's incredibly time consuming but i feel, beneficial if done right..

A friend of mine was able to accompany them into the area around the 1st of the year. He was amazed how hard it was to access the area due to terrain and thick vegetation. Plus it rains a lot in the Olympics. They have gotten some of the hair analysis back and some came back as unknown as he mentions. I believe the process of the environmental DNA has been discussed in some of the threads here. Basically they take a core sample, such as the floor of a cave. Then run tests. The results are supposed to show all the various organisms that have used the cave. In this case though, as usual, it could come back as unknown, which is still good. But you are looking for everything that used the area. That would include humans. With this test contamination isn't really an option because the point is you want to know everything that was there. I assume the test is more in depth than a simple DNA test because you have to go far enough to actually identify what organism you're looking at without any idea what you are going to find. Of course the problem still exists, how close is BF DNA to human DNA.

I have always carried a camera. Modern cell phones have excellent cameras as far as they go, but are designed with landscape shots in mind and the "zooming" simply amounts to cropping and enlarging the image on screen, with a resultant loss of resolution. After 45 years of using mostly Canons, both film and digital, last year I switched to a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ300 as my primary model. It is moisture sealed, has a 25 mm to 600 mm equivalent zoom lens made by Leica, and maintains its maximum f2.8 aperture through the entire zoom range. Focus is nearly instant, it will shoot both raw and jpeg, in bursts as required, as well as video up to 4k, has a good built in mic and a jack for external stereo mics and sells for under $500. I carry an extra battery and keep a UV filter on at all times; it protects the lens without having to mess with a lens cap and cuts through atmospheric haze. It also incorporates a good eye level viewfinder with diopter adjustment and an artificial horizon making it easy to keep shots level in landscape and portrait mode.

Do you really not understand that for the vast majority of people, there is no mystery? There is nothing to nail to the wall. Not a great many people wonder if bigfoot is real or not.