Friday night I went out with a couple members of the University's Wildlife Club to track deer. The Wildlife Club has radio collars on two deer in the city population and every few days, a handful of members will take the ancient 1970's style radio tracking equipment out and try to locate them.

The weather was nasty friday night, very high humidity and just a couple degrees below zero, which means the cold bites through your clothes and clings to you. (More like Vancouver weather, or England, than Edmonton, so we all whined about it.)

I learned how to tune the receiver and what to listen for, and how to aim the aerial array. The aerials themselves are big metal vanes like you used to have to pick up tv signals before there was digital reception; one main strut with three tines on either side, kind of like two H's squashed together: HH-- The dashes are the part you hold onto.

The top pair of tines collects the signal. The bottom pair reflects it and amplifies it. The middle pair are the ones that actually receive the information and have the receiver unit attached to them. (No cordless here; the U of A does it Battlestar Galactica style!)

To find a distant signal, you hold the array horizontally and slowly wave it around while you listen to the receiver. If you get a signal, it sounds a bit like a squeaky Geiger counter. To close in on a signal, it works best holding the array vertically and very slowly sweeping back and forth. We had two arrays so when we found a signal, we would stand 10 or so meters apart to triangulate on it.

Edmonton was established originally as a fur-trading fort and built on the North Saskatchewan river for easy transportation (like a great many western cities). The unique thing about Edmonton though is for one reason or another, no one has ever buggered up the river valley. This is the only city in North America with an uninterrupted green belt through it. (If you have access, there's a good but tiny article on this in last month's issue of Canadian Wildlife.) There are parts of the river valley where you can't tell your in a city at all. Wildlife of all varieties uses the river valley as a corridor; rather than going around the city, they go through it. This means at least once a year someone has a bobcat in their backyard, or has their small dog eaten by a cougar, or has a black bear visiting their bird feeder, or finds a moose chilling under their front window, or some such.

Aside from the vagrants, it also means we have large non-migratory populations of some animals. There's stable communities of coyotes, deer, rabbits, ravens, muskrats and beaver that call downtown Edmonton home.

Despite the crappy weather, all four of us that went had a great time. We found the signal from one collar and tracked the deer across a stream, up a muddy hill, along a ridge and finally had to stop because it was too dark to read the GPS. At one point, we were pretty sure the bastard had flanked us, which lead to discussing Games Animals Play With Biology Students.

It was the first time I've ever done anything that made me feel like a real biologist!