Brea Perry

Mammals, big mammals and birds, we didn't find evidence that their populations had declined.

But I would say that that's more so a case of we don't actually have really good data to know what happened to them.

So for mammals, the only data that we have for mammals is what we call camera trap data.

So that's basically where wildlife biologists have cameras set up kind of all throughout the landscape.

And they take photos of whatever happens to be in front of the camera, you know, every minute.

And then you end up with tens of thousands of photos.

And so what we know from that is that

photos of large mammals like mountain goats and moose and caribou, and they declined.

And so you can't say from that, oh, they were all dying and their population declined.

Really, that just indicates a change in their activity level.

So they probably just...

went into the forest and sought shade as any of us would, right?

So it's a change in activity level and kind of similar for birds.

Basically, one of the only sources that we had for birds were acoustic recordings.

So there were wildlife biologists who, not to do with the heat dome, but just were running these long-term studies where they had recorders set up.

And they record what they hear.

And often what they're recording are songbirds.

And they just found slight differences in the times of those songbirds.

So what that tells us is that birds and mammals, they're doing something different, right?

They're trying to escape the heat.