HOME RANGE WILDLIFE RESEARCH

Leah was an intern from Whitman College and worked in the field on our Lynx and Wildfire Project during the summer of 2025.    Log Walking and Lynx Conservation My name is Leah Barnes. I am a junior at Whitman majoring in Biology-Environmental Studies, and this summer I interned at Home Range Wildlife Research in Winthrop, WA. I worked on a project that researched Canada lynx habitat in the 2005 Tripod megafire burned area to ultimately uncover the best modes of lynx conservation. In the winter, a crew snowmobiled into the study area and snowshoed along lynx tracks in the snow, backtracking their movements and learning the story behind them. They mapped the lynx trails as they went, flagging anytime a lynx attempted to hunt or succeeded in killing its meal – usually a snowshoe hare. The graduate student in charge of this research then placed those trails in GIS, creating a plot every 400 meters, at hunting attempt sites, and at kill sites. She also copied each trail, spun ...

Sarah was an intern from Middlebury College and worked in the field on our Lynx and Wildfire Project during the summer of 2025.  This summer, I worked for Home Range Wildlife Research, an organization based in the Methow Valley in Washington state, on their Canada lynx and wildfire project. For four days every week, I bushwhacked through an area that experienced a climate change driven megafire 20 years ago. We followed lynx trails that were traced in the winter by following tracks in the snow and stopped periodically to take vegetation plots in order to learn where lynx are able to survive in burned areas. This data helps Home Range to recommend management actions that will allow the forests to be resilient against megafires in the future, while also ensuring that the lynx are able to thrive. It has been incredible and very helpful to have the opportunity to do field work full time. I am considering careers that involve field work, but I had not had the chance to do much of it bef...