As the number of people camping in remote areas continues to rise, it seems that the local wildlife is giving visitors a wide berth.
While grey nomads who have become accustomed to having their camp invaded by the likes of scavenging possums and hungry goannas, new research shows that the presence of even a few humans can severely impact the activity of wildlife that live there.
A new University of Washington-led study published in the British Ecological Society journal, People and Nature, concluded it was ‘eye-opening’ to see the number of wildlife sightings slump as more people visited an area.
The researchers installed 40 motion-activated cameras across 10 sites in Glacier Bay National Park, a remote coastal area in southeast Alaska.
'You might be seeing even less of me is so many people keep visiting!' PIC: Pexels
The cameras enabled the researchers to focus on the movements of people and four animal species – wolves, black bears, brown bears and moose – over two summers.
“I was surprised that for all four species, wildlife detections were always highest when there wasn’t any human activity,” said lead author, Mira Sytsma. “So many people visit national parks for the chance to view wildlife, and that desire alone may reduce the chance of it happening.”
Though all four species showed some change in activity due to humans, wolves were most likely to disappear from cameras when people were around. Brown bears were the least impacted by human presence.
Though, of course, it is self-evident that all animal species would react in a slightly different way to the presence of humans, the academics believe the study does have some important universal lessons.
“I expect that similar results could be found in other national parks, particularly those with relatively low visitation,” said Ms Sytsma. “I wouldn’t be surprised if more and more people seek out less popular national parks to explore, which will have interesting and important implications for park management and wildlife.”
The report’s authors said with more visitors heading out to bushwalk into ever more remote areas to ‘escape the crowds’, some parks were expanding their trail networks to accommodate the extra people.
The authors though hope their study can help park managers consider different approaches to making parks accessible both to humans and animals. They say, for example, that managers could consider concentrating trails and human use in certain areas to reduce their total footprint, or put restrictions on the time of year or days in which people can visit.
“Our findings lend support to concentrating human activities in some areas, because if you’re going to go above zero human activity and it’s going to have an impact, you might as well go way above zero in some areas and then have other areas where you have almost no human activity,” said another of the report’s authors, Laura Prugh. “In those areas, then, wildlife can live their natural lives unaffected by people.”
As more new people go bush there are bound to be those that have no idea or no respect for the environment. I’ve seen families tearing down trees for fires and fishing in National parks. Generators, loud music and shouting kids, it’s no wonder they don’t see wildlife. And don’t start on the rubbish left behind. We never seem to have trouble finding wildlife when we camp by ourselves and i think thats because most times when camping, we’re very quiet and listen to the bush
The Australian bush has nearly more feral animals than Native animals…
This is very evident in some National Parks as well.
Well, in my case we had unwanted wildlife, licking a bbq, that had not been cleaned that day before, Something akin to a Yahoo, that visited us at 2 am in the morning, to do just that lick the BBQ clean. I wasn’t the only one to see it close up. Just lookup the name. I don’t want to be ridiculed here directly.
Yes. Something’s got to happen and soon. As a wildlife carer travelling the country at the moment, i’m really noticing the LACK of wildlife everywhere.
I think there needs to be a more controlled amount of people in this I mean the number of people allowed to camp on one site in the National Pk. I am a Camp Host at the National Parks In South Australia all the parks have different rules of what is allowed and not. The one I have just finished had one site that the National Pk deemed as a large site so this site was able to have 5 vehicles and a total of 14 people. To me the site was not that big as I have seen a lot bigger sites at other parks that only allow 2 vehicles and a total of 8 people. In my own personal opinion the number of people in one camp site should be lowered. This would cap the amount of people in the park and not so intrusive to the wildlife. Like I said just my own personal opinion of what I have seen.