- [Bret] So you harvested a deer, you field dress it, drag it outta the woods, process it and it feeds your family for the next year.

But what about those guts or awful that you left in the woods?

It's feeding other critters, but who exactly is enjoying that free meal?

That's the question that staff and volunteers at the University of Minnesota Extension are trying to answer with the Awful Wildlife Watching Program.

- The Awful Wildlife Watching Program is a volunteer run program where we are trying to understand which scavenger species are coming into hunter provided gut piles.

So the gut piles that hunters leave in the woods after they field dress a deer.

This program is funded by the Environment Natural Resource Trust Fund here in Minnesota and like I said, is run completely by a volunteer effort in terms of how we collect our data.

So hunters will set cameras at gut piles right after they field dress their deer and then send us images back of those scavenger species that visit the gut piles after about a month.

My interest in this really was spurred by my interest in hunter provided food sources, first with my PhD dissertation with hunter bait, hunter deer bait and bear bait in Michigan and Minnesota.

I wanted to understand what other scavengers were using hunter provided food.

I grew up in a family that hunted.

I knew that gut piles are left and every hunter will tell you that scavengers are coming in to use them.

We just wanted to look at that on a huge scale across Minnesota and understand what all scavengers were coming in.

- [Bret] While we didn't have any gut piles to monitor and officially participate in the program, we did have two deer carcasses that we put trail cams on for three months.

One doe that was harvested and a buck that was hit by a car, which we found while pheasant hunting.

Well Wade just found a buck that looks like a big one.

That is unfortunate.

Oh boy.

- Hit by a car?

Yeah, look at the scrapes right there.

Scrapes on the body.

Doesn't look like a bullet hole does it?

- Since this is a a scientific study, we are interested in kind of putting some controls on it.

We ask hunters to put cameras out for a full month after they field dress their deer.

We want them out as immediately as possible because I mean I've heard stories and I've seen myself at gut piles, crows, or eagles watching you field dress your deer knowing that it's there, it's coming.

So we want what's coming in immediately.

That month duration seems super long because a lot of times people will go back to the location that they shot their deer and that gut pile is gone two days later.

We recognize that, we understand that.

But there are some places in the state, maybe up north if you shoot a deer over Thanksgiving or during muzzle loader season in the late winter, that they might get a lot of snow and that gut pile might be covered and it might last a few weeks.

So to kind of standardize that across the state, we ask for a full month.

- [Bret] While this study is being conducted on gut piles in Minnesota, people from all over the world are helping out.

- After a month of having that out on a gut pile.

If they return the images to us, we upload them to an online participatory science platform called Zooniverse.

Anybody with an internet access can go on and help us analyze the images.

We have the location of every gut pile, the exact location for just about every gut pile.

And that's something that when we ask a hunter to share, we guarantee that we won't share that out with anybody else.

That's a very sensitive topic for people.

So using that location data, we can get at further more detailed questions than just biome, what's the difference between these large major biomes?

We can really look at how landscape features or tree cover might impact how long a gut pile lasts, which species are coming in, who's queuing into it.

We haven't looked at that quite yet, but that is something we will.

We started this project in 2018 and we really started it not knowing if anyone would be interested.

So we started it with the Master Naturalist Program 'cause we knew that was a group of people that was really interested in helping scientific efforts and we got a lot of interest.

So we moved and expanded to other hunting organizations, Minnesota Deer Hunters Association, Minnesota Chapter Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, and bluff and white tails have all really helped spread the word about this project.

So since 2018, we've grown and just this year's the first year we've been funded, we had the opportunity to hire a project coordinator with extension to help us really get the word out and collect more data and have more people involved.

- I was attracted to it because it's totally unique.

I think we are a bunch of researchers who are just kinda nature nerds, interested in what is happening with dead stuff in the woods.

And I think all of our volunteer hunters can relate to that.

They are curious about what is happening in their backyards or in the woods that they hunt in.

And we get a lot of great feedback from people who just like seeing what's happening when we humans aren't around to see it firsthand.

It's really neat that I get to be curious in my job all the time.

- So Minnesota's really unique in the biomes and the deciduous forest and the coniferous forest, in the prairie, and the farmland region.

So the scavengers that come in to feed on these gut piles are gonna vary.

So how does that vary and what are they are really the initial basic questions.

As far as scavengers go, we've learned that there's more than 50 different species of animals that feed on gut piles.

Variety of birds including woodpeckers, all sorts of mammals, including deer, that feed are actually feeding on the gut pile.

And we've learned that there is a difference across the biomes of maybe when different scavengers are finding the gut pile, how long they're staying, how many individuals are finding them.

So for example, in the prairie where it's a little more open, birds key in it really quick and then flocks of birds can see other birds and kind of flock.

So there's more individuals in the prairie region than in others.

- [Bret] While observing our carcasses, it was really interesting to watch the interactions between these different species, including this skunk who didn't wanna share its meal with a pack of coyotes.

And a mink that wasn't as successful in fending off those coyotes.

Well that's where the deer was, that's the camera there.

We've had skunks and crows and coyotes and then last night the battery died and they came and picked this thing clean.

And come to find out, look at this guy.

- [Man] A mink.

Look at that.

That's wild.

- I think the deer eating gut piles has been pretty surprising.

Not unheard of, deer and ungulates have been known to, you know, chew on antlers and when their nutrition demands it, they'll eat other things but it does bring up more additional questions potentially about possible disease spread from the deer perspective and then other scavengers as well.

So a lot of what's brought up is our additional questions that we could ask.

- We had some images from before I started of horses.

The landowner that owned these horses said they were eating the awful.

That was definitely surprising.

- Other studies I've read that have looked at similar things will name a few different species.

We've seen at least 50 different species that we can recognize as individual species.

And I'd say the majority of them are actually feeding on the carcass.

Some are maybe passing through, but I think just the amount is pretty interesting.

There are some that will look at like rabbits or woodpeckers that are initially kind of surprising.

But if you think about it, if you have a suet feeder, suet is fat and that's a woodpecker will come to that.

So if you think about it, not too surprising, but I think the variety of species has been pretty, pretty cool to see.

We have basic questions, so what's coming in and how that varies across the state.

And then from there I think we start to answer or ask a few more questions.

So questions about potential for disease spread, potential for the positive implications for a scavenger.

So this is a huge pulse resource on the landscape that historically didn't exist, right?

We have our management decisions have made this resource almost 200,000 gut piles, probably roughly give or take depending on the year, every year in Minnesota on the landscape in a month's time available to scavenger species that in the absence of human hunters would not have that available.

So understanding what that means to scavengers I think is part of the next step.

How are we positively impacting these species?

How are hunters really helping scavengers?

- Hunters can get in touch with us directly.

We have a website, it's awful.umn.edu.

Our email is also awful@umn.edu.

They can sign up to participate on that website and also if anybody needs camera equipment to use, we can help get them connected to a whole setup that they can borrow and then they mail it back to us at the end of the season.

We need more southwest hunters and then we are always looking for more participants.

So anybody who wants to join us, we welcome their contributions.

- Right now we have funding to do this for one more year.

We're hoping to move that forward.

I'd love to make this a long term project and kind of a pie in the sky dream for me is to expand this outside of Minnesota and compare between different states, maybe different management methods.

So where they might bait in Wisconsin, how does that affect what scavengers are coming into a gut pile versus in Minnesota in a similar biome.

(crow cawing)