Walia Special Edition on the Bale Mountains (2011) - Zoologische ...

Monitoring Activities the Bale Mountains from 2001-2004
From 2001-2004, the effort and spatial coverage of the EWCP monitoring programme in the Bale
Mountains increased substantially from previous years, largely in response to a rabies outbreak and
subsequent vaccination of wolves (Randall et al. 2004; Knobel et al. 2008). During this time, the
number of monitoring personnel also increased from only two staff in 2001 and less than 100 person
days to nine staff in 2004 and over 1,000 person days expended in the field collecting a substantial
amount of data on pack size, composition, and distribution over a wider area (Fig. 2). Monitoring
effort was unevenly distributed throughout the Bale massif with the most effort concentrated in
the Web Valley, Sanetti Plateau, and Morebawa areas in 2003 and 2004 (Fig. 1). During these
years monitoring in the Web Valley was particularly high in response to the rabies outbreak in that
area (August 2003 to January 2004, Randall et al. 2004) and monitoring in the Sanetti Plateau and
Morebawa areas focused on assessing the survival of wolves captured and vaccinated during the
emergency vaccination programme (Knobel et al. 2008).
Figure 2. Monitoring effort in eight study areas of the Bale Mountains from 2001 to 2004. Numbers
above bars indicate the number of monitoring personnel employed by the EWCP each year.
The monitoring methods used followed those described above for determination of
pack boundaries and complete enumeration of unmarked individuals in focal packs based on
sex and age assignment. However, a certain level of individual recognition was also possible
following the vaccination intervention in 2003 (Randall et al. 2004; Knobel et al. 2008) when
unique combinations of colour-coded ear tags were put on a number of wolves in three study
areas (Web Valley, Morebawa, and Sanetti Plateau).
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