Sometime between the end of World War II and 1952, brown tree snakes found their way to Guam, likely arriving as stowaways aboard US military cargo from their native Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands. In the decades that followed, the snakes proliferated on the previously snake-free island and proceeded to decimate Guam’s forest birds and several lizard species as well.

You may recall we've been working on developing a smart trap for invasive brown tree snakes in Guam. This spring, we spent three weeks there testing them out with hands-on lab and field research as part of a U.S. Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) award.

Our schedule on Guam was packed, and the work yielded a tremendous amount of data that will be invaluable to our prototype trap design process. In addition to gathering thousands of images for training the computer vision models that we’ll employ to capture snakes in our traps, we also assessed the viability of several different physical trap designs with more than 150 snakes. This process was informative and at times humbling. Fortunately, multiple designs performed as well as we could have hoped and will advance to the next phase–a multi-month prototype field trial. With all of this new information and data, we’re now designing the prototype traps that we’ll be bringing to Guam in a few short months. In the weeks ahead, we’ll continue to work closely with Guam-based USDA NWRC staff to complete a field trial evaluating the performance of several designs as the final phase of this project. We’re excited to be nearing this stage, and we look forward to sharing the results.

No matter how many times I’ve read about it, I was not totally prepared for the degree to which Guam is without native birds. Not that I doubted the many articles I’ve read over the years, or what fellow wildlife biologists have told me of their own experiences on the island, but some things are just hard to fathom until you experience them in person.

Outside of the capital area at Guam’s center, the majority of the island’s landscape is covered with lush tropical forests. Counterintuitively, it is here where there are effectively no native birds to be seen or heard. Exceptions include a handful of bird species that are too large to be preyed upon by the snakes. In and around Guam’s urban center and suburban neighborhoods, nonnative birds like Eurasian tree sparrows, Rock Pigeons, and feral chickens are abundant.

While on Guam, we were presented with an unexpected opportunity to tour the Guam Department of Wildlife Resources’ (DAWR) captive breeding facility for two of Guam’s most imperiled endemic birds, the Guam rail and the Guam Kingfisher (known as the Coco and Sihek, respectively, in Guam’s native Chamorro language). When the Guam rail and Guam Kingfisher were nearing their eventual extirpation from Guam in the 1980s, the few remaining individuals were brought into captivity. Despite decades-long efforts to breed and re-establish the Coco and Sihek in their native habitats, both species are still found primarily in captive breeding programs on Guam and in zoos. Until brown tree snakes can be eliminated or greatly reduced on the island or even from some part of it, this situation will likely remain.

To end on a small bit of good news with regard to Guam’s birds, DAWR recently celebrated the hatching of a rare female Sihek. For reasons not fully understood, nearly all captive-bred Guam kingfishers are males. With expert care and a bit of luck, this new female will be a big help in DAWR’s effort to restore the species.

A new project with University of Maine scientists Noah Charney and Sydne Record will begin this summer–WVS’s first project that is NOT focused on invasive species. We’re excited to use the tech we’ve been developing to benefit native amphibian and beetle conservation. WVS will design and custom-build camera units to be used for long-term field deployments to gather images for Acadia National Park amphibian monitoring work and NEON ground beetle monitoring.

The cameras at Acadia National Park will be used in ongoing efforts to monitor amphibian activity around the park’s roadways to aid in park efforts to reduce road mortality and enhance habitat connectivity. The beetle cameras will be tested for use in the National Ecological Observation Network or NEON, a National Science Foundation project to provide long-term ecological data. Ground beetles are one of the NEON focal taxonomic groups and these important indicators of ecosystem health and biodiversity are systematically monitored at all 47 NEON sites.

While trail or game cameras are now a standard tool for non-invasive monitoring of large and medium mammals, they have not been designed for smaller and often slower-moving animals like amphibians and beetles and are usually not effective for them. Wild Vision Systems is working on a single design for both the amphibian and ground beetle use cases. It will be adjustable and/or feature components that can be easily exchanged so that the camera can be located at different distances from the subject. Units will be optimized to provide images that can be easily classified with machine learning after collection. 

Thus far, WVS projects have been carried out in Florida and Guam (with our sights set on many other regions as well), yet our company is based in Maine, where we were recently featured in one of Maine’s best independent news outlets. Back in May, reporter Jim Leonard profiled our ongoing work to develop smart traps for brown tree snakes in the Midcoast Villager.

Wild Vision Systems was founded by Derek Yorks and Ben Stookey. Derek’s wildlife conservation career spans more than 20 years, and includes applied conservation and research experience as a state agency reptile & amphibian specialist. Ben is a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience and expertise in AI, Edge ML, computer vision, full-stack, & mobile software development. Derek and Ben’s friendship was established in 1998.

Please spread the word and share this newsletter with anyone you know who might also want to learn more about our work. And stay tuned for our next issue early this autumn.

Derek Yorks & Ben Stookey

Founders at Wild Vision Systems