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Surveillance methods can be useful in locating lost cats and skittish lost dogs. Wildlife cameras are the most common surveillance method.
Long, Robert A., Paula MacKay, William J. Zielinski, and Justina C. Ray, Editors. 2008. Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores
Not a cheap book, but I would definitely recommend purchasing it to anyone who wants to learn about surveillance techniques available for locating skittish lost dogs and cats. Methods covered include track plates, surveillance cameras, search dogs, hair snares, and baits/lures.
Wildlife Camera Books
“Camera trapping” is the wildlife biologist term for using a wildlife camera (a.k.a. game camera or trail camera) to take pictures of wildlife. They refer to it as “trapping” because they use a data analysis method that is also used in mark-recapture studies, where they catch a wild animal, mark it and then see how many marked animals that they recapture. This can be used to estimate the number of animals in a given area.
In the last couple years several books on camera trapping have been published. These books may contain useful information in effectively setting up wildlife cameras and maximizing effectiveness for locating lost dogs and cats. Unfortunately, they are rather expensive, so I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read them yet.
O’Connell, Allen, James Nichols, and K. Ullas Kranth, editors. 2011. Camera Traps in Animal Ecology: Methods and Analysis. Springer.
Meek, Paul and Peter Fleming, editors. 2014. Camera Trapping: Wildlife Management and Research. CSIRO Publishing.
Rovero, Francesco and Fridolin Zimmerman. 2016. Camera Trapping for Wildlife Research. Pelagic Publishing.
Camera Review Websites
Discussion Groups & Blogs
- Yahoo! Camera Traps Group: camera trapping information exchange among wildlife biologists.
- Camera Trap Codger: has some interesting blog posts, and offers a week long camera trapping workshop.
- TrailCamPro has a blog
- Chasing Game has a forum
- Also don’t forget the articles on Surveillance in the Lost Pet Research blog.
