Career Choices

$1 million grant for MU professor to study deer

As a kid, professor Josh Millspaugh grew up hunting and fishing with family and friends. He's now a principal investigator on a $1 million grant to study habits of Missouri deer.

The associate professor in the University of Missouri in Columbia grew up in upstate New York with lots of opportunities for outdoor activities. He said, by high school, he knew a career in wildlife conservation "was an automatic fit for me."

Now 36, Professor Millspaugh is heading a multi-campus study of how to use modern technology to give conservation officials better information on how to manage the state's deer population.

Recently, the New York Times featured his study in the Science section. The article included a cartoon illustration showing a deer with a video cam hooked to its antlers facing an on-coming car.

The cartoon depicted real life. Professor Millspaugh has been outfitting deer with cameras to give researchers a better idea of how they live in the forests and fields.

"The cameras allow us to see things that we never would have known with other studies," he said. Previously, the researchers could use radios and GPS devices to plot deer locations and movements.

"But, we never understood why the deer were in that location," he said. The camera views allow the researchers to see what the deer are seeing and doing, he said.

Millspaugh is working with Dr. Zhihai He, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. In addition, they are collaborating with data transmission experts in Florida.

The NSF grant will allow the professors to expand on a pilot "deercam" project. Millspaugh has had a 4-year camera information project with deer at a 10-acre fenced area south of Columbia.

He admits the pilot project was definitely low budget. But, he got plenty of help from Missouri Department of Conservation field biologists. They designed and built waterproof cameras that could be mounted on deer.

Then, using feeding stations to attract deer so nearby receivers could download the pictures for analysis.

The first cameras were mounted on antlers of male deer and on collars on females.

The antler-mounted cameras give good pictures but were good for less than a year. Buck deer shed antlers every year and grow new ones. The collar-mounted cameras don't provide very good picture angles.

Millspaugh said one improvement in the larger study will be newly designed "helmets with chin straps." That way, both male and female deer can be fitted with longer-lasting head-mounted cameras.

He said the researchers will start field-testing the new head-mounted cameras this month.

Experts in Florida are working on ways to allow for downloading cameras from longer distances. The researchers also want to be able to download information from up to five deer at one time.

Millspaugh said pictures from his earlier study turned up some unusual information.

"One deer was walking in the forest. Every time he spotted a mulberry leaf, he'd stop and eat it. He didn't eat anything else. Apparently, mulberry leaves were his food item for the day," he said.

Another deer kept returning to the same tree time after time. He said, "We could see that water had been trapped in the crotch of the tree and he came back to drink. We'd have never known why he was returning without the cameras."

Millspaugh said researchers are hoping the visual information will answer some important wildlife management questions. One problem is the number of accidents that occur when vehicles hit deer that are trying to cross highways.

Conservation officials hope to find out what causes deer to cross roads at certain places but avoid other possible crossing sites, he said. They also want to find out how diseases are transmitted between animals.

Millspaugh said early camera images showed deer regularly have "close mouth-to-mouth contact with each other." Many human diseases are transmitted by close contact.

After his career decision in high school, Millspaugh obtained degrees from universities in New York, South Dakota and Washington. He said he applied for a position at MU because the state has a national reputation for support of conservation.

About his career decision, Millspaugh said, "It was the right choice."