Alumni Highlight: Sara Jordan-McLachlan

Written By: Leslie Brown

Sara Jordan-McLachlan spent a summer as a research intern for Cascades Carnivore Project 11 years ago, and to this day it stands out as one of her favorite summers. 

Every day, she’d head out from Paradise at Mount Rainier National Park, locate the den a Cascade red fox was using to raise her two kits, find a spot in the brush to settle into, then sit for the next few hours, observing and recording the family’s behavior. 

She noted the way the female approached the den, the food she brought, the kits’ behavior when she arrived, and the way the family regarded her. “They always knew I was there.”

The work was a joy, she said. “As field work goes, this was one of the easiest and most enjoyable jobs imaginable,” she said. 

It was also meaningful work. Jocelyn Akins, CCP’s director and founder, first captured the image of a Cascade red fox on a trail camera in 2008, an important discovery – many thought the elusive mountain carnivore no longer inhabited the area. The field work that followed – including that of Sara’s – helped establish not only the presence and behavior of these animals at Mount Rainier, but also their imperiled status. 

In 2022, after 15 years of study at Mount Rainier that documented 51 individual Cascade red foxes, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife listed the fox as endangered, opening the door to a recovery plan that CCP and other agencies helped to develop and today are working to implement. 

Sara had no idea at the time that her summer of fox observations would be part of something so foundational, but she said the work gave her an important start in her own journey towards a career in wildlife conservation. Jocelyn was a mentor to her, encouraging her to pursue a graduate degree – Sara ultimately obtained an MS in Environmental Practice at Royal Roads University. The experience watching foxes at Mount Rainier shaped her professionally, as well, she said. “It helped me to know how to do that kind of behavioral observation and how to understand how wild animals sometimes behave around people.”

Sara left CCP to return to Calgary, her hometown. Today, she lives with her family in this fast-growing city in southern Alberta, working with Calgary Captured, a project of the Miistakis Institute for the Rockies. She manages the camera project, overseeing 60 remote cameras and a team of volunteers – part of an effort to understand the presence and behavior of wildlife in Calgary and to ensure they have the connectivity they need to survive.

In many ways, it’s a job that circles back to her days on Mount Rainier, where wildlife cameras also helped scientists understand the presence and needs of imperiled animals. 

Alumni Highlight: Jenny Kordosky

Written By: Leslie Brown

Jenny Kordosky remembers something a colleague told her during one particularly wet day of field work in the mountains about a decade ago, when it rained, snowed, sleeted and hailed over the course of a few hours. “She told me, ‘If you’re warm, you’re happy.’”

“I took that into all my wildlife jobs,” Jenny added with a laugh. “It’s one of the best tips I’ve ever gotten.”

Jenny was a member of a Cascades Carnivore Project field crew at the time, where she worked during the fall of 2013 – a short but memorable experience. She recalls the sheer joy of working in the field after years in a lab; pushing herself physically hard and feeling her muscles get stronger; the utter beauty of the places where she worked – her “outdoor office” in the Southern and Central Cascades.

She had no experience in field work when she applied for a position at CCP and found it hard to land that first gig. “My lab work made everyone think I couldn’t handle being outside,” she said. But after sending several emails to Jocelyn Akins, CCP’s founder, she said, “Jocelyn decided to take a leap with me. She told me, ‘I think you can do it.’”

And indeed, she could. Jenny worked in the Indian Heaven Wilderness near Mount Adams, the Icicle Creek area outside of Leavenworth, and the Goat Rocks Wilderness near Randall, checking camera traps and collecting scat in support of CCP’s efforts to determine the ranges and population dynamics of the wolverine and Cascade red fox, both imperiled in Washington state.

She calculated her miles – on average, she traversed 12.5 miles a day through forests and meadows, some of them in alpine areas like the Enchantments in the Central Cascades, where she and her crew got a permit to do a scat survey for two days. “It was awesome,” she said.

Her season with CCP was a foundational experience, and Jenny went on from there to pursue several other opportunities, including working with the U.S.Forest Service on a project that looked at chronic stress levels in fishers in the Sierras near Shaver Lake, Calif. Her work there became the basis of a master’s thesis, and in 2019, she received her master’s in wildlife biology from Utah State University.

She also edited the newsletter produced by the Martes Working Group for two years and for more than three years worked as a biologist for the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, where she managed fish hatchery data statewide. In March 2022, in need of greater financial stability, she left field work and returned to the lab: She’s now a field applications scientist for PacBio, a California-based biotech company that manufactures and sells genetic sequencers. A native of Portland, Ore., she now lives in Olympia, Wash

She says she misses her days in the field, but she hasn’t left her love of nature and wildlife behind. Nearly every weekend, she’s hiking, backpacking, or kayaking, and when she gets wet or tired, she remembers her colleague’s words from more than a decade ago: “If you’re warm, you’re happy.” She makes sure she stays warm.

Alumni Highlight: Austin Homkes

Written By: Leslie Brown

Austin Homkes is a field biologist with Voyageurs Wolf Project where he studies wolves in Northern Minnesota, using a network of trail cameras, GPS collars, and direct observations to learn more about the lives and ecological role of wolves in the southern boreal forest.

He has crawled into active wolf dens when the adults were away, deftly inserting microchips under the pups’ skin; captured adult wolves and collared them with GPS collars before releasing them into the wild; examined kill sites to determine what they have eaten and how they kill their prey. It is work that has led to significant discoveries about wolf behavior and ecology.

“Wolves are well-studied animals but not here in the Minnesota ecosystem, where they are cryptic and more hidden,” he said. “That’s why we are doing this work. There is a lot we still don’t know.”

Austin’s path to Voyageurs Wolf Project began a decade ago, when he discovered his love of field biology as an intern for Cascades Carnivore Project. If his current job is a dream come true, so was his two-month stint with us in 2014, when he hiked the subalpine meadows of Mount Rainier and Mount Hood, looking for mountain red fox and wolverine scats.

Austin – newly graduated with a B.A. in Biology from Hope College in Holland, Michigan – had never been to the Pacific Northwest before his position with CCP. “I found the landscape stunning,” he said. He also loved the work. “Being with CCP was my first real field job. It solidified for me that I wanted to study larger animals in the field. I realized I wanted to do hands-on work.”

Six months later, he was in Minnesota doing just that, working with a friend and colleague for what eventually became Voyageurs Wolf Project. The organization is now a University of Minnesota research project focused on wolves’ summertime ecology.

In 2021, while working for the project, Austin earned a master’s degree in biology from Northern Michigan University – his thesis examined wolf predation of white-tailed deer fawns.

Like his work for CCP, Austin’s position today is physically challenging but deeply rewarding, replete with some incredible experiences. Asked to share one, he described a moment in 2019, when he visited a wolf den that he thought the pack had vacated – to make sure, he stood nearby and howled. To his amazement, five pups emerged from the den and crept close, circling him as they tried to figure out who (or what) he was. He remained in place when the adult returned (she didn’t see him), and watched as she fed to the pups.

He later examined the remains and discovered a behavior new to biologists. She had regurgitated blueberries, an observation that led to a peer-reviewed paper Austin authored: “Berry Important? Wolf Provisions Pups with Berries in Northern Minnesota.”

As Austin begins his tenth year studying wolves in Minnesota, he reflected on those days in the Cascades in 2014. “I never could have known where this passion would take me, but I can see now the seed was planted in those mountains picking up scat with Cascades Carnivore Project.”

Alumni Highlight: Kayla Shively

Written By: Leslie Brown

Photo By: Gretchen Kay Stuart

Kayla Shively became a “wolverine nut,” as she puts it, while working as a volunteer for CCP in 2018. She and another CCP staff member successfully tracked a wolverine through deep snow to her den site in a remote basin in the William O. Douglas Wilderness, where they discreetly set up a camera and eventually captured several images of the female, her mate, and their two kits.

The photos documented the first reproductive wolverine den in Washington’s South Cascades and only the third den discovered in the state. “I was thrilled to be a part of something so special and rare,” Kayla said, adding that for her as a young scientist, “it was a formative experience.”

Today, Kayla lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, holds a Master’s degree in Wildlife Sciences from the University of Washington’s School of Forest and Environmental Science, and recently became a conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. She leads scientific research and monitoring projects for their Arctic Beringia Program, spending weeks in the field documenting the impact of climate change on several bird species, including common eiders, dunlins, and red phalaropes.

Her work with CCP, she said, was invaluable, laying the groundwork for what she’s doing today. “The field work experience I gained from CCP set me up for success,” she said. “It gave me the skills I needed to lead field crews in these remote camps and remote locations.”

From 2015 to 2021, Kayla supported several of CCP’s carnivore projects as a volunteer and employee, and later as a U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service employee and CCP collaborator. She hiked the backcountry in the South Cascades, setting up fox cameras, building runpoles for wolverines, collecting scat, and more – work that gave her a window into a career as a wildlife biologist.

In 2020, she started graduate school at the University of Washington, where she worked with Washington’s reintroduced fisher population, gathering hundreds of scat samples of two distinct groups – those in the North Cascades and those in the South Cascades – to assess their diet. She found a significant difference – those in the south had “a typical fisher diet,” she said, dominated by snowshoe hares, mountain beavers, and other larger-body prey. In the north, the diet was diverse – 71 species that included small birds, moles, and even fish (“contrary to what their name might suggest, fishers aren't known for eating fish,” she said).

Now in Alaska, she expects to again focus on wolverines. WCS plans to continue a wolverine collaring and camera monitoring study to better understand wolverine population dynamics in northern Alaska. “Wolverines might be the least studied carnivore in North America, so even small discoveries can have a big impact and that's what draws me to working with them,” Kayla said.

Her hope is that this research will contribute to wolverine conservation in Washington’s Cascade mountains, where they first inspired me to pursue a career in ecology.

Alumni Highlight: Jessie Thoreson

Written by: Leslie Brown

Photo: Cascades Carnivore Project

In May, Jessie Thoreson completed her master’s degree in fire ecology from Oregon State University, where her thesis examined the role of cultural fire and other Indigenous stewardship practices in Northern California’s black oak woodlands.

Her research differed from her work for CCP, where she spent time in the North and South Cascades collecting scat to help establish population levels of wolverines, Cascade red fox, and other carnivores. But one huge similarity stood out, she said – the importance of spending time in the field, not simply in front of a computer.

“You develop a whole different commitment and relationship to a place from being in the field,” she said. “It almost seems inappropriate to try to interpret a place without lived experience there.”

Jessie spent two summers working for CCP, first in 2018 after graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in environmental studies and again in 2021 before starting her graduate program in Corvallis. 

“I feel lucky to have discovered CCP,” she said. In her first season, she hiked over 500 miles through the North Cascades, where she collected scat and hair from the Cascade red fox, as well as wolverines, martens, and lynx. In 2021, she spent time in the high meadows and forests around Mount Rainier and the Goat Rocks Wilderness, focused largely on wolverine research.

Both were rich experiences, she said. She recalled one arduous day in the Pasayten Wilderness in the North Cascades, where she and other members of the crew spent hours clambering over blowdown trees, rewarded when they came upon a bear track, with a wolf track inside it and the scat of a moose nearby. “It just showed how wild that place was,” she said.

Jessie, who was born and raised in Seattle, has a second passion – she’s a singer/songwriter and the lead for a band called The Crown Fire, a “nerdy reference,” she notes, to fire ecology (a crown fire is a forest fire that spreads from the top of one tree to another). The band plays folk rock with a jazz influence.

Her work as an ecologist informs her music. She recalled one song she wrote while working for CCP and living in Winthrop: She had been sitting in the field behind her trailer, a place she considered her home, when she saw a coyote sauntering through the field completely at ease. “It was so clear that this was the coyote’s place,” she said. “It wasn’t mine at all.” 

The song that came out of that experience, “Coyote,” is a lyrical piece and was a single on her band’s debut album, Round River. “Coyote in the moonlight, singing a sweet song …”