If you ever get the chance to go hiking with Wildlife Ecologist Tanya Diamond and Wildlife Researcher Ahíga Sandoval, don’t be prepared to go fast.
“People hate hiking with us,” Diamond says, “because it takes us forever just to go.”
Calling Cards
Why the slow pace? They’re keeping their eyes peeled for animal scat and tracks. “It’s addicting,” Diamond says, looking for animal signs. Both are certified wildlife trackers and often conduct tracking workshops.
Wildlife calling cards of scat and tracks—even burrows, dens, and trails—inform the team of two at Pathways for Wildlife on where to place their field cameras.
“People wave to the cameras,” Diamond says. You may have come across one of these cameras yourself if you’ve stumbled onto a box tethered to a tree. Their informational sign about a wildlife study is sure to give it away.
In between the Homo sapien wanderer, what Diamond and Sandoval are hoping to capture on these motion-sensored cameras requires patience. “You’re going through 200 images of leaf blowing or snow,” Diamond says, “For every amazing bobcat footage.” But when they do capture that video of a mother bear showing her cubs a great place to itch against a log or the rarely-seen porcupine, it’s worth getting excited about.

Big personalities
“We’re highly amused,” Diamond says when they review the footage. Many candid animal reels have surprised them in just the first year of the multiyear camera study.
For example, the animal that hails as the king or queen of Tahoe’s forest was not who Sandoval or Diamond were expecting it to be. It isn’t a bear or a mountain lion. “The most hardcore animal,” Sandoval says, “is the chickaree.”
He exclaims, “They chase everything!” This bold characteristic is what makes these Douglas squirrels so hardcore. The list of animals they’ve recorded these squirrels chasing away includes each other, other types of squirrels, chipmunks, and even weasels, which can actually kill chickarees. “Their personalities are much bigger than their bodies,” says Joe Harvey with the California Tahoe Conservancy.

You’ll often see evidence of these critters in the form of their stripped pinecone snacks or hear their rattle calls. If you ever get close enough, you’ll see tufts of hair jutted from their ears.
There’s one forest creature the team wasn’t expecting to see so much of, the porcupine. In the past, loggers had poisoned these spiny animals. “It was detrimental to the porcupine population,” Diamond says, but filming more than they anticipated is a good sign for the species. It could mean there is a core population of breeding individuals with their young dispersing.
The quilled creature is special to Sandoval and Diamond. It was the first animal they spotted in-person when starting the project. Sandoval could tell it was a porcupine by the way it walked, “You can immediately tell,” he says, from what he describes as a sloppy gate. The quills, and the outline confirmed.
In other footage, a lone female bobcat walks through the forest and crouches. Moments later, outbursts another bobcat running and pouncing towards her. She wasn’t alone after all. It was her kitten, participating in playtime. There was something different about this kitten sighting. “Something happened,” Sandoval says and explains typically, they see bobcats with litters of three. At times, an incident might happen to one kitten, dropping the number to two. But with this sighting Sandoval says, “it’s kind of rare for her to only have one.”

The pouncing play behavior evidenced in this video is usually exhibited between kitten siblings. However, the mom in this case, “She’s actually doing that with her kitten,” Sandoval explains, “So she’s taking on the role of also the playmate.” It’s bonding, but it is also how the kitten learns to hunt, pounce, and hide.
Pathways for Wildlife cameras are even picking up threatened species in the Sierra. A California spotted owl revealed itself to a field camera near the Upper Truckee River. This sighting helped one of their partners, the U.S. Forest Service, know where to place audio recording units to find the species and further inform their management of the area.
The American pine marten is another sensitive population, listed as a Species of Special Concern. All agencies are closely monitoring the mammal due to their low numbers. Habitat loss and fragmentation have contributed to their decline. The morning was still very early and dark when the mammal came within camera sight. The critter left a trail in the fresh snow, evidence of its presence after it scurried away.
There is cause for celebration with any footage. Besides the extreme elation from seeing wild animals on camera, each capture is more data to help make animals safer.
But just how are these furry reels doing that? The two researchers are conducting a five-year wildlife connectivity study in the Lake Tahoe Basin. The study gathers information on how wildlife is moving and where, including human roads.
They see daily wildlife crossings on certain roads. “It’s a part of their ecology now,” Sandavol says, but it’s a risk each time an animal crosses.
This data, along with information from their roadkill surveys and other techniques, informs many different agencies on how to conduct their operations when it comes to wildlife. Pathways for Wildlife connects with these agencies, including State Parks, Caltrans, the U.S. Forest Service, and the California Tahoe Conservancy through the help of Damon Yeh and others at Wildlands Network to collaborate on solutions.
“It’s such a great partnership,” Diamond explains, “because then they take our science, and they apply it and implement it.”
‘If you don’t move, you don’t survive’
For road partners like Caltrans, implementation takes the form of retrofitting rocky culverts with sediment fill. This makes it easier for ungulates, such as deer, to walk through. Without this augmentation, the rocky material can be tricky for the hoofed animals to navigate. Other potential structures are open-span bridges that create spacious areas for wildlife to move below the roads. Still, others could take wildlife up and over roads, like wildlife overpasses. Directional fencing can then guide animals to these safe crossings. These all make human roads more permeable to animals, where they might otherwise create a barrier or pose dangerous risks.
Sandoval explains, there are laws to nature, and one is the law of movement. “The law goes like this,” Sandoval begins, “if you don’t move, you don’t survive. You don’t even have a chance.” It’s the same roads, Sandoval continues to explain, that take us to our scenic places, breathtaking overlooks, and emerald lake, that get in the way of this survival movement for animals.
The team is trying to find a win-win for both animals and humans. “Unfortunately, as of now,” Sandoval says, “wildlife have to travel across these roads.”
In addition to posts near roads, Pathways for Wildlife places cameras in a randomized grid across the landscape, collecting data on the land in between roads. This provides valuable information for agencies like the California Tahoe Conservancy and land managers like Joe Harvey. Harvey explains for them to manage the land properly, they need to understand what species are here and where they are going. “Without that critical data,” he says, “we might be unknowingly interrupting that movement.”
Given wildfires, there is a push to clear out dense cover areas, places with many fallen branches, and jumbled logs or vegetation that create cover and habitat. These areas also provide fuel ripe to burn.
The team coined the acronym DCA for these dense cover areas. “We’re going to make it stick,” Harvey says on a cold morning when snow hadn’t yet blanketed the ground. The team walks up to a particularly large DCA that they are monitoring and Sandoval says, “I call this a mega DCA.” It’s characterized as, “going on forever,” by Yeh with its long logs strewn across the area, branches and vegetation filling in.
One big management question Harvey and other land managers are asking is how many DCAs do they need to keep per acre for wildlife and how many do they clear for fire mitigation? They hope these studies answer that question.
The team has similar connectivity projects in other regions. One project is north of Tahoe, along Highway 395. In fact, it was while working on the 395 project that Diamond and Sandoval became enamored with the lake. Diamond explains, “I didn’t know you could fall in love with the lake like a person.” As Diamond fell head over all 10 pairs of her hiking boots, another thing that struck her was the plethora and variety of wildlife here.
She describes the Tahoe Basin as the Serengeti of California, having come from fragmented habitats in the Bay Area. In a cautionary tale, many Bay Area agencies are now working to restore the land and animal populations. “So here,” what excites Diamond is, “We have the opportunity to get ahead of that.”
Living the dream
The team has been paving the way for wildlife connectivity with their studies for around 15 years now and when asked by a financial advisor about when they plan on retiring, Sandoval answers, “Well, if I could make it to 80.” But it might be a little longer than that. According to Diamond, “We’re never going to retire.” Keeping the team going for that long shouldn’t be hard since in addition to being research partners, they’re also life partners.

The duo recently celebrated 14 years together as a couple. They first met when Sandoval walked into Diamond’s office expressing interest in her mountain lion movement study in Salinas, Calif. For six months of what Diamond describes as torture, they worked together professionally. Each remained unspoken about their feelings. The silence finally broke on Valentine’s Day over 14 years ago. “Man, what an amazing life though,” Sandoval says, “You get to run the most purposeful, meaningful thing in your life with your best friend and partner.”
It’s sometimes hard to believe for Diamond, “I feel like I’ve made this all up in my head. I don’t think this is actually, really happening. I get to do my dream project with my dream partner.”
While living the dream, the team of two at Pathways for Wildlife and their partners at Wildlands Network have a goal of eventually connecting all the projects together. This would make the Sierra fluid for wildlife to move through so that animals and humans alike can enjoy—a win-win.