One day last winter, Aaron Shafer was kneeling in the snow in a wooded section of Thousand Islands National Park, about 50 kilometres east of Kingston, Ont. Beside him lay a drugged and blindfolded white-tailed deer.
Nearby, Sheldon Lambert, a resource conservation manager with Parks Canada, cradled the unconscious deer's head on his leg, while veterinarian Dave McRuer monitored the animal's pulse and breathing. The female yearling's tongue lolled as tubes fed oxygen into her nostrils.
Dr. Shafer, an associate professor at Trent University who specializes in wildlife genomics, moved swiftly and quietly as he fit a radio collar around the deer's neck. He collected hair samples and measured the deer's hind-foot length, an indicator of body size.
With Mr. Lambert's help, he then transferred the animal into a shallow plastic tub that they suspended on a spring scale to record the deer's weight: 48 kilograms. The female was likely pregnant, which, for white-tailed deer can occur as early as the first year of life.
A key moment in the operation came when Dr. Shafer used a punch tool and carefully clipped a hole in the deer's right ear. A small trickle of blood darkened the crisp white snow while he bagged and labelled the pea-sized pellet of flesh. "That gives me unlimited amounts of DNA," Dr. Shafer said.
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