Cat owners who live near the western edge of Boulder now have an opportunity to peek into the secret lives of their feline friends, thanks to an ongoing study by a doctoral student at Colorado State University.
Ashley Gramza is hoping to fit GPS collars on 30 kitties that live in the areas where Boulder's urban development collides with the city's vast western open space land. The collars -- which will collect data on each cat's whereabouts at 15-minute intervals over a couple of weeks each season -- are attached to harnesses that allow the units to face towards the sky, where they can make good contact with overhead satellites.
The goal for Gramza, who is earning a master's degree in human dimensions of natural resources and a Ph.D. in fish, wildlife and conservation biology, is to better understand how far domestic cats venture into open space, and what risks they face -- and pose -- once they're there.
"We know that mountain lions, coyotes and bobcats are using urban areas," Gramza said. "But we really don't know how far (domestic) cats are venturing out."
So far, Gramza has collared just seven cats, so she's looking for more volunteers who live within 175 meters of the western open space areas, including those who live in neighborhoods on the edge of the city and those who live in areas further west, such as Flagstaff Mountain.
One of the benefits for cat owners of signing up for the project is that Gramza promises to give them a map that sheds light on the mystery of where their cats go when they venture out of the house and into the great beyond. That was part of what enticed Chris Chandler, who lives in the Lake of the Pines neighborhood north of Boulder, to sign up her two cats: Totoro and Ringo.
"Many years ago, we had a cat and she disappeared for three weeks and then she turned up looking perfectly fine," Chandler said. "We always joked that we wanted to put a kitty cam on our cat -- I figured this was the closest we were going to get."
Chandler suspects that her current cats don't wander that far, but she's still eager to see how they spend some of their outdoor time.
Gramza also is asking participants to keep any prey that their cats bring home with them from their adventures so that she can identify it and keep track of it.
"We are going to be looking at whether or not there's a connection between how far cats are roaming and how many prey items they're bringing back," she said.
The project also includes the installation of 25 motion-activated cameras on open space land that's relatively near urban development. The idea is to get an idea of how many domestic cats are visiting open space, as well as how many other species are roaming around that might pose a risk to the cats.
So far, Gramza said she hasn't collected much evidence that would indicate that there are feral cats in Boulder -- a problem that has cropped up elsewhere in the country.
"There's really not a feral cat population," she said. "I don't know if that's because people aren't feeding them or if there is such a healthy carnivore population."
The cameras have shown that bobcats, mountain lions and domestic cats do overlap in their territories to some degree, which could be a concern because the cat species could potentially pass pathogens among each other, Gramza sad.
And the cameras have captured images of a number of other interesting critters, including a rare ringtail cat. And on at least one occasion, the camera snapped a picture of a housecat interacting with a larger predator.
"I got a picture of a cat and a coyote facing off," Gramza said.
Anyone who is interested in participating in the study can contact Gramza atagramza@rams.colostate.edu.
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