Catching roe deer with box-traps: lesson learned from a decadal experience

The study of animal movement necessarily relies on the acquisition of data from tagged animals and is thus strongly dependent on the capture success of the target individuals. Box trapping is a quite common methodology implemented to live-catch animals, especially in those contexts where the adoption of other methodologies such as drive nets is logistically complex (e.g., in mountain environments) and/or tele-anesthesia is not a viable option. Despite their wide usage by field ecologists and wildlife managers, we feel that information about the best practices to successfully capture animals through box-trapping remains quite often in the grey literature. Therefore, we present the lesson learned from over 10 years of box-trapping activity on roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) in an alpine environment, where we captured more than 100 individuals in two different study sites. We describe all the phases of roe deer captures, from pre-baiting to the release of the animals, showing the modalities that increment capture success but also the mistakes to be avoided. Among other, we investigate circadian patterns in the capture probability, as well as the link between animal immediate post-release behavior and capture-to-handling interval. Based on the above, we propose a ‘vademecum’ on capture modalities that we hope can be beneficial to ecologists and wildlife managers for tagging wildlife of interest.