Thursday Trapping and Tree trimming

I'm exhausted!!!!!

We were out at Cook's Lake again today. Tomorrow will be our last day there (I think). We arrived and checked our traps. As usual, my morning trap check came up empty. No small mammals were lured into my traps.

There are 100 traps, each of us is responsible for 20 traps. They are divided in half. We placed half of our numbered traps on one side of the jeep trail, and the rest on the other side. Our areas were measured out so that we were approximately 100 meters apart. I cover section B.

Anyway, my section seems to be the least popular area for small mammals.


After we finished checking the traps, we moved on to cover poo. We created quadrants that were 10 meters by 10 meters. If you can imagine how searchers look for a missing person--walking side by side--that is how we looked for poo. Our goal was to collect the snowshoe hare poo. If we found other poo, we were to document it but not pick it up.

We did 5 random quadrants and discovered some very interesting info: the hares were not prolific everywhere. Some areas were covered with hare poo. Other areas had little to no poo at all!!!!

After lunch, we moved on to trail clearing. Have I mentioned that there are 5 of us? Four of us are on the fellowship and one person is a paying client. All of us are female. The research scientists are a couple. Chris, the only guy in this group, is currently sick so he wasn't there. His partner, Christina was with us--a total of 6 girls. I'm quite impressed with the work we accomplished.


Our tools were hand saws and clippers. We cut down so many trees (secondary forest, not the primary trees). The trees were 20+ feet tall but only 6 or so inches in diameter. That was still a lot of work!!!!!

We were exhausted from the trail clearing and went to check our traps again at 4:45pm. After checking 18 traps, I was getting discouraged. But trap #19 had a vole. He was a recapture but I didn't care.

We're a bit concerend that we haven't caught any other small mammals (mice, groundhog, shrew, bog lemming). There are several barred owls that we see frequently. I hope they don't have their eyes on our voles. They voles run quickly into a hole when we release them so I know they're ok. Maybe that is why they keep showing up in our traps!!! Safety, warmth, and food.


Tomorrow we're headed back to the traps for the last time. We'll collect them before lunch and then head back to the house for a 'live from the field' with our classes. I hope this goes well.

Well...my goal is to get to sleep before 12:30am so I must sign off now so I can post pictures and video.


:)
Paige