Human Interest & Wildlife Tidbit Podcast

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Final Days

Wednesday, April 23, was a nice surprise, for after a predicted high of 40 degrees, we enjoyed lunch at 70!

I caught another red-backed vole this morning, the same one I caught yesterday. A second trap had the door half closed, so I checked it out, but it was empty. I didn't get any in the afternoon.

Next, we mapped with GPS the boundaries of the neighbor's property we're working on. I was a bit disappointed that half of our route was along the road, so I talked Paige into using lunges to pace our distances between readings. She still hasn't forgiven me!

After lunch, we baited our camera traps with dog stew and moldy muffins.

We then cleared trail on the neighbor's property until 3:50. Something we didn't expect to see was this:

The husband built this tennis court for his wife, but she was so
upset by the woods that were cleared that she won't use it! Hopefully she'll use this trail that we're clearing for them. They want a trail and it's our way of giving back to them. If the trail helps them enjoy their land, they'll want to conserve it. The trail can be used for Chris and Christina's baseline transects, concentrates volunteers' feet to a smaller area, and wildlife will use it, too.

Chris covered 1 billion years of Nova Scotia (and Earth) geologic history with us today, clear through how geologic history influenced mammal distributions. Again, seeing the big picture was fantastic. Geology students, how does Nova Scotia fit into the plate tectonic history of the Earth? And where have Nova Scotia's terranes come from?



Thursday, April 24 -- OK, so today it's 40 and rainy. But I'm famous! I got a red-backed vole recapture and the very first and only rock lemming! These are larger than red-backed voles and and as the name implies, are adapted to life amongst the rocks. What do you suppose some of these adaptations are?

After bringing in all our traps, we finished clearing the rest of the neighbor's trail. It felt great to complete this task.

After lunch the van wouldn't start. Chris shuttled us teachers back to the house and we worked through the statistics on our East Port Medway trapping data. This is exciting data because East Port Medway has never been surveyed for small mammals ever before. Our data is baseline data.

While we found 28 red-backed voles per hectare at Cook's Lake Farm, we found half that density at East Port Medway. Chris has a preliminary hypothesis that though red-backed voles prefer mixed forests and both of our areas sampled are mixed forest, rock lemmings here may be competing with the red-backed voles. You can be sure that Chris and Christina will be investigating this as they get more data.

Arctic hares were much more numerous at East P ort Medway, so the scientists expected that because of competition, deer would be less abundant here. Deer may be more abundant here, however, though more data is needed before any firm conclusions can be made.

One disappointment (besides the van) was that our camera traps photographed only a raven. Chris and Christina will keep the area baited and we can check and see what later groups photograph.

Friday, April 25, and no snow! It's cloudy and windy, though, and after breakfast we hear about survival strategies before going out and practicing any. Expecting the worst, when we get out there it actually feels balmy. Almost, anyway. We practice fire-building and also trap-building for larger mammals. Here I am, making the bow sing the right song, intently sawing faster and faster, saying, "I'm going to make smoke, I'm going to make smoke!" which is a good level to reach.

And here I am, handing the bow over to Chris.
The string broke before the smoke billowed.

Chris (Dr. Newman) demonstrates construction of the trap here.

After lunch, we have a real-life situation simulation case study: an oil refinery wants to locate on the nearby harbor. Our job is to do an environmental assessment, finding signs of mammals to show what will be affected if the refinery were to be built. It's blustery, but the scat is nestled low to the ground, tracks even lower, and we find evidence of mink, otter, fox, coyote, raccoon, and mouse and/or voles. If that's not enough, this is nesting area for the endangered piping plover, which we see! No oil refinery here, thank you!

Our last activity is to try the bat detector that will pick up their ultrasound. But cold and blustery is not conducive to insects out in abundance, the main food of bats in this area, and it's probably more efficient for them to not hunt tonight. We see none.

Well, the actual last activity is packing. I envy Chris and Christina to be able to continue this important work, but I do look forward very much to sharing my many experiences and all I've learned with my students ... and anyone else that will listen! It's been wonderful to experience the research of these scientists who care so deeply about our planet. It sounds corny, I know, but I really do feel closer to Earth after holding those little red-backed voles that through their numbers can help us monitor the health of Earth. I also was closer to the earth when I crawled beneath the brambles to count the feces left by numerous other animals that also help us monitor the state of Earth!

Happy Earth Day!

A short Earth Day video:




Other Earth Day activities:
We counted 1000s of Arctic hare pellets again today
We went beaver-watching:

Week 2 Begins: Coastal Trapping Area, Deer Dropping Surveys, Camera Traps

What a busy day!

We started by driving to East Port Medway, near the big house that Christina and Chris are building. Here, we walked a transect of about 1 mile, recording all signs of mammals. To maximize our chances of seeing wildlife, two volunteers started at one end and three at the other. It took us over an hour to carefully scour the transect. We saw lots of coyote scat, deer tracks and finally deer scat, a bird carcass, trees gnawed by beaver, porcupine poo, and hare poo.

Field work is going to get interesting as many are a bit distracted after Paige found a tick on her and Bree and Erin from the other group found five.

Next, we conducted five deer dropping quadrat surveys at a nearby area. This area, as the name (East Port Medway) implies, is near the coast. Christina expects fewer deer but more hare compared to Cook's Lake, the inland site where we sampled last week. At Cook's Lake, we found a total of four deer piles. We collected all the hare poo we found, with a high count of an astounding 600 or so pellets in one 10m X 10m area. Yesterday at Kejimkujik National Park we found no deer scat in our five surveys. Today, we found a couple of deer piles in each quadrat (you may see exact numbers later) and over 2000 hare pellets in the last 10m X 10 m quadrat! If 600 is astounding, what is 2000+?

We also found porcupine poo. And we found that this area, where we will also do our trapping this week, is characterized by what has to be the densest undergrowth in the province, if not the entire continent!

Picking up over 2000 quarter-inch pellets (see photo to left below) from dense undergrowth (see right below) takes time, even with 5 people, and we ended up having lunch at about 2:00.















After lunch, we set five camera traps. This is what they look like:

Watch the short video below and think about this: How do you suppose a wildlife camera operates for taking still photos like we'll be doing?

My camera trap is just down the hill from the scientists' house on a quiet bay of the Atlantic.

Next, we assembled all small mammal traps, not each assembling their own set, but working as a group on all sets in an attempt to we eliminate any scent bias from the handlers. Then into the deep, deep woods. Did I mention how deep? There are tough shrubs everywhere! Except where there are huge boulders. We set 5 lines of traps, 2 traps at each of 10 sites along each line, or transect.

We're looking forward to the possibility of trapping a wider variety of mammals, maybe even flying squirrels! But we're not looking forward to going into those woods twice a day until Friday morning.

Humans are the ultimate reason for our dread. Humans 100s of years ago made the decision to clear the hemlock/white pine climax forests for lumber. Year after year, clear cutting continued before succession had a chance to continue to the original climax community. Now spruce/birch forests with thick understory prevail. So what did the hemlock/white pine forest look like? We drove to Kejimkujik National Park on Sunday and experienced the hemlock/white pine forest:

Compare this to the dreadful photo above taken in our trapping area. The hemlock adds a lot of acid to the soil in the natural climax community, keeping many other plants from growing beneath it.

Well, perhaps those shrubs will trample down some so that by midweek, walking will be easier. One thing for certain, no one wears shorts!

After dinner, we attempt beaver watching at a pond where Christina always sees beaver. She's never seen fishermen there, but tonight one beats us to the spot and we go elsewhere. We see two muskrats. Christina teaches us to tell them from beaver by the way their backs bob up and down as they use their tails in swimming. And otter can be ID'd from a distance by their squarer heads that sit higher in the water because their eyes are set lower on their heads.

Looks like I might get to put my UnderArmour to use after all when we attempt beaver watching again. Just sitting and standing at 38 degrees gets chilly!

It will be an interesting and challenging second week!

More soon!
Mrs. Megivern

Bringing in the Traps Friday Morning: A Watery Tale

We had a lot to do today! And the weather was not cooperative.

We not only had to check our traps, but we also had to collect all of them from the woods, clean them out, and haul them back to the van.

Checking the traps, we first found recapture after recapture and we so needed one new capture to be able to do the math on our own data. We not only got new captures, but we also found 3 mice in the traps! We had many traps with animals this morning -- all those traps in the soggy photo above contained animals! Any ideas for why we'd have so many more on this soggy morning? (Think, then read on.)

We think that because we had clear skies until last night, and are near a full moon, the combination of cool overnight lows (below freezing) and visibility to predators with the good light discouraged the wee creatures from getting out and foraging.

I hear that some are wondering what a vole is. Perhaps you need to do a little research. Here is a vole on the left and a mouse on the right. How are they different? I encourage you to see what differences you can, then research this question. Perhaps discuss lifestyle differences.

Not clear enough from these pictures? You could google "mouse photos" and "vole photos!"

Video P.S. for Thursday

Here is a video showing the release of a vole.
Send me your reactions to this release!

Trapping Success, Digestive Systems, Trail Appreciation, & Skinks!

Hello, All!

We did so much again today! This is how I started my day:


I caught another red-backed vole, this one a male! It was in my second trap on the "a" side again, so I must have hit a hotspot there! I got this one out of the bag in about half the time as yesterday's first try.

After we checked all the traps, we did a quadrant survey for droppings. This is for population estimates. We'd had our lunchtime scat "lab" practical yesterday and I passed (I probably rated about a B+ -- it's tough!). So now we layed out 10m square grids and in an orderly fashion picked up all the Arctic hare droppings we found and had Christina examine and count all other kinds of droppings. We had 146 hare pellets in our first grid! I had about 25 of these. The two wetter sites both had over 140 hare pellets and the drier sites had well under 10 each.

This is what hare droppings look like:

Note how grainy it looks.












To the right is deer poo. Notice the smooth, almost creamy consistency.











Next, Christina talked about why the droppings of the species look so different when they're both vegetarians. It gets down to the differences in their digestive systems.
Here's another question for you:
Why do hares eat their own feces? You may have to look this one up to get to the specifics!
(I told Biology classes that I'd present the mammals sections of the packet -- now I'm worried, after Christina's talk, that I'll need the rest of the school year for this!)

We did 5 grids before stopping for lunch ... make that washing our hands, then stopping for lunch! Then we extended our trail clearing that we started yesterday. The 5 of us cleared over 100m in two days. It was tough work, but wonderful to clear it one day, then use it for a base for the scat surveys the next, then extend it today.

Working so close to nature, you never know what you might find. I found deer fumid that Christina had described in her digestive systems talk:

(What's deer fumid???)

And we found 2 skinks. OK, Bio people, here's a photo you can use in your presentation! Is it part of YOUR group?



When we were exhausted and it was about 4:00, it was time to check our traps again. I had no traps sprung on the "a" side, but had high hopes for the "b" side. Enough time had passed that our odor was likely gone from the traps and it's such a wet environment compared to the "a" side and we found so many more droppings in wet areas than dry. I became very optimistic, too, that we'd catch, among our 50 traps on this side, something besides red-backed voles, which is all anyone has caught so far. Males, females, pregnant females, but all red-backed voles. I really wanted to catch a vole, but enough already!

I had no traps sprung. We had a couple more red-backed voles from the group and that was it.

Actually, Christina is puzzled and becoming concerned that we haven't caught so much as a single mouse. Why could this be? And why do we catch so many fewer animals in the wetter habitat when the deer and hare dropping surveys indicate that that's a popular habitat?