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!