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?