Wednesday Evening

We are having trouble uploading videos so hopefully we will get it fixed soon!

We had a wonderful day out at the field at Cook's lake. Yesterday we set 100 traps in hopes of catching some small mammals.

The day started out by checking our traps that we set out yesterday. Dr. Christina gave us a short demonstration on how to get a small mammal out of the trap.
Video of Christina going over the directions on how to get a small mammal out of the trap.

We all had high hopes that our traps would be full.
Kim and I had one trap that had been sprung and the door was closed.
Sadly, when we got back to the base camp there was nothing inside. It was just a false alarm.
Out of the 50 traps we caught only 8 rodents. We had 5 redback voles and 3 rock voles.



Once we bring the sprung traps back to the base camp we have to get the animal out. We remove the pieces of the trap and the nesting grass. the animal is in the plastic bag and we gently grab them by the scruff of the neck and hold on carefully. We examine the animal to see what species, what sex and check the reproductive organs.We clip their fur on a certain side to indicate that they have been caught. Then we put them back in the bag to get weighed. Once the information has been recorded we return the trap and the rodent to the same location. It is very important that the rodent be returned to the same area where it was captured as it a territorial animal.

After we checked the traps we headed back to base camp for lunch. The next task for us was to set up some camera traps in various areas. My group set up the camera trap so that we could hopefully catch some deer drinking at the stream. The camera works on infra red and a motion sensor. when an animal walks by it will trigger the camera to take a picture.

When we returned we worked on deer dropping counts. We created a grid 10 meters by 10 meters. Then we lined up on one of the lines and walked the grid looking for deer droppings. We were not too successful and only found droppings on the last grid. Not very good statistics for 8 grids.

The next task was to check the traps one more time. Once again Kim and I were very excited as we thought we had caught a critter in our trap. The team caught a total of 10 rodents in the afternoon.
Video of opening the trap.