Research at Cook's Lake...

Today turned a little cold and the rain came over in the afternoon, but despite ending up a little wet and bedraggled, we had a productive day of checking mammal traps (set in two locations - grassland and forest), more white-tailed deer scat quadrats (20 in total for our small team - quite a feat for one morning), and some trail-clearing for future team use.

This team is a specialist Earthwatch team: a live from the field teacher team. My ten team mates are all American teachers and hail from a variety of states; amongst them Minnesota, Iowa and California. Each day, as well as fully participating in the project research, they have been updating blogs like this one, feeding information about the project science and research tasksdirectly to their students. They have also been busy creating informative videos, taking thousands of pictures, and skyping live with their classes, in order to hold question and answer sessions about mammals in Nova Scotia and environmental issues. It is an inspiring team to be part of and as I am typing away now, I can hear several live chats going on in various rooms of our base camp/accomodation and the sounds of excited kids chatting away with their teachers.