We're now on our third day of research at our first research site at East Port Medway - not far from the location of the project accommodation. As the weather has steadily improved (from snow storms to strong sun and blue skies in the space of a few days), the team has been bonding over a variety of research tasks.
In pairs, we have been setting up small mammal trapping grids – 100 traps between us in a small area of forested land. We are using Longworth traps, designed and produced in the UK in Oxfordshire. They are expensive things, so we need to set them up carefully and make sure that their locations are well marked so that we don’t lose them in the understorey. We check the traps once in the morning, and again in the late afternoon. So far we have had 10 catches –consisting of red-backed voles, deer mice and 2 feisty chipmunks. Scruffing the captured animals is quite an art – mice are particularly jumpy and energetic and don’t want to be held by a human if at all possible! We need to handle them however in order to measure, weigh, sex and ID them. They are then released back into their territory – exactly where we originally caught them. 6 of the rodents we caught were female – and there has been some evidence of early pregnancies, indicating that the breeding season is now upon us. Chris and Christina the project scientists are interested in monitoring species abundance, location and breeding behaviours, with a view to finding linkages between these factors and climatic/seasonal variation.
Check out this video of one of our team members, Mr Wignall, a teacher at Lionsgate Academy, Crystal, Minnesota, USA, explaining to his class about safely removing a captive rodent from a trap and scruffing it safely:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rstLIRKWm8&feature=channel_page
We have also been spending an almost unhealthy amount of time in the last few days tracking down, studying, identifying and discussing poo! The team has bravely crawled through numerous 10x10m quadrats on hands and knees, collecting every single snowshoe hare dropping in sight. As well as proving a useful way of keeping 10 garrulous teachers entertained, this exercise contributes to an overall assessment of hare population numbers in the area. By counting numbers of droppings per unit area, the scientists are building a stock of data which will ultimately lead to an estimation of hare numbers in the area.
