Mammals of Nova Scotia with Caroline

Back on home soil...

2009-04-29T10:09:00.009+01:00

Wow - finally made it back to the UK after a gruelling (and rather obscenely delayed) flight from Halifax. I am jetlagged and slightly bewildered having rejoined the 'real world' again, but happy to be back to see friends and family again. What an experience though! I miss the team a lot - all of the jokes and banter, the daily excitement as to what might be lurking in our traps, the crazy, ever-changing Nova Scotian weather, the daily 'tick-count' after wrestling our way through the forest for hours on end...and most of all, scientists Chris and Christina (pictured checking the trap above). They were truly superb and made the experience what it was - something never to be forgotten.

The other picture is of our team on the last day. We are posing by a rock in the seaside adjunct of Kejimikujik National Park, having completed our mammal transects there. It was a beautiful day - bright blue skies, strong sunshine - what an end to the expedition! We saw deer and seals in the park, and the coastal scenary was fabulous. Ah, what I'd give to be back there now...

Drowned rats...

2009-04-23T22:48:00.001+01:00

As you can see from this photo, two days of rain has culminated in a huge amount of water-logging of the Cook's Lake research area...necessitating a great deal of wading to reach our mammal trapping site this morning! That said, at least the rain had stopped...and no, we didn't end up drowning any rodents thankfully - no, unfortunately the whole team were drowned rats at the end of Wednesday!!

As the weather cleared today, we checked our Cook's Lake traps for the last time. Sadly because of the rain, we haven't been successful in trapping any rodents in the meadows, but had a little more success in the forested area. Our contribution to Chris and Christina's long term monitoring of the Cook's Lake area yielded the following distribution and abundance results:

Red-Backed Voles per ha = 6.7
Chipmunks = 1 caught
No mice/no meadow voles or shrews caught

Numbers were lower than the scientists would have expected, but the heavy rains will definitely have skewed results.

The second picture shows me preparing a Longworth trap - to do this correctly, the two sections of the trap should be separated, fresh, dry hay/grass inserted into the main body of the trap until it's at least half full and in order that the rodents are comfortable and warm during their stay; and a small palm-full of bird/mouse-feed put inside. The tunnel should then be attached at a slight angle (creating a 'banana shape') and the trap set carefully (back end higher up), located in an area where one might expect rodents to be lurking - i.e. near obvious mice-holes, feeding areas at the foot of trees, or alongside logs or objects rodents would run along to take cover. There is no point in setting traps in the open as rodents rarely take the risk of running in open ground...

Research at Cook's Lake...

2009-04-21T22:29:00.003+01:00

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.

Hard work, not in vain...

2009-04-21T03:36:00.003+01:00

So we're starting a new week of research work, having concluded our research at the East Port Medway site. In our studies of abundance and distribution, early findings for this team are as follows:

- Red-backed vole: average of 10 per 2 hectares
- Deer mice: at least 3 in 2 hectares

- Chipmunks: 2 found on a 2 hectare plot

Overall density of small mammals = 10.5 per hectare (this is at the low end of the scale but we are early in the year – Chris Newman (lead scientist) would however have expected the numbers to be higher than this at this time of year, but weather has been harsh and food supplies will be low right now. The next couple of weeks are going to prove critical for these creatures otherwise we could have a potential population crash in Nova Scotia relatively soon which could have all sorts of knock-on effects for the foodchains within this fragile forest ecosystem.

Surveys of snowshoe hare droppings have so far indicated that population numbers are healthy in the East Port Medway area; and deer dropping sightings have been significantly down on 2008 so far.

We laid out new small mammal trapping grids in both forest and meadow locations at another, long-term study site today - Cooks Lake. Let the fun commence once more!

Measuring quadrats in East Port Medway

2009-04-17T19:40:00.002+01:00

Research at East Port Medway

2009-04-17T19:24:00.002+01:00

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.

First Research Day

2009-04-14T12:43:00.002+01:00

Weather's looking ok this morning - at least no snow storms. We're off to set our first round of mammal traps today at East Port Medway - the first research site. We'll also be starting a 'mouse timidity' experiement lead by Chris.
Bacon and eggs sizzling away in the background as I type...

Ready for take-off!

2009-04-11T15:35:00.004+01:00

It's the afternoon of Saturday 11th, and after two solid days of preparation, I think I'm ready for my trip to Canada - well, almost!!

Test

2009-04-03T19:50:00.001+01:00

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