Hare Poo, Mice, and Beaver... Oh My!

What We Did Today:
1. Checked our Small Mammal Traps!
Yesterday, our group put out 100 Longworth Aluminum Mouse Traps, baited with grain/seed. Once this morning and again this afternoon we had to check our line of traps (each group has 20). We had 6 of 100 traps this morning that were sprung. Out of those, 3 of them had critters in them and 3 were false traps (the big donut).

When you have a critter, it is hopefully a deer or white footed mouse, but sometimes it can be a vole or a chipmunk. The mice are the animal that we take our data on, so we hope to catch as many mice as we can.

First Step: Place the trap in the bag, reach in with your bare arm to dismantle the trap by taking out all the hay and pine needles. Hopefully a critter pops out!
Second Step: Corner the beast and grab it by its scruff (between the shoulder blades). It has no feeling in this fur and you can pinch it fairly hard. If you don't, there are good chances it will turn around and bite you, it will hurt, and you'll drop him. Not good for research.





Third Step: Weigh it. If it's a mouse, record if it's male or female, pregnant or not, and adult or kid.






Fourth Step: Create a mark/check for a mark. We'll figure out population numbers with the Mark & Recapture Method we had used in class. How we mark the mice is to take a scissors and just cut a small swipe of guard hair on the right back leg of the mouse. Other teams this summer will mark different areas of the mouses body, so as to know what team had marked it.

Fifth Step: Put it through a Timidity Trap...... aka "The Mouse Scrambler". Tuesday between trapping, our groups made mouse mazes. Before we let them go, we'll put them through the maze. The hypothesis is that the mice around right now represent the carrying capacity of mice. These mice are the ones wise and smart enough to survive winter and they're all adults. So, they should be smarter than mice caught this summer - when they're juveniles and not as wise to the world yet. To test this hypothesis, scientists chose to challenge them through a maze and time how long it takes to go through. Crazy?? Maybe, but we're seeing if it will work..

Sixth Step: Time it through the maze and let it escape out in the same location you trapped it at.











2. "Finding Snowshoe Hare Poo in a Haystack."
With the varying temperatures during the last several winters, there is an interest on the amount of snowshoe hares (not rabbits) there are. They're hard to see and even harder to catch, so we have to go with secondary data..... that means we need to look at poo.
Similar to random sampling, we made a drive through the woods on our hands and knees inside a 10 meter x 10 meter quandrat and picked up.... you guessed it..... smart pills, Nova Scotia gum balls, Fecal Jaw Breakers.... Hare Poo. We got quite a bit. Looks a lot like a big ziploc of CoCo Pebbles Cereal... we made sure not to confuse this bag with our lunch (which followed shortly after this endeavor).



LUNCH: Food always tastes better outside!















3. Mammal Sign Hike.
During the afternoon, small groups of us took a 3-4 mile hike through the woods looking for mammal sign. The goal was to document as many different signs we found and also how many. Sign can be actual observations, beaver cuts/dams/poo, scat, porcupine chew marks, & hair.
What are mammal are these signs off?
































What We'll Do Tomorrow:
1. Check Mouse Traps again - morning & evening.
2. Deer Dropping Counts
3. Field Sign Transects


For YOU...
1. Why do we study the mouse population on Nova Scotia as potential bio-indicators of climate change? (many correct answers... this is a complicated one. Do your best!)

2. Imagine our teams catch 50 mice and mark them. Next week, we catch 30 mice and 20 have a small "haircut" marking. How many mice are there? (Use Mark & Recapture Method!)


3. Which ones are the mouse, vole, and chipmunk?





Tuesday's Picks:
1. Why do you guess we set up the traps with the tunnel slightly pointed downward and the nesting box up higher? If it rained. If it rained and the nesting box was lower than the tunnel, the water would sit in the hay - water's NOT very insulating. Mice get cold. Mice die.

2. What is this hole for in the nesting box?
The hole in the nesting box is for shrews. Shrews are not what we're studying and they're also very small critters. The shrews can crawl out that small hole and escape. They'll otherwise die if they don't eat every 4 hours.


Looking Forward to Tomorrow & See you soon!
Love your comments! Keep them coming!
KVWH