Voles and Ticks and another day in the wet and wild Nova Scotia

My earlier blog about voles and tick was meant to be a joke - like a knock knock joke.

What is a vole ? "A Vole is a mole playing the violin!" smile....and laugh....

How do you know when a tick is around? "You can hear it go 'tick, tick, tick'...please laugh, I need to hear you!

Here's the data and info:

1. Red back voles are common, and found in both the United States and Canada. Voles can not see nor hear its predator. Lives in the thick understory and only eats vegetation around where it lives. It also is a slower creature as compared to a mouse or shrew. The physical difference between a vole and a mouse - voles have shorter tails while the mouse has a longer one that it uses like a rudder ( look this up if you dont know what a rudder is) to escape its predator.

2 Ticks - wood ticks love to burrow itself in something warm, like your hairline and skin and also feeds off blood. It will get "fat" from the blood but wont die from overfeeding itself. Ticks do get as big as a small grape.

You will not believe this but we did a TICK DRAG experiment ! I have never seen an experiment like this - How you ask?
1. We took a blanket, measured and transect the land, 10 meters by 10 meters for its perimeter.

2. Then we took the blanket and dragged it very SLOWLY. Think of it as a tick bus!

3. On a recording sheet, we still had to record how many ticks per drag and the time intervals. Furthermore, we tested the surrounding areas also. Not once but 5 times!

4. For this particular day, we didn't catch any ticks, because once again, ticks do not like cold, wet rainy days, but the day before, after trampling through the forest on a warmer day, we all had to do a tick check before getting on our van. Yes, we did find hitchhiking ticks on us!

Why do a tick drag?

1.Both scientists, Dr. Chris N. and Christina Beushing are aware that there are no scientific data out there on the tick population; this is the beginning of their investigations.

2. Wood Ticks do not carry lyme diesease, but deer ticks do.

3. But the ticks seem to be increasing in its numbers all over and our scientists would like to find more - what's causing the rise of ticks which in turn ends up preying on animals. Think what happens next.

Have you heard of the old saying "A Picture Says a Thousand Words"

Day 3 at Cook's Lake

But, as I mentioned in my other blog, everytime it rains, it creates different types of habitat all around Cook's Lake, we found this today. Mystery picture: Do you know what this is?

Team A once again hit ZERO on our traps for both the forest floor and the meadow floor. Today, Wednesday's weather condition was worse than Tuesday!
I was soaked through my bones! Forgot to pack real rain gear! Good thing I had rain boots, I was getting sucked in the mud by midafternoon after we had cleared some trails.

As a team, we did have 3 catches, 1 squirrel, and 2 voles today.

Yesterdays catch was 3 total.

Out of all these catches, we did have 1 recatch, which meant that one of the male voles went into another teams trap. Interesting isn't it how these voles work.....

Answers to my own questions from yesterday's blog.

1. We shut the traps in the evenings because we do not want to trap any of the meadow shrews because its metabolism is very fast, it needs to eat every 4 hours, and since we don't check the traps every four hours at night, it will die of starvation. If its a bigger shrew it wont be able to escape out of the escape hole on the sides of the traps.
2. The aluminum traps during a nice warm day will become a steaming oven if we dont cover it with the dry grass. Any trapped mammals will just die.

3. Rainy conditions - chances are these creatures are smarter than we think, they do not want to come out of their warmer habitats or their mousie / vole conventions and council meetings please smile at my jokes... UNLESS THEY ARE STARVING and have to search for food.

I do not have questions for you to respond except for the mystery pictures. Go through the previous blogs and see if there are burning questions that I can answer. But if not, i will answer EVERYTHING when I see you on Monday!

Sing your "sun dance" for me, we need the sun or we will drown in this rain and mud!

Onward we go, boys and girls. Till the next time I skype with you all!

MTANG