Like I stated in the post previous to this… I’ve had quite a busy week. Play by play- go!
Monday- birthday. Set up traps. Wore a t-shirt with wolves on it. Had a root beer float without the root beer. Did some “spool tracking” where you glue a spool of thread to a chipmunk to see where he went for 180 meters. Our assignment for the week is to write a report on how chipmunks spend their time- on woody debris, near woody debris, or far from woody debris. yes, very exciting. Then at night, we did “powder tracking” where little mice were dusted with this neon powder and ran around the forest and we used UV lights to see where they ran. Super fun.
Tuesday- Learned about bat roosts and picked out a potential site. Later that night, at sundown, we went to the site to see the bats come out. However, it was raining and turns out, bats don’t really like the rain. So we saw some little beady eyes watching us, but they didn’t feel like eating that night. We checked traps at a bog and got a least chipmunk- the first ever to be caught by students at camp. She was pretty cute!!
Wednesday- Checked traps in tag alder (eye poker). One whole line of traps was broken because of… A BEAR. The little traps were smashed and the doors were pulled off. Our teammates saw big momma bear’s poo, and then two little cub’s poo. Who would have thought bears would go through so much hassle for a couple of sunflower seeds? We caught a meadow jumping mouse at the site- adorable. Kind of looked like my old hamster, Hammie (I miss Hammie!!).
Then we checked traps at the northern hardwood grid and got like 7 chipmunks and a gray squirrel. We all got to handle a chipmunk- weigh it, tag it, sex it and talk about how adorable it is. After that we did some telemetry exercises. Telemetry is using radio frequencies to locate a radio collar. Its actually kind of difficult. I finally figured out how to do it right and then had to do this long trig equation to find my real estimate of my collar’s location.
We checked traps again at the mixed conifer grid and caught a red back vole- who was quite angry to be caught and bit one of my teammates. Then we put up mist nets for bats- they’re basically just very fine nets set up where the bats are likely to fly and hopefully you catch a couple and you can take different measurements or give them a radio collar. Sadly, we didn’t catch any in our nets, but we did get to sit around and watch them forage above us. We used a device called an Anabat that picks up their echolocation frequencies. Turns out, there are a lot of bats up here!
Thursday- We used a computer program to look at the frequencies picked up by the Anabats. Different bats have different frequencies and patterns so you could tell the species that were picked up. Then we played “telemetry tag” where three teams hid 2 collars and then tried to find the collars hidden by the other team. Whoever found the most wins. My team found 0. Oops. And again, we checked more traps and only caught one chipmunk.
Last night I also did a little Kayaking and really enjoyed it… even though I may have come close to accidentally tipping the thing over.
Today we’re basically just writing our paper about chipmunks. Tonight I’m signed up to the camp’s high ropes course- so it better stop raining.
And I’ll be home in t-minus 8 days!!!
