Quadrats, surveys, and one chipmunk...

We got up a smidge earlier today to go check the small mammal traps we put out yesterday. We were full of excitement, confident that our traps would catch more traps that Chris anticipated. Of course, we were wrong and either our poor placement or icky human smell kept away all the critters this morning - as all 100 traps were empty. Not even a single "tossed about by a racoon" one. It was a sad realization for us as we walked back to the truck.

"No worries folks!" said Chris and Christina, "we'll do quadrats!" before lunch. So off we set, with four 2 meter tall red and white poles that looked surprizingly like javelins. We set them in a 10 meter by 10 meter square and eagerly crawled on our hands and knees through the field looking for deer poop. So convinced were we that we might miss something, we pushed back grass and peered at the dirt below. Paul shouted excitedly, "I found some poop!" "that's earthworm poop" replied Christina. Turns out we were being a bit more thorough than we needed to be. No deer poop was found, and we pressed on across the field to set another quadrat. Again no poop. And another. No poop. Two more. No poop. Although we had seen deer the day before, we were beginning to doubt that deer existed at all in Nova Scotia. Finally, dejected after our sixth unsuccessful quadrat we walked despondantly towards the other side of the field. "Deer poop!" someone yelled. So in a decidedly non-random way we set up a quadrat with it on the inside corner. But there was no more poop in the 100 square meter area. Were we to have a totally unsuccessful day?