Voles!!

Tuesday June 5th
Written by Paul Bonazzi

The morning began with checking the traps in the new location we has set up yesterday. Over half of the fifty field traps were busted open - probably by raccoons. The raccoons go after the meat. We set them back up, this time without the meat, and headed to check the forest traps. The forest traps yielded better results - we caught two small mammals - both red-backed voles.

Red-backed voles are small rodents that don’t have good hearing or vision, and often freeze completely still when they see predators. For these reasons they often become prey for several carnivores: including foxes, weasel, bobcat, coyote, owls, and raptors. One might wonder; how do they survive as a species? The answer is they reproduce often they rely on protection from the underground, and loose fitting skin that allows them to turn around when caught and bite their predators on the nose. The skin of their tail will break off if a predator grabs it. It will not grow back, so it can be a sign of how many close calls a red-backed vole has had with death.

After lunch we were each given a camera trap and given the choice of where we wanted to set it up. I took my camera trap to the back of the fire pond. The fire pond was created as a source of water for fire crews to use to prevent fires from spreading. I put the camera in an area where bobcat scat had previously been found. On Thursday I will check the pictures of the animals that were taken there.

We finished up the day by clearing a trail, and then we checked the small mammal traps before we left. Nothing had been captured. Only two more days left with our research at Cook’s lake. We will be able to see our immediate results, but this is a long-term research site and our team (the first team) is setting the baseline data onto which future teams will add.