Scat Track Fever is Signing Off!

Group Scat Track Fever is feeling fantastic! Tired, but fantastic!  Today we made some minor adjustments to our journal and we completed our powerpoint.  As usual, our teamwork was terrific and we each took different sections of strength and then pulled it all together into a completed powerpoint.

We finished developing our activity for our presentation.  Hopefully it will be fun and educational for everybody else to have the opportunity to try making a cast, and then think about what animal print they have.  It is an activity that could easily be used in any educational setting.

Speaking of that, it was very helpful to consider how to use tracking and our research in general in the classroom.  Tracking is very exciting for students and it's easier to do than trying to find actual animals in the wild.  Also, it was exciting and hopeful to realize that tracking could be tied to state standards.  There is definitely room for environmental education in the traditional classroom!

We really do feel like the data we collected, specifically the mammals in multiple habitats and direction of travel, demonstrates that all three habitats are important to a multitude of creatures.  Hopefully individuals will realize this and work to conserve these precious spaces.

It has been a joy working together and learning more about the land we share with these wild creatures.

Scat Track Fever is signing off!

The Finish is in Sight

Today has been long!  We have been completing our binder the whole day, stuck inside while the sun shines and minutes tick away.  Although, we have been able to derive interesting information from our results during this time.

We ended up finding 13 species, they are as follows: Coyote, moose, deer, bobcat, porcupine, mole, meadow vole, peromyscus, turkey, gray squirrel, red squirrel, gray fox and house cat.  The transition transect was the most widely used out of the three (farm, transition and woods).  The turkey was the most abundant species overall, followed by coyote and deer.  There were several species that used more than one habitat area, including: coyote, moose, porcupine, and deer which was found in all three habitats.  

What was most interesting to us was that the majority of the species were found to be traveling southwest towards the farm.  Deer spent an equal amount of time traveling towards the farm and directly away from the farm.  

This information demonstrates that all three habitats are important to a number of species.  In fact many species depend on more than one of these habitats.  The fact that animals were often found moving towards the farm, illustrates that mammals are moving to the farm most likely as a food source.  Clearly it is important to preserve farmland, woodland and the transition area in between for the health and happiness for the wildlife that calls these habitats home.

Now, we are tired and wish to go outside.  It is hard to ask fifteen environmental educators to sit inside and type all day!  Whew!  

Cat Food + Heat + Water + Time= Nauseous Researchers

Monday, July 28 brought a clear, bright pleasant morning. Team Scat Track Fever met at nine in the Morrill computer cluster and then ventured forth to the Warren Farm for our last day of data collection. Lizzy drove us once again in her white Subaru. Conversation among the team members was light and cheery, except for Matt who kept quiet due to him nursing a benedryl and Zyrtec hangover from a severe Sunday evening allergy attack. We arrived at the farm and immediately walked the "fringe" and "woodland" transect lines to see if anything exciting was left over from the weekend. The transects were wetter than any previous day in the last two weeks. Any sign that was left over the weekend was surely wiped clean from the torrential rain fall over the weekend. We only found two deer tracks that we believe were left early this morning after the rain had stopped.

Our attention then turned to the soot traps. We hustled out of the woods as swarms of mosquitoes and deer flies swarmed Leah. They like Leah. Leah doesn't like bug spray. Leah prefers the "bug dance" to deet. The rest of us prefer deet. The brisk walk woke up Matt and he immediately headed to the large soot trap placed at the 50 meter mark by a large birch tree on the farm transect. As Matt neared the trap, he noticed something wasn't right. The grasses and shrubs were high and as he bent low to dig through the weeds it hit him. The smell of the soot trap felt as though he was trapped at the bottom of a fraternity house dumpster, awash with filth and foul debris.

The visceral reaction to the wretched smell was to immediately gag and Matt's eyes began to well with tears. He powered on, not wanting to show weakness to his teammates. As he carried the trap to the open the team cries rang out. "My god! What is that smell!" Vicki exclaimed. "Yuck" Lizzy said in gross understatement. "Arrrgh", Gasp. Gasp. "Arrrgh" Leah began dry heaving. As Matt placed the trap down, vile, disgusting roach-like beetles swarmed out of the trap and scurried for safety. They were covered in a creamy white substance that smelled of a rich, organic composted vomit. The ocean white fish tuna used for bait had chemically transformed into a slurry of slimy sludge writhing with beetles and maggots. It was a horror show of stench and visual disgust so profound that we spent the better part of the next hour scrubbing our hands, washing our faces and flooding the traps with high pressure water. Collecting data was far from our minds.

After the air cleared and Leah stopped dry heaving we headed back to campus to continue working on our data analysis and presentation. It will take time to heal from the morning insult to the senses, but we must if we hope to venture out again. Perhaps the wet nose of a puppy dog or the bright colors of a butterfly will help us heal. Only time will tell.



For the unsqueamish, feel free to check out our short, unprofessional clip of the sludge and maggots that greeted us in our mammal trap. If you can view it in full screen, it will be easier to see. Be grateful that you can't smell what you're seeing!

Poetry, Peer editing and Protocol

Class met at our old stomping ground today; Murkland Hall. Lara started us off with a wonderful workshop on poetry that was invigorating for some, calming for others. After we had explored some poetic structures and hints, as well as listened to Lara read several poems with an emphasis in "memorable places," class disbanded for some private poetry-writing time.

Once we reconvened, several brave and talented classmates, (and equally-talented instructor, Eleanor), shared their poems with the class. Appreciating the creativity around us and sharing warm thoughts on what our peers had written was a great way to start the day. Of personal mention to Group Scat Track Fever is Matt's cheeky and clever poem which he was inspired to write after reading an exerpt from David Carroll's "The Year of the Turtle." He and Lizzy had previously expressed their mutual "passionate disgust for his molestation of large turtles," as Carroll had described an afternoon he spent physically man-handling huge turtles in order to get a closer look at them. Matt has so graciously allowed us to share his awesome work with the world:

"Let Me Sun Myself"
by Matthew Moore

I read "The Year of the Turtle"
And thought it was fertile
with love and respect
for the pond.
but then as I read,
I became full of dread.
Carroll's harassment of turtles
was really quite hurtful.
He loved them so much,
Now they're dead.


Matt's poem was a great source of comic relief during the workshop, and definitely struck a chord with many of us as to the similar feelings we had after reading Carroll's work. Thank you for letting us post it here, Matt!

After poetry we moved right on to the "peer editing" portion of the day. Each of us, having brought in an updated copy of the personal pedagogies we'd writen, was paired with a classmate with whom the instructors saw both an educational similarity and thought-provoking difference. We spent the next two hours adding comments to our peers' papers, while enjoying lunch by ourselves or in small groups. Before the entire class met up at our usual computer lab, the pairs joined up again to discuss in-depth whatetver praise, suggestions and/or constructive critisism they had to offer one another.

It was right around lunch time, when we were each head-long into our roles as editors, when a conspicuous alarm canvassed the entire UNH campus. "A voice from God," (as Matt likes to call it), began announcing that there was a "Severe weather warning! Seek shelter immediately!" It was really a mega loudspeaker calling out to us over the terrential downpours. It rained at least a few inches in a matter of hours. As the class had a schedule to keep to, which required most of us to travel outdoors despite the terrible weather, we EE'ers left the intoxicating aroma of thoroughly damp student resonating through Morrill Hall.

We Track Scatters used our final 3 hours of class to make great headway on the project binder we will hand in at the time of presentation. On Monday we will return one last time to the Warren Farm for a final walk amongst our beloved transects, that we may gather the final prints, soot trap data, and hopefully some pictures of wildlife captured over the weekend. We are very grateful to Mr. Warren for all his hospitality and good nature in letting us explore his property. It has been a terrific experience. Certainly on Monday we hope to have the chance to tell him how much it has meant. Hopefully, too, we will come back with the final bits of good news as to mammal signs.

A Little Help From My...Friend.

Today began with worries of rain, but a change of plans helped ease our fears. Dan agreed to meet with us at 11:00 instead of 1:00, keeping us out of potential storms that were supposed to hit in the later afternoon.

We arrived at the farm at 10:30, and took a quick peek at our camera. Unfortunately, we were unable to capture any wildlife…again. So, we turned to the cornfields, where Mr. Warren told us a porcupine’s life was taken the night before, due to the fact that they were ruining his corn crop. Needless to say, we found the little critter and I will leave it at that. A prettier sight in that corn field region, however, was a gorgeous leopard frog who didn't seem too scared of us. Check out his picture!

Not long after these sightings did Dan arrive. He joined us on a walk into the transition transect, where we were glad to find that the prints we cast yesterday were in fact coyote! We also found some ground squirrel and grey fox prints! We also found that the scat originally believed to be grey fox, in the transition corridor, was actually toad scat! When dissected, it was riddled with ant anatomy; which Dan said was a sure sign of toad origin. Once the transition transect had been walked, we ventured deeper into the forested landscape towards the woodland transect. Here we found little change from the previous day; just a few prints outside of our study area.

Our last study of the day was the farm transect. Here, Dan was able to identify the uplifted Earth as an actual mole tunnel, as we expected. We sent him a photo of the supposed grey fox scat, but it turned out to also be from a toad. Darn you toads! Along this transect we did discover evidence of browsed vegetation by deer, as well as vole scat, which helped improve our data. To finish up the day, we got help in re-applying soot on the track traps. Then we purchased some contact paper and laid the bait out; peanut butter on the small mammal soot trap, and juicy tuna cat food on the larger animal soot trap. We then re-set the camera, and cleaned up a bit.

Overall it was a very productive field day, now we have to start piecing all of our information together in a coherent fashion.

Where Am I?! Oh, now I know.

Here is the map of our project site! Enjoy!!

Thank You Mr. Coyote

This morning we were greeted by sunshine as we made our way over to the Warren Farm. We really hoped that there would be more for us to see today than there was after the washout yesterday. Just as we pulled into the parking lot there was a family of turkeys with at least a dozen babies. They flew up into the trees as we tried to get a picture. It was wonderful to finally see some of the wildlife that we had been tracking.
After that, we got off to a "sluggish" start. When we checked our small mammal soot trap we found a bunch of slugs enjoying a little peanut butter snack. While it was a funny discovery, we were disappointed to find no mammal sign, as we were really hoping to prove presence of mouse on the farmland.
In general the farm transect has proved to be the most trying. That's why we all were really excited when Leah called out that she had found some poop! After doing some measurements, and Vicki identifying the strong dog smell of the scat, we think that we have determined it to be Gray Fox. We took some pictures so we are hoping that Dan can help us certify our discovery tomorrow. We also found a tunnel that appeared to be made by a mole. So while we only found two things, they were two exciting and new things, so we were happy as we headed into the woods.
We were in for a real treat as we took our first steps onto our fringe transect. There were coyote prints galore! We feared that we might have been tricked by Eleanor's dog Raven, but we found a Raven print and it was obviously different from the coyote print. Raven has more spread out, longer toes with long nails and the coyote print was more oblong and showing only two short claws, if any. A look up the transect 10 meters further supported our coyote theory. There was a large pile of scat and some serious digging had been done where we buried some pork fat. Of course, all of this action took place exactly where we had the camera over the weekend, before we moved it deeper into the woods yesterday. Nonetheless, there was obvious coyote presence on the fringe and we were able to get a great collection of coyote track casts. For a moment we thought that we had finally found some small mammal tracks, but it turned out to be from a frog. However, we did find another piece of scat that looked exactly like the one we found on the farm transect. Again, we believe it to be gray fox.
After searching for sign in the fringe, we battled the swarms of mosquitoes as we hiked to our woods transect. We were very surprised to see that no animals were tempted by the ocean whitefish/tuna and peanut butter feast we had prepared. Our soot trap had not been touched and we had no wildlife pictures on the camera. However, a coyote was kind enough to leave his scat just inside of our transect, so we have more coyote presence. There was also a new deer track to be recorded.
Since the greatest amount of presence by far has been at the fringe, we decided to move the camera back to that location. Hopefully the coyote will decide to return to the same place he found a yummy dinner last time, and this time he can enjoy ocean whitefish and tuna while our camera snaps a shot of him in action!
We again tried to re-soot our traps, but again we found no success. The foil wouldn't change color, and the metal was being distorted. Since we haven't had much luck with the traps in general so far, and because we didn't want to ruin Dan's traps, we decided not to put them out today.
Dan returns to us tomorrow, and it would be great for him to help us find some more animal sign on our farm transect. Overall, we feel good about all of the sign we have found and the casts we have made so far, and if tomorrow proves to be successful with Dan we should be all done with our data collection 24 hours from now!

When it rains, it pours!

So the weekend weather wasn't particularly kind to us; though we hoped for some rain to muddy up the corridors, creating great substrate for animal tracks, we got a bit more than we bargained for! It rained every day over the weekend, and even rained this morning. We're not talking a light drizzle, either, but rather, side-swiping, large-drop showers, and even hail.

Nevertheless, we were all very excited to check out if we'd caught anything on motion-sensor camera, or with our soot-traps. When we arrived to the Warren farm, we could see that the corridors we'd measured out were pretty flooded, just as we'd expected. Most animal prints that may have accumulated while we were gone were lost to the watery landscape. However, we were fortunate enough to come across some great finds anyway, including several clear moose prints and some coyote scat just off the pathway. Our soot traps yeilded mixed results; though we were disappointed to see that the wind and rain had wiped away most evidence of animal tracks, the small mammal trap did have obvious scratch marks and scat deposits which indicated mouse activity. Leah even later found a clump of brownish fur near the trap, givng further evidence that our bait had been taken by a field or jumping mouse. The large mammal trap was a bit less successful - there were no definite prints to be seen, and the bait seemed untouched.

Next, we traipsed along, accompanied by Lara, in exploration of the farmland and woodland transects we'd measured out. The woodland area was where we had the greatest success today, locating the scat and moose prints. The farmland area soil, however, soaked up all the rain, making it very difficult to find any signs of mammal presence. We spent so long scrutinizing that particular corridor that when we finally came up for air, it was already time for lunch! We parted ways with Lara and concocted a game plan:

Driving to the nearby Market Basket grocery store, we decided to buy a few items to help us reset the soot traps. Dan had suggested using a blowtorch or other powerful flame device to procure the sootiness. He mentioned that using a candle would also provide good, but slow, results, and encouraged us to experiment with other methods as we saw fit. As supply-deficient poor graduate students, we opted to try the flame abilities of a good old sterno, and rather than contact paper as the sooty-paw print collector, we selected a classic notepad of plain white paper. Lizzy had heard that bait-wise, fishy smelling catfood was very effective, so we bought a few tins of that. To entice the small mammals, we also bought peanut butter.

Back at the Warren farm, where it was already raining again, we headed under a canopy to test the soot-producing abilities of our sterno. Well, we spent more than a few minutes trying to gather soot that way, but to no avail. With limited other materials at hand, we decided to experiment with another option: mud, rather than soot. The small mammal trap was baited with peanut butter and "sooted" with mud. For the larger trap we wanted to try using a blow torch, so Lizzy called her boss at the Thompson School Green House, who agreed to let us use his. Matt and Lizzy took the trap over there while Leah and Vicki stayed to reposition the motion-sensor camera. Over the weekend, the camera gathered only six photos, and while we were extremely hopeful that even just one of them would boast a shot of wildlife, the only pictures it caught were of other class members!

Shortly after the camera was set in a hopeful location of the woodland corridor, Matt and Lizzy arrived back with an unsooted trap and a very interesting story... apparently Matt lit up the blow torch and began heating the foil to accumulate soot, when, after just ten seconds of success, flames engulfed the entire apparatus, including Matt's hand! The only utterance Matt could find within himself were the repeated words, "bad, bad, bad," in a completely monotone voice. Looking at Lizzy for guidance, which he got, in the form of her frantic pointing outside, Matt marched the flaming device out of the green house and doused it in a puddle. He is ok, though! His flaming hand lost mass amounts of hair, but apparently the two group members who witnessed the fiery debachle thought it was hilarious.

In light of the blow torch incident, team Scat Track Fever decided to adopt the mud method for the large mammal trap also. For bait we left a delicious-smelling combination of ocean whitefish/tuna catfood and cheap peanut butter, to attract both herbivorous and carnivorous mammals. We left both traps in what we determined to be high-traffic mammal areas, turned our motion-sensor camera on, gathered up our things, and headed back to the computer classroom to begin compiling our data. We hope that when we return tomorrow, our camera and traps will have more to tell than they did today! Also, if the rain wouldn't mind holding out for a few more days, we would be most appreciative :)

A Pork Filled Day

We are the dream team, and we plan on living up to our name.

It all began with a common interest to learn more about the animal population in the woods we have been exploring during the Summer Institute of our Environmental Education graduate program at UNH. We are interested in examining how various mammals use three different habitats - managed farm land, woodland, and the fringe area in between - and how/if the present species are moving between these habitats. In order to accomplish this goal, we are using a variety of methods including locating mammal tracks, examining scat, setting up mud and soot traps, and utilizing a motion-sensor camera. When we see signs of mammals, we take pictures and/or make molds of the tracks we see. We are noting track/scat size, stride length, direction, medium in which we found the track, weather, date, and time. Once we collect all of our data we can identify which animals prefer which habitats, and therefore determine the importance of maintaining these different habitats in the interest of biodiversity.

Our success thus far has been surprisingly great! Yesterday we had the privilege of working with Dan Gardoqui again, who is a master at tracking animals and noticing the nuances of the woods. He was able to show us things we never would have even looked for before, like mice and chipmunk tracks. While these were very cute and important in their own right, we also ran into signs of larger mammals, as well. We saw two separate coyote scat samples, moose prints, and our biggest find... bobcat tracks!

Not only did Dan give us great advice and hands-on learning, but he also gave us insight about our project goal. Initially we wanted to investigate corridors and how heavily different ones were used. However, Dan informed us that corridors are difficult to find outside of winter. So instead we are looking at absence and presence of different mammals in three different habitats, which should turn out to be a very interesting and exciting study. It's all part of the research process, and we are definitely learning a ton along the way.

We accomplished a lot today. First of all, we knew we wanted to set up our soot traps before the weekend, so we needed bait. We looked for the dead woodchuck on Main Street, but it was no longer there. Our quest for roadkill on Route 4 was also unsuccessful, so we made a pit-stop at Market Basket where the butcher was kind enough to donate leftover pork fat to us. Let's hope that attracts some cool creatures!

Now that our question was clearly defined, we decided to set up our line transects. We did one each on the farmland, in the fringe, and deeper in the woods. We measured them out, found their direction, got GPS points at the start and end, and set up soot traps next to them. We also hauled water from the farm out to all of our transects to wet down the mud and left some of our meat there in hopes of getting new, clearly defined, tracks by Monday. Finally, we set up the motion-sensor camera and left meat around the area it is covering. It would be fantastic to snag a shot of something chewing on our bait over the weekend.

After all that work our time was up, so we stopped by the vegetable stand to let the farmer's wife know about our traps, and then we left our study site for the long weekend. We are all really looking forward to what we will find there when we come back in three days!