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.