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!