Learning the Squirrely Ropes...

(Dated 16-20 April) Not sure how long this is going to be, it just depends on how long it takes before we get internet again…So it could be a long one (but you should be used to that). The first Monday we got up late again and spent the morning learning how to work the traps and fixing busted ones. There’s a little lever at the front that you can press and open the door, then you attach a hook to keep the door open. The hook is attached to a treadle at the back of the trap, so when you push down on that, the hook slips lose and the door shuts. We put peanut butter on the pedal and at the back of the trap beyond it, so that the squirrel will come in, eat the peanut butter on the treadle and then trigger the door shutting as it tries to get to the peanut butter at the back. They shouldn’t harm the animal, although Jeff emphasized that we have to check them a lot when they’re open so that they don’t get overexposed. After lunch we took all the traps out to the field, as well as some flags and stakes, which we use to put in a grid on the field site so that when you see a squirrel and its burrow, you can pinpoint exactly where it is on the grid (they run with letters and numbers, so it’s like A1, but every number is in 10m segments so then you have to say at which metre, like A.5 3.9 etc). That afternoon Jeff and Jessica started measuring and laying out the grid and Kaitlin and I “scoped” the field to try and spot the squirrels as they emerged. It was pretty tedious, since you have to go slowly and stop to scan with your binoculars occasionally, and I didn’t know what I was looking for so I didn’t know how carefully I had to be looking. At one point Kaitlin called us on our walkie-talkies saying that she had seen a squirrel, but by the time we got over there to see what it looked like, it had disappeared! Grr The only thing interesting about the scoping was that the area that I was in had a lot of old cow bones (they graze cattle here at some point in the summer, which is obvious by the amount of thawed-out cow piles everywhere, plus the sheep and deer are around too, so there’s just lots of scat everywhere…). I identified several leg bones (a femur and a tibia right next to each other) and part of a pelvic bone, plus other arm and leg bones and a vertebrae. It would have been pretty cold out, except that it was really sunny that day and a lot of the snow had melted (the icicles on the roof of the kitchen dripped in the morning and were gone by the time we finished checking traps and left for the sites). It was amazing how much difference the sun made, and most of the snow on the ground and the trees had vanished, only drifts remaining. Here are some of the mountains that you can see from the field site and the camp area when the sun is out.

Tuesday, though, it was a lot colder and occasionally snowing, but it didn’t stick much more than just a few sparkles and frost on the grass. I got stuck scoping again, which was very chilly because you have to go so slowly, and I still hadn’t seen a squirrel yet so it felt kind of useless. There was also a huge flock of robins on the hill and I kept seeing them move and thinking they were squirrels, with a frustrating leap of excitement that I had finally seen a squirrel. Then we switched jobs and I got to work on gridding, which was a lot warmer since you have to climb up and down the hills and move the transect tape around and stick flags in the right spots, so you end up walking the same tracks multiple times, which makes you toasty. We still hadn’t seen a squirrel by the afternoon, and Jeff took us back in the truck to warm up a little bit before some of us went out again. I actually ended up checking some more traps and cooking dinner instead of heading out, but I think they only saw one more squirrel after that (no sign of the first one, either), so I didn’t miss too much. We have a decent amount of food, but it takes some time to figure out what to do with it all, and there’s a limit of recipes available (you can’t look anything up on the internet, etc). I made vegetable soup, with potatoes, celery, carrots, onions, and a few lentils, and then Irish soda bread to go with it, which was a bit of an experiment, since I didn’t know if the baking soda was still good, and we didn’t have any buttermilk, so I had to improvise some milk mixed with vinegar, except I didn’t know the proportion, so it came out a bit vinegary, but it was actually fine, since it was a more savory version than normal. It rose fine and was pretty good, especially if you put it in the soup, where it became sort of dumpling things. Everybody was happy, it was definitely a good day for soup, and I was glad because I was the first one to cook for everyone (the night before we all worked together to make rice, beans, and cooked onions with grated cheese). Here’s a picture of the kitchen, so you can see that you don’t have too much room to cook, but we still have a fair amount of equipment.

There’s a few more people here now, working on another ground squirrel project run by a guy named Steve, who is the person we may be checking in with over the summer in the field if we have problems, since Jeff is going to leave us in a few weeks and will only be around via phone/skype (assuming the internet works well enough). There’s also Ross (who went to school in Seattle but I’m not sure where he’s from originally) and Ana (who’s German, and vegetarian, which made me feel better about avoiding red meat) who are working on Steve’s crew. (Anne Marie, who’s Dutch, and Nanadeen, who’s from India, are also working on Steve’s project. There’s also Peter, who’s from Switzerland and is in charge of yet another ground squirrel project, and his field assistant Charline, who’s from France. Don’t remember when they arrived but it was several days later than this original post). After dinner on Tuesday we went into a nearby town (Black Diamond) to use the internet at the same bar/horse race place that we had been to on Saturday. We got a few soft drinks and enjoyed finally checking up on emails and communicating with people for the first time in a few days (that’s obviously when I posted the last blog post). Wednesday we got up early again (like Tuesday) and went out to the field to continue looking for squirrels (the default activity for the duration of the summer, except when we’re trapping the squirrels). I was actually on grid-making for the whole day, since it was pretty nice and Jeff and Kaitlin saw a few squirrels right off the bat, so then they had to set up their traps and monitor them. It was still cool, though, because I got to finally see a squirrel on the hillside (after Kaitlin saw it while scoping). It looks a lot like the Stanford ground squirrels, except a lot smaller and more reddish, especially its face and underside, while the back is the same sort of mottled beige/yellow/grey as the dried grass. As we see more squirrels out and about I’ll try to get a picture (of one pre-dying, and post-dying, too). After you see the squirrel, you have to watch it and also walk towards it so you can hopefully see where it goes down into the ground. Then you walk up to the hole (hopefully there aren’t more than one) and position the traps at the opening so that the squirrel has no choice but to wander into a trap the next time it comes up (and also because it hopefully is attracted by the peanut butter). We have to check the traps pretty regularly and keep meticulous track of when they’re open and closed so we don’t accidentally trap an animal for too long. Wednesday we caught 3 total squirrels in the traps, so we started learning how to process the squirrel. We watched Jeff the first two times and then he helped us do it ourselves (I didn’t do any until Thursday, since you only do the squirrels you set traps for). This is what the hibernating burrows look like (they’re called “hibernacula,” good old Latin…).

Once you have a squirrel, you put your pillowcase over the trap (it calms them down), get out your trapping materials (scale, ear tags if you need them, databook, dye and brush), and mix your hair dye (this is literally women’s Clairol “pearl black” hair dye, which apparently is the gentlest on the squirrels, although you can’t let it sit for too long before making a new batch or it may start to burn the skin). Then you can start processing the squirrel. First you look in the trap and see if there’s anything wrong with the squirrel (it’s very unlikely that it will get damaged from the trap, but just in case we have some antibiotic cream to put on any cuts that we think we caused) and you also check to see if it already has a dye mark and ear tags (hopefully the ear tags are still on, at least for adults, since they monitor the population every year and the tags should stay on). Then you weigh the pillowcase, get the squirrel out of the trap and into the pillowcase, and then weigh the squirrel in the bag. Then you have to do a complicated manoeuvre where you hold the squirrel through the bag (its nose and head should be in one corner, although sometimes they like to squirm) and work the bag up and around the squirrel so that you can see a portion of the fur. You have to work your way up the squirrel only exposing small bits of fur at a time (and keeping hold of the squirrel) until you find its ear tags, which is pretty tricky because its ear and its eye are really close together and you don’t want its eyes to be exposed because it will probably freak out and squirm away from the bag. After the ear tags, you reposition the squirrel and the bag so you can check its reproductive status (the males come out of hibernation first and then wait around until the females emerge so they can be the first to mate, so we don’t know what females look like yet) and tell how many flakes it has (these bits of dandruff, I guess, that the squirrels get from hibernation, so it tells you how long the squirrel has been emerged from hibernation, if there are still a lot than its only been a few days, if there are very few flakes or none then it’s been out for a lot longer). The flake data also helps you give a confidence rating to the squirrel, which just means how confident you are that the squirrel you caught is the squirrel that you saw earlier, and that when you saw it was actually the day that it emerged (so if you saw a squirrel but couldn’t trap it, and then a few days later you saw another squirrel in the same location, and then you catch one a day later, you may not know which squirrel you caught but if one is super flaky you can maybe figure it out). Anyway you have to list how confident you are in the emergence date, which is the most important piece of information at the moment, since that’s what the project is focusing on. After that, you flip the squirrel around so you can see its back, and give it a big letter marking with the hair-dye and brush, preferably so that you can tell that it’s been marked from a distance through your binoculars. Then you let it go pointing away from you, usually towards its burrow, and it runs off, displaying its newly letter-marked back as it leaves. So anyway, that is the basic idea of what we are doing at the moment with the squirrels, it gets more complicated once we start getting females and then eventually baby squirrels (I hope they’re super cute)! Wednesday we just watched Jeff do two and then Kaitlin got to do one of hers, so here are some pictures of Jeff handling the squirrel (in the pillowcase) and Kaitlin drawing on the “C,” and a shot of the release.

Thursday Jessica and I did scoping and trapping while Jeff and Kaitlin finished up the grid. We still hadn’t caught the first squirrel we saw, which was on a ridge that had a lot of confusing vegetation and there were several burrow holes that Kaitlin had seen him use, so I had to set up the traps there. This is what a box-plot looks like, where you position the traps around the hibernaculum so that they have no choice but to go into a trap.

I also saw a squirrel out on the edge of our grid, so then I got to see where he went down and place my traps at the burrow. I saw another squirrel around there but when I looked closely I realized that it was Bartholemew, the “B” squirrel we had caught the day before. I’ve started to name them in my head, so for Wednesday we got Albert, Bartholemew (Jeff actually named that one, which cracked us all up), and Charlie. As I was scoping around and checking the traps, I caught the elusive squirrel on the hill, and got to process him (with Jeff’s help), so he became Ernest. Then I caught my other squirrel that I had noticed earlier, and he became Frank (I’m going on the improv model of using the first name that comes to my head, but that one worked out kind of nice). So though we only saw a few new squirrels that day after a lot of scoping, it was cool for me because I got to trap and process two squirrels. The next day we were all caught up on trapping every squirrel we’d seen, so we had to start finding new ones. It’s a little bit trickier now because we have some squirrels out that are marked, so if we see one we have to carefully walk around and see if we can see its back so that we know whether or not it’s actually a new squirrel or not. Anyway it was pretty slow going, but then we saw some, and Jeff found some too (Kaitlin had a day off so it was just the three of us out there). I saw one on this slope that proved to be finicky, since I saw him and then lost track of him. Then I set traps for a few that Jeff saw, and one of them caught a squirrel and became Gerald. It was super super windy out, to the point where I had difficulty keeping my balance on the slopes as I was walking, and also annoying because the wind and the sun were not necessarily pointing in the same direction, so either you were facing into the sun or the wind, which made scoping more unpleasant (it’s been pretty warm the last few days, and it hasn’t snowed since earlier in the week). The bighorn sheep have been wandering into the plots a lot more. Mostly it’s just the females and a few lambs (they females and males travel separately) but I think that day I saw a male for the first time, which had these epic, verily “big” horns curling around its head, although I was trying to check traps so I didn’t get a picture of it (our trapping bag is kind of heavy, so I haven’t been taking my big bag around, hence the lack of pictures when I’m out busy). I did get a few pics of the females on a day when I was gridding, so you can see their slightly smaller horns and the cute fluffy lambs (well, they’re more like teenagers, I guess).

I think I’ll end the post here, since that seems like a long enough one for starters...