Busy Days

It has been a while since I have posted about the goings on here at the field station. The third session of classes began on Monday, July 1st. Well, technically for my class, classes started that Sunday evening. Ever since then, we have been working pretty much non-stop from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm. As a reminder the class I am currently taking is Conservation Biology. It is not what I was expecting, but it is still fun (when I am not being eaten alive) and educational. On the Monday, my class went out to the Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge to setup pitfall traps and Sherman traps in the hopes of catching small mammals. However, since it is so hot outside, they protocols require that our trapping only take place at night, when it is cooler. Because of this, every night we meet at 7:00 pm to head to the study site, bait the traps, and return to the field station. Then every morning, at 8:10 am, we go back out to the traps to see if we caught anything. The first day we checked the traps was Tuesday morning. We had caught a fowler's toad and american toad in one of our pitfall traps along with many arachnids, and in the Sherman traps we caught a white-footed mouse. Just top give you a sense on the study site, there are two pitfall traps and fifty Sherman traps. Out of those fifty Sherman traps, only one actual caught something. That's the name of the game in conservation though. Then, this morning, we went to check the traps again after having re-baited them the night prior. We had caught nothing but arachnids in any of our traps. Fortunately, arachnids are not the focus of this class, and so my undiagnosed arachnophobia is not being bothered too much. However, my professor said he would give me a dollar for every second I caught keep my hand at the bottom of the bucket of arachnids. Now, I may have considered this proposal Tuesday morning, but by Wednesday morning, their were two massive wolf spiders that joined the party and one of them was brooding eggs. So, no, I did not put my hand in the bucket of arachnids.

Tonight we set the traps one last time, and upon inspecting them in the morning tomorrow, we will clean them up as well.

Along with the traps, we also set up cameras around the study site. I am hoping we can get some nice pictures to use later.

We have to create this field notebook, using word or powerpoint, that catalogs the species we are seeing. It can be any combination of plants, insects, animals, etc., in any proportion, as long as there are 100 species. And we already asked, and no, we are not allowed to use domesticated dogs and humans.

Yesterday, we got a few good species to use in the field notebook when we went seining at Savage Neck Dunes Natural Area Preserve. Pictures will be posted soon.

Tomorrow, we will also be kayaking.