Hello

Sorry I havent updated in so long. For those of you who dont know I am HOME!!!!

I got back a week and a half ago and brought a special surprise for my husband- a new kitten! His name is now Sprocket and he is hilarious. Duece met him yesterday and was unimpressed! At least he didnt try to kill him. Sprocket however has been following Duece around the house growling and hissing at him.

I will probably stop updating the blog since I am no longer 'on the go'

I hope everyone has a great school year, work year, relax year or whatever!

Thanks for following the blog

This is the little man while he was still living at the shelter

Still at the shelter- he's much bigger now!

Friday, August 7th

Today we caught 3 chipmunks and 2 golden mantle ground squirrels. We let one golden go because he was a part of another study. We ran the chips and went to get the golden out. Thats about when he escaped and pulled a flying ground squirrel act. He made it behind the cabinets in the lab and we had to set traps in the lab and go eat dinner, waiting for him to go in the trap again. He got recaptured and we are running him right now, its 930 at night and hes not even done! We've been in this lab since 8am.

Anyways I thought I'd share a couple of pictures illustrating just how much of a research town this is. Like I said the squirrel we caught today was already ear tagged and dye marked so we let him go. Its like every animal near camp is a study participant!

This is a Yellow Bellied Marmot- a momma marmot. She heard a noise and ran to this rock to check it out.

This is what she's worried about- baby marmot

Baby marmot copying momma

And this is how you know she's in a study... No, Marmots do not naturally have a number stained on their backs! This little lady is number 3!

Thursday, August 6th

ONLY ONE MORE WEEK!!

Today was quite boring. It rained last night and was raining this morning when we headed out. The Prius wasn't handling the muddy road up to the pikas and we didnt feel like falling off of a cliff so we got rained out. We set up in the lab and Dr. Wilson trapped a chipmunk that we ran all day, snore.

Crested Butte is the wildflower capitol of Colorado. We have been seeing A TON of wildflowers and since I am so absolutely bored all of the time I thought I should take some pictures of the beautiful blooms and share them with you all. This has given me something to do at least- I spent several hours today trying to figure out what kind of flowers they are!

I hope you enjoy:

Columbine- I think this is the state flower?

Nodding Groundsel

Scarlet Paintbrush- I love these!

This is a Fleabane, I'm not sure which one though

Kings Crown- very cool!

Tuesday, August 4th

Today Dr. Wilson informed me that we will be leaving a WEEK EARLY!!!! I will be driving back August 13th!

You cannot even understand how happy I am about this. I do not recommend leaving home for 7 weeks to anyone EVER. Its a bad idea, period.

Anyway we caught 2 more young pikas today. They are so mellow, I got to touch one a couple of times and their fur is so soft, even their little feet are fuzzy!

Here is a video of a couple of baby pikas running around on the rocks. They are so agile.

Monday, August 3rd

Today we went out to trap pikas. We didnt catch anything till about 1pm. We caught a juvenile pika and ran him through the program. Thankfully he was ok! We were worried about them because they're a little sensitive.

The only issue with these pikas is that they live up on these rocky slopes where the rocks have slid off the mountain and they usually live above 10,000 feet. We hiked up and down that darn cliff 5 times today! I have thighs like a beast! The bigger rocks are usually pretty stable but all of the smaller ones shift when you step on them, I twisted my ankle and knee several times today, I was hopind Id get to break my left one and come home!! No dice.

To all of you who are dying from the heat of August... I touched snow on Sunday... SNOW! It is right near where we are doing our research, I could touch it every day if I wanted, ha!

Dr. Wilson up the rocks where we set traps

Can you see the pika?

Heres a baby pika, soo freaking cute!

Adult pika

Our baby pika in the pika chamber.

ps the pika in the second picture is perched on a darker gray rock just right of the center of the picture!

Saturday, August 1st

Today we drove from Moran, WY to Gothic, CO. The total drive was supposed to be 12 hours but I have no idea how long it actually took us. I stopped in Grand Junction for about an hour and a half and got pulled over so I think I made pretty good time considering. (no ticket!)

I got to watch the sun rise in Wyoming and watch it set in Colorado. The drive was spectacular, I took some awesome pictures, Utah was very pretty also.

Gothic is a research town filled with all sorts of freakish biologists. We have our own rooms in a four room cabin. We are currently sharing it with some lady and a guy is supposed to come too. It is VERY small, we were so spoiled at the last place! Also it does not have a real toilet but an indoor port-o-poty type thing. Just basically a huge hole in the ground, its absolutely revolting but at least we have our own indoor outhouse... others have to use the one outside along with everyone else. Also we have our own shower which is nice cause other people have to hike over to the community one.

We will be searching for pikas soon, I cant wait to see one!

Sunrise leaving Grand Teton

This is in the morning in Wyoming

I believe this is in Utah, so pretty.

I think Utah still, correct me if I'm wrong. You could see for miles!

Those are not our cabins, those are million dollar houses but this is Mt Crested Butte, right next to where we're staying now.

Wednesday, July 29th

Yesterday and today were kindof sad and difficult. We had a couple of chipmunks not make it through the night last night and that is always really hard. Today we ran the other two on the remaining temperatures that they didnt run on yesterday and let them go. We also picked up forty of our traps from one site since we hadn't caught anything there in awhile. We are beginning to clean up our stuff and get ready to move on saturday. We are going to Gothic, a research station in Colorado near Crested Butte. There we will study Golden Mantle Ground Squirrels and Pikas among others.

Sadly we only have complete data from four Chipmunks when we were supposed to have finished 12 during this trip. Tomorrow we have the possibility of running four more but that still only puts us at eight total.

I just watched a fox run by the screen door and try to pounce on a ground squirrel outside. He missed and took off toward the front of the lodge for more... I dont know if he caught one but saw him trot off into the woods. When I went to see if he caught anything I looked up to a buck and a doe eating the bushes in front of the lodge... I will miss that, the wild side of this lodge... so cool! Thats about the only thing I'll miss aside from the mountains.

Oh, I am deathly afraid of bats and yesterday I successfully moved a baby bat from the floor of the great room outside. I am very proud of the fact that I would even try! I got pictures on my cell phone!

Here are a couple of pictures of the chipmunks we've been working on:

Least Chipmunk in the Chamber

Least in a trap

Little Least Chipmunk in another Chamber

This is a picture that was taken while we were up at yellowstone. This is a Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel. Lots of people confuse them with chipmunks. We will be studying them in Colorado. Isn't he cute!

Friday, July 24th

Wednesday we had the morning and afternoon off and set traps around 5 in the deep woods... like deep yucky so many mosquitoes you cant see the trap in front of you woods. Oh and of course I didnt remember exactly where we were trapping and mistook it for a different place that was mostly grassy so I wore yoga pants and sandals. Ya, wont be doing that again.

I am posting a couple of pictures that Dr. Wilson took of me and the bear on Monday.

Thursday we caught one Chipmunk and one Ground Squirrel (we needed one more since the fourth chamber broke the other day). We processed them which didnt take too long but sucked because of all of the flies and horse flies, and then we came back for an interesting lecture on invasive plant species.

Today, Friday, we went out and checked the traps this morning but found only a vole and a few unwanted ground squirrels so we're back at camp until we go to check and close the traps at 11.

Me with my little ground squirrel friend, tempted to be near me since a part of my peanut butter sandwich crust was near my leg!

Here is a picture of the bear that Dr. Wilson got. I thought it was a pretty good shot!

Monday, July 20th

Today we started off badly with the computer crashing right off! Yesterday it crashed 5 times! That set us back almost 2 hours yesterday, today it only crashed the one time. After about 20mins the fourth air flow meter started freaking out and couldn't regulate itself. We didnt know how to fix it so one little squirrel got off easy after only 20 mins in the chamber! That leaves us down one squirrel but I'm sure we'll catch another while looking for chipmunks anyways. P.S. the fact that we got to skip the fourth chamber made us get done more than two hours early!! Yeah, We needed it!

The weather was good today (yesterday it poured) and we had a fairly uneventful day till right at the end...

So there I was doing some yoga, Dr. Wilson was in the car watching Star Trek or something. I was in a balancing pose where you focus straight ahead and stand on one leg when I heard a branch snap to my left. I looked and saw a pair of deer ears from the back, pretty average considering we're in front of a river and have seen deer all week. I glanced up to see what the deer was looking at and saw a brown blob, this blob didnt look like a rusty pine tree... too thick. The blob started moving about and I realized it was a bear... a grizzly bear!

We had been waiting to see one and the ranger warned us it was in the area plus someone saw it near us on Saturday so we were prepared. I ran back and got Dr. Wilson cause he'd never seen one either. It wasnt more than a few years old, fairly small for a grizzly apparently but HUGE to me! The crazy thing is that it can disappear in the willows or pine so well that it pops up right near you and you dont even see or hear it! We watched it for a couple of minutes and then it climbed our hill and disappeared in the pines next to us. We didnt see it again, pretty exciting!

This is from yesterday in the pouring rain! I loved it, very refreshing and cool.

I call him... camo squirrel

Isn't it pretty here?

My bear scrounging for grubs in the willows. By the way the willows are like 6 feet tall, they cover my head so you could imagine how the bear would move through them without being seen.

The Griz on the prowl. You can tell its a grizzly because of that hump on his back, black bears dont have the hump.

Mom, Dad, and Jessie... just so you know we DO have bear spray which can sometimes work on Grizzlies. Also I am quicker and more nimble than Dr. Wilson so I think I could out run him. Lastly I learned that Grizzlies don't climb trees... but I do and I think I could climb pretty fast if needed!

Day 6, Saturday

Today was very long! We got up at 6 and got to our trapping spot at 7:30, that began our whole day of sitting outside in the same spot and checking a machine every 20 mins. By whole day I mean WHOLE DAY... we got back to camp at 8:30.

Needless to say I'm a little tired. We got four Uinta Ground Squirrels done today so we are 1/3 of the way done with this species.

Tomorrow is a repeat of today so I will post if anything interesting happens... if not just imagine I copied and pasted today's blog!

Me with a very big female, we let her go cause she might be pregnant!

She thought she might just chew her way out! (the one we let go again)

This little guy was not so lucky... he's in the chamber about to go in for a long day of metabolic testing... I feel bad for them but I know they're ok because we saw one today that we caught yesterday (she had an ear tag) and she was fine!

Day 5, Friday

Today was well... interesting!

We got up at 6am which was semi hard considering some people were partying late and I had to go ask them to shut it! (nicely of course) and then a Pine Marten was running around on the roof and walls and scared the bejesus out of me when it landed on the outside of the wall right next to my head and I thought it was in the room! ps... the walls here are not insulated since they're real old school cabins so its very loud!

Anyways today we tried out a real field day trapping Uinta Ground Squirrels. We had good luck and caught four within an hour and a half (we can only run four in our machine at a time). The program takes 9 hours to run so after driving (one hour each way), setting traps, setting up, and evaluating the animals its a whole days work.

Dr. Wilson didnt get the O2 calibrated right and we didnt figure out that we even had a problem until 3pm which ment we had to scrap the whole days work and start over tomorrow :( semi frustrating but oh well!

We plan to try again tomorrow, the bright side is that we are parked in front of a beautiful river where we saw several animals today!

This is a Pine Marten, I didnt take this picture, but thought I'd show it. I know he looks cute but he is a predator! They're rarely seen, they are very sneaky!

Ground squirrel dangerously close to our trap!

Me and all of the crap! We set up the metabolic chamber in the back of the prius... if it looks confusing thats because it is!

Deer crossing the river

Bald Eagle!

Day 4, Thursday

Today was quite boring... we couldn't go set traps because we wouldn't have been able to make it back in time to meet this lady Dr. Wilson needed to talk to about trapping inside the park.

So we traveled to Jackson again to go to Kmart... exciting... then back to the cabin (ps I'm staying in a cabin, no ac/heat and it gets COLD but its live-able minus the bats, mosquitoes, and mice!)

We hung out around the cabin a bit and headed off to a bbq and seminar on glaciers in the national park... yawn!

The one cool thing that did happen today was that I saw my first MOOSE! It was pretty awesome and much faster and more agile than I expected!

Our Moose sighting, he came, he ate, he ran from a semi making a lot of noise!

Day 3, Wednesday

Ok so I am trying to get this post put in before dark... last night I was run out of the library by dive-bombing bats! They came like three inches from my face and got worse when I went outside to make a phone call! 

Today we set out to search for chipmunks on some roads that led outside the park. So far no one can tell us where the good populations of chippys are outside of the park, its been frustrating! Dr. Wilson wants to talk to this lady about maybe letting us just trap around the research center where there arent any tourists and where we have seen the chips... she is coming here for a seminar tomorrow so we'll see how that goes.

We climbed a mountain and saw nothing and drove around and saw nothing again! Hank, the guy that runs the center showed us a couple of places to go and we went to check one out... there was a sign posted that said it was a frequented area by bears! AHH, I have heard too many stories about the bears people have been seeing!

Here are the pictures for today!

Those are Elk grazing in a feild, last night a bear chased them all down but didn't catch any. I didnt see it but two people from our cabin did. This is not very close to our cabin.

This is a pronghorn without its horns! Very beautiful guys

The illusive Least Chipmunk! This is what we're looking for. This guy was on the trail up to the library, unfortunately we cannot trap him since he is living inside of the park.

We found some scratches on the trees near our cabin from bear claws. Thankfully they were not fresh! This is Dr. Wilson for those of you who don't know him.

This red fox was blocking our way to the cabin on the road. He is a little mangy and usually more red than this but very pretty. The people that live here said he hangs out a lot around the center and is not easily spooked!

Day 2, Tuesday

Today we went into Moose and Jackson to visit with some of the head rangers which was extremely uneventful. We also got our groceries for the week and ate some fast food... YUM!

After lunch we headed out of the park to find some trapping sites for Chipmunks. We didnt see a single little chipmunk guy but a LOT of ground squirrels!

Pretty much another uneventful day!

P.S. as I'm sitting here I can hear the bats talking to each other in the next room, ugh! They FREAK me out!

This is a pic of a bunch of burnt up trees from some fires here while ago

While looking for chipmunks we came along a lot of these Richardson's Ground Squirrels and thought we'd try our luck at catching one! No dice

A picture of the mountains from in front of a lake