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"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" - Thoreau

Thursday, 16 August 2012

Newfoundland - pt2

Arrived at Salmonier Nature Park, a truly beautiful place. This is where I do my research for the little brown sociality questions.
caribou pair and their calf from the spring - pretty big now!
bat houses at a close by property that we were trapping... this is the tarping method... invasive but great when you need to catch a lot of bats.
last bat being processed - taking a hair sample for isotope analysis. released at 4:05am, concluding a long night of processing 90 bats.
harp trap set up by maternity colonies in bat houses - works well, relatively unstressful.
after 6 nights of trapping, we ended up tagging 226 new bats: 77 lactating adult females, 18 non-reproductive females, 2 reproductive adult males, 61 juvenile females and 68 juvenile males. out of the 240 we tagged in may, we ended up only recapturing 14 adult females... meaning the population there is huge!
one night after trapping I stayed up to monitor the bats around the boxes and make sure the equipment was working properly.
and I had the coolest morning... ever.
I checked the boxes hourly to see if there were bats inside or flying around. at 5am there were so many bats flying around and I almost got hit in the head quite a few times.
after that I was too stoked to sleep, so I walked the trail of the park in the early morning fog:
lynx stalking me as I walked by - ready to pounce. the two lynx at the park are from fur farms. really sad.
eagles watching for fish in the stream - a juvenile and adult.
isabella the moose, raised at the centre, now about 3 years old.
minks playing in the stream.
a gray jay - first time seeing them was at this park. they are very habituated to humans here, but very curious of course, since they are part of the corvidae family.

Melanie, an animal care person from the park, had some time off and took me hiking with her the day before I left. we went to a little town called brigus, which was cute and tiny. then off to madrock, which was beautiful but it was pouring so we left. rain let up as we were driving back so we made a stop at the east coast trail and hiked along there for some time.
winston, a pretty nobel dog:)
and through the fog a barely visible island exists where puffins breed. the puffin babies are called pufflings, doesn't get much cuter.
back in halifax for a couple days, unexpected trip to cape breton on monday. this just doesn't stop. will miss the open mic on monday and the one starting up on wednesday... so that sucks, was really looking forward to that. 
rat school tonight and a show tomorrow, so things are still good.
decided to stop wasting my time with people. keeping in touch with old friends, and the new awesome ones, so priorities are in check.
found out I may be presenting a poster on my project at the bat conference later in the fall... in puerto rico!  
now to bike home in the rain,
alicia
xx

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