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

new home in halifax

was supposed to be posted a while ago, but internet failed. 

 

So I was in tatamagouche doing fieldwork with Jordi, and we escaped for an afternoon to pugwash to see the tallships: 

jake thought it was pretty rad. and then there was canoe jostling, which was pretty hilarious:

our new home, escaped the crazyiness of the last one. this is temporary until september when I'm finally moving in with laura who is beyond rad.

apple and flax seed pancakes to break-in the new kitchen. good times.

 

pretty sweet backyard, jake has been enjoying it. I was only able to hangout here for 3 days before leaving for newfoundland - a 10 day trip. 

xx

PEI fieldwork

Went to PEI for some field work. We were there to collect DNA samples for one girl's project which is comparing maternity colonies across the maritimes.

 Beach by Stanhope where we camped, Dalvay National Park

 

 bat from the 1st colony sampled - an alopecia bat - missing fur from her chest.

We sampled two maternity colonies:

• 1st colony: caught 10 bats - 4 pulled from the attic and the rest from the mist net set up outside. Had a few adult females, but mostly juveniles - males and females. 
• 2nd colony: very cool colony! in an amazing house that was 110 years old, some cool hippies lived there with a few musical instruments. We caught about 9 bats in the attic and 6 from the net outside. Turns out that there were 3 northern long-eared bats in the attic! this is very cool since they are a tree roosting species! and what is even cooler is that one of them was a juvenile that was very young and couldn't even fly yet! this is rare to see since they are usually in tree roosts at that age which we can't access. this little guy was 4.7 grams - and the adults are around 7-8 grams, so yeah, he was a little tiny adorable bat with huge ears, beyond cute. 
• it is hypothesized that since PEI has been completely logged, there are no mature stands of forests, so the northern long-eared bats which rely on old trees for their roosts have no where to roost - and thus are forced to use attics and man-made structures

 an awesome campground we stayed at, just overlooking the river where it met with the ocean.

 jake had a blast, as usual. but it was a tough trip, and much of it was spent in a car which sucked, so I felt pretty bad for him, although he did get to run around here a bit.

 leaving PEI - after all that I've heard of it - I cannot say I love the place... it's flat, there are farms...

Back in Tatamagouche - trapping at a property by earltown lake, quite a pretty spot:

We only caught two bats - one was in the bat box, so that was easy to catch. The other flew into our net near midnight when we were just taking them down. She appeared to have some odd scarring/sores:

 bump along tip of uropatagium

scars along the edges of her ears.

she went into torpor very fast while we handled her, and after trying to warm her up for over an hour, we placed her in a bat box near where she was caught, and hopefully she takes off tonight. both bats we caught, octavia and petri, are radiotagged and will be followed for the next (hopefully) 10 days.

back to halifax on august 1st, meeting up with a friend for breakfast (I met her in BC and she showed me how to make pierogies and we saw lemuria and living with lions play!), then food not bombs, then who knows.

newfoundland on the 4th!

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

- alicia

new projects

Morning sun coming up, two bright stars are actually planets - mars and jupiter or something..

stranded without a place to stay, so we went to malagash. at the beach with Laura and Jake.

at the farm there are some cliff swallows that like to hangout:

one of the bats we had caught, male northern long-earred, some scarring on the wing.

new project! near parrsborro, working with amanda to trap at a proposed wind farm site (around 20 turbines or so).
at the campsite - brought the wrong fly for the tent and it was raining, make shift tarping for the win.

 some views from the study site:

 blueberry fields everywhere

there were some orphaned mice we cared for, a farmer had set a trap which killed the mom. unfortunately they didnt make it, but lived for about 5 days. it was too cold and kitten formula was all we had available to us.

bat detectors deployed,

in the lower left corner, this device records bat calls as they forage along forest edges.

harp traps were used to catch bats here, since we were trapping in the forest:

they are basically metal frames with fishing wire. the bats hit the wire and fall into the bag below.
this project was cut short because the project was cancelled. there are moose in the area, and these are endangered in most of nova scotia, so DNR (department of natural resources) came in and said they required a two year moose study before the project could go ahead.

next site: a proposed wind turbine site, but this time only for 3 turbines. we stayed at cariboo provincial park, it was absolutely beautiful.

surprise, jake in the water

next project:
trapping a maternity colony by river hebert. turned out there were no bats. we just got eaten alive by mosquitos (and I mean this, it was terrible - at one point I look down, and not only are my arms and hands covered in mosquitos, but three land on my finger at the same time.)
on the plus side, we were able to go to the fossil cliffs in joggins:

summary of the week long/three projects: 6 nights of trapping, 2 bats captured :(

then a few days off back in halifax:
jake is excited to sleep in a bed again!

my favorite jake face

bike ride to long lake and a hike:

and I found a place to sublet for august, and it has a fenced in backyard and no other dogs! things are looking up, aside from feeling lost all the time.
-alicia