Heat, squirrels, and swimming holes

What a week it’s been! We finished up the two traplines near Samwel Cave on Friday and were joined on Sunday by Targe Lindsay, a local Palo Alto teacher and Jasper Ridge docent who has been in the Hadly lab over the past several months researching raptor diet using pellets. Targe arrived just in time for a major heat wave to hit the area, with temps between 109-114 deg F during the day (cooling off to 104 deg in our bedroom at night-we switched to a tent!). Luckily, we managed to situate our third trapline right next to a great wading hole in the McCloud River and have been wallowing in the cold water each afternoon before setting our traps for the evening! Fieldwork’s tough, huh?

This trapline was uneventful in terms of the species we caught- the normal overabundance of Peromyscus, with some shrews and squirrels. It was pretty cool to actually capture squirrels in our normal trapline, but man, are they big! Most of the individuals we caught were juveniles, but they were still difficult to handle. Here’s a cute little guy biting my glove! And, a more typical photo of Ariel and I trying to figure out whether one of our captured animals was Peromyscus maniculatus or P. boylii (the big debate of the summer, along with whether Facebook is or is not a time sink).


So, all was fairly typical, with days spent trapping and skinning (here’s Targe starting to make a study skull out of a squirrel we unexpectedly had to euthanize—see below), and nights trying to keep cool.

However, something was disturbing the traps each night, with some of our traps being carried over a hundred feet and visible bite marks on the outside of a few Shermans. The degree of disturbance has been escalating over the past several nights, and yesterday morning we found a Tomahawk trap with a California ground squirrel whose hind right leg had been chewed off. It was horrible to see and horrible to know that our traps inadvertently caused such an injury, so we euthanized the squirrel and decided to pull the traps a day early, since whatever is getting the squirrels knows exactly where to go for a nice meal and is just going to keep hitting the animals in the traps.

So, after another day spent in Redding, on to the next trapline! We will be heading up to (higher) elevation- the top of Hirz Mountain, where there is some Douglas-fir forest. This trapline should finish Monday morning, just in time to be joined by three more people next week- Liz, Uma, and Becca!