6/17/14

Fixed point telemetry, to determine home range

Foggy Rinconada in the early morning

I've been performing field work in Rinconada for the last few days to practice techniques for my research at Fray Jorge National Park. The thing about field work is that you never know what you'll encounter. Driving in the truck in Rinconada is truly like riding the Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland, and I'm not exaggerating at all. During the ride we were able to see lots of native wildlife, like coruros (a pretty ugly but somehow cute subterranean rodent-look it up!), Chimango caracaras (spanish: tiuque), Black-chested Buzzard-Eagles, Harris's Hawk, striped woodpecker, long-tailed meadow lark (spanish: loica), and I was surprised by an Elegant Racer! I recommend Katie Carroll's blog http://atacamalove.blogspot.com/ for some excellent high quality wildlife pictures! 

A view of the Andes in Rinconada

We started exploring the mountain and when we looked back down into the valley there was my brilliant advisor Dr. Loren Hayes herding hundreds of sheep! Turns out a big part of burrow trapping degus in Rinconada is making sure the sheep don't walk through our area, crushing or traps or scaring degus. We all had a chance to herd the sheep- they are so cute!

My favorite were the the Blackface sheep, but I didn't get a good picture of any of those.

And I finally trapped and handled some degus! Some were feistier than others, but that's good practice since I hear the degus in Fray Jorge will be much wilder than Rinconada degus. This is likely because they have not been trapped or handled as much as the Rinconada degus. 

You can see in the pictures that degus form "runways" between the burrow openings in each system. Degu social groups use multiple systems, where they will sleep together at night, but during the day may travel to burrow systems that are not there own. We open traps early in the morning so we can be sure that the degus we trap just emerged from the burrow system they were sleeping in. Fun fact: we can not use peanut butter to bait traps because degus, unlike other animals, are very susceptible to diabetes so we use oats instead. They are studied to understand why they are less successful at controlling blood sugar levels.

For my project, I will trap degus (including the pups when they begin emerging!) and assign radio collars to individuals. If you know how small my hands are then you will understand  how tiny these collars are! Degus are a lot smaller than they appear in pictures. I will radio track animals to burrow systems to figure out the social groups, and then I will know how many pups are produced in groups of various sizes.