Degu Power

Trapping has been going very well- except that the sun is rising earlier and earlier so we will have to get up earlier and earlier. We're still waking up around 6 because I can't bear to set an alarm in the 5am hour. That will happen this week though. My new assistant is here! I'll have to do a little profile on him next if he lets me. His name is Matias and so far he has been doing a great job! More importantly he has a lot of movies and tv shows on a hard drive so we have new stuff to watch at night! We watched American Psycho the other night and he and Katie had nightmares about it. We watched Pitch Perfect with Juan- he said he couldn't fall asleep that night because he kept laughing about the movie. We even got Megan to watch it and she never watches movies with us! We're still quoting lines from the movie. One day we thought he was lost hiking up to the forest so Katie and I drove up to find him. The guardaparque told us he had already started hiking back down but it wasn't a waste because I got to see the ocean of clouds! 

We also saw the ocean from the forest on one of Matias' first days in the park.

As you have probably heard from Facebook. Little Jorge the hummingbird died. He was doing very well but I doubt his wing would ever get better. On very cold days he would go into torpor and then it would get really hot again in the house, so maybe his body was just very stressed. 

In more positive animal news....Nubz survived another fox attack! She's invincible. Matias found her in a trap and clearly a fox had been digging all around her. She was unscathed except for a small cut on her ear. What a badass. We are going to stay out by the traps in the mornings to scare foxes away. 

I've still been finding new degus while I'm focusing my trapping efforts. I have around 75 burrow systems tagged- a social group of degus will use around 2-5 burrow systems to sleep and rear young. So it is important I find all the burrow systems a group may use so that I can trap their pups in September/October. I have enough traps for around 40 burrow systems. We have found some very pregnant females lately and I can't wait to see the pups! They do not emerge until about 30 days after being born, and no females are lactating yet so I still have weeks until I will be able to hold one of the little guys.