A new "Bitey"

There’s been a lot I wanted to share but I’ve been too busy with work or fun and/or lazy in my free time to write another blog post. But this week something happened that I didn’t expect ~ one of the cute little mice bit me! Through a plastic bag and a latex glove! Of course it is always a possibility an animal will bite you but I thought we had these ones handled pretty well. This one just happened to be WILD! He was too much for the field assistants to handle so I tried to get him scruffed so they could ear tag him and then BAM he got me! There’s always a few animals you work with that are just crazier than others, and I often refer to them affectionately as “Bitey”. There was a narrow-headed gartersnake I worked with at the Phoenix Zoo’s Conservation Center that we named Bitey. There was a degu or two over the years that I wrote down as “Bitey” and now we have this guy.

A little juvenile mouse or "juvie" as we call them

But really, what else have I been doing? We’ve been radio-tracking 6 mice. Some days are easier than others ~ on hard days it might take us awhile to locate an animal. One we couldn’t find for 2 days, but she could have just been sleeping in a weird place. Today I was having troubles tracking a little lady mouse- she wasn’t in her usual spot. The signal was very strong but I couldn’t quite pinpoint where she was around this tree off one of our trapping lines. I looked at the tree and I noticed some nestlet material in a little hidey hole. We put these cotton nestlets in the traps with the bait so any animal caught in the trap can make a little nest with it. So I see the nestlets and I’m thinking she’s in there, and then I see a little ear tag! I could see her sleeping face in the hole, she was so sweet. I was shocked she didn’t wake up while I was taking pictures of her. But right before I left to track the next animal she had moved further in and all I could see was her tail!

If you look closely you can see her shiny ear tag, and her cute little face

Trackin' some mice ~ the antenna kinda blends into the background

I’ve adjusted to life here and a lot of the things that used to freak me out don’t anymore. Rides in the gators don’t seem as treacherous now, although we haven’t been going to the sites that were the scariest. We’ll be back there in about a week. Some parts still feel like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, only not in the fun way. For a bit I had a strong fear of seeing a rattlesnake at the field site. Every few steps I would be certain I saw one, and really it was just the pattern of the brush on the ground. It’s no wonder they have the pattern they do here because they would blend right into leaves on the ground. Which sucks for the humans that might step on one on accident (I know, not very likely). But seriously my mind was playing major tricks on me for awhile.

For fun we’ve gone to the lake (with hot pink inner tubes). I went to a SF Giants vs AZ Dbacks game which was AMAZING! We lost but I still loved being at that ballpark on the bay for the afternoon. We found a local bar that does weekly trivia nights which if you know me you know I LOVE IT. A few of the rounds that we’ve crushed so far have been Science, Broadway, and Netflix Originals. Sometimes we do well at the Current Events round, and sometimes we flop. So far the Golden Girls are a team we see there regularly, but they suck. 

Fun at the lake

The beer wall at Green River Brewery, where we do trivia. You have a little card that measures how much you take and you're running total. Awesome for me because I can have little amounts of different beers I want to try!

Last but not least, an update on research. Trapping has been going well, although for my dissertation I really need to be trapping and collaring juvenile mice, and running behavior trials on them. I want to see how behavior and testosterone levels might be related to their dispersal patterns/tendencies. We've caught only a few juveniles and they were too small to collar in the first round, so I'm hoping in about 2 weeks they will be big enough to collar for the second round of tracking. In another part of my dissertation I'll be looking at food availability and diets of the mice, so for that I need to measure insect abundance at their site. My field assistants and I will be digging 36 holes to bury 36 little containers into the ground. When I open the containers at night they will act as traps so I can collect insects that fall into them, and identify them in the lab back in NM. 

Little juvie has no idea what is going on. Don't worry, this is how you weigh many rodents and it doesn't hurt them!

My pitfall trap

We babysat for our neighbors kids and this is all I could come up with during arts and crafts. Pebo stands for Peromyscus boylii (the brush mouse). The flowers represent ear tags 😂

Firefighters have been out around us doing preventative burning I think??? It was mild at first and then the other day I drove through a more intense one. They shuttle all the traffic through the area. I wanted to take a video of it because it looked so crazy....and then I felt the heat when I drove by it!!! You hear my reaction...

One week in

5/21/18 ~10am
It's been one week since I arrived at my field site and so far I've caught....1 mouse. And it was the mouse that was visiting our kitchen every night. I released the little thing down the road and hopefully he/she won't come back....although my advisor thinks it is probably the same one that we removed in March. Food webs are interesting; I don't want mice in the house that may carry hantavirus, but do I want a snake (rattlesnake or otherwise) hanging around the house eating the mice? Decisions, decisions. When I visited the site last September there was a rattlesnake living on our front steps and obviously kept mice from ransacking our kitchen.

We weren't trapping this last week, but we were getting everything ready for our field season. One thing I had to do was Gator training. We drive John Deere Gators around the reserve. They all have their own names and their own quirks. I think we mainly use Princess, because she is the biggest Gator and seats 4 people. Others include Eleanor, Fran, Crystal, Abigail and Doris. I'm not making this up, they each have one of those CA novelty license plate souvenirs with their name on it.

I think this is Eleanor...before she had a flat

Princess

In other fun news, I finally visited the Lake Berryessa Brewing Company. It is only about 15 minutes away, on the way to Winters, CA, the nearest town to us. I had driven by it the last few times I visited the site but never stopped in. I got a growler of their most well-known beer, their Separation Anxiety IPA. It is soooo good! I can't wait to try more of their brews. Unfortunately, my field students are very young so we can't all go hang out at the bars for awhile. But two of them turn 21 this summer so soon I'll be taking them out 🍻

3:49pm Classic #fieldworkfail

As I said above, we had not yet trapped our sites for mice. We set out around 1:30/2 to set traps at 3 long term sites. I had only visited these sites briefly in the past. Karen (advisor) asks me if I have a preference for which gator to drive. I say no. She has no preference. I started for Princess, but saw she had her stuff in there, so I head for Fran instead. We had collected Fran a few hours before, and chose her because Eleanor looked like she had a going-flat tire. I get in Fran with Katheryn, one of our awesome undergrad field assistants. We were going along just fine, Fran is not as smooth a ride as Princess but I was feeling okay about it. Then, going down our first somewhat steep hill, we spin out and instead of gaining control and keeping the vehicle straight I go into a bush on the side of the road. Luckily, we didn't tip but we were at an awkward incline and angle on this road. I maneuvered it out of the bush and drove a little down the road but it just felt too weird to me. It turns out her front right tire was going flat and I think that's what screwed us on the way down. So we ditch Fran and start walking to meet up with the other group. We think they will soon realize something is wrong and turn back for us. Through this I learned: 1) Katheryn is good in a crisis. She didn't freak out or anything. 2) She knows 4WD vehicles better than I do. She drives ATVs and has flipped in those and is good with this kind of thing.

So, we walk. It's a nice day and we're in a beautiful reserve so it wasn't bad. But we are surprised to get to where we thought the group was headed, and find they are not there waiting for us. And they have not gone back to get us. Then, we hear a very loud Gator in the distance! It's Princess! They pull up to us briefly and say that they are going to park ahead, and then they will tell us about Gator misadventures. Turns out, they were having trouble, too. Classic fieldwork fail. Just when you think you have everything ready to go and you can FINALLY set traps for some mice...both Gators fail us.

We'll see how it goes tomorrow. Turns out two other Gators (Crystal and Abigail) wouldn't start when we wanted to switch out Princess and Fran. And Eleanor had a tire worse off than Fran. Oh, and good old Doris had been wrecked a little bit ago by some other researchers!!

I notice this vineyard every time I'm here. One day I want to visit it!

It's so cute watching squirrels carrying these giant pine cones around

Back at it!

Hi guys! I'm back in the field, this time for my Ph.D. research and for ONLY 3 months this time! I'm staying in  Quail Ridge Nature Reserve (https://naturalreserves.ucdavis.edu/quail-ridge-reserve), a site located on Lake Berryessa in between Davis, CA and Napa, CA. Yeah, it's a pretty great location 😍

Andy drove with me to Sacramento where I dropped him off at the airport yesterday. I think we had a great trip-we stopped in Balboa Beach and sat on the beach (I went in the ocean). I'm not sure if I'll be able to take time off in July for the annual family beach trip so I wanted to make sure I got to Balboa on this trip. We stayed in West Hollywood for the night at a super beautiful Best Western with bougainvilleas galore. We ate across the street at Carney's Restaurant, a unique renovated railroad car. Then we walked down the street to go to the world famous Comedy Store. I didn't know the history, but Andy said he had always wanted to go there and the line up for the night was really good. Once we were there I learned all about it. It was opened in 1972 by Mitzi Shore, Pauly Shore's mother. She happened to passed away last month so people are still celebrating her memory there. It was the first all stand-up comedy nightclub in the world! Johnny Carson moved the Tonight Show from NYC to LA that same year, so comedians followed and would practice at the Comedy Store. Richard Pryor worked on new material there night after night in the 1970s. Many of the greats from multiple generations got started there including Robin Williams, David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Jim Carrey, and Whoopi Goldberg. The first comic of the night was Argus Hamilton, he first got his start at the Comedy Store in the 1970s when he would run errands around town for Mitzi, helping her set up the the Comedy Store. We saw Tom Segura, Chris D'elia, Natasha Leggero, and Moshe Kasher (and a few others). It was a really cool night.

We left LA on Sunday morning for Sacramento. Andy is a really good passenger because I can ask him to pick a place to eat and he'll always find something interesting. We went to a place called Joe Marty's Bar and Grille, named for the baseball player. It was actually a surprisingly classy sports bar (there were cloth napkins). I had a yummy local IPA from Track 7 brewery and a great salad and sandwich.

 I really enjoyed Sacramento. I visited with my mother's cousin Mary Rita, who I had never met before. We were able to walk to a restaurant just a few minutes from her place, and even walked through a little nature area. The restaurant was right on the river. I had heard my mom joke about people calling Sacramento the "armpit of CA"- I think anywhere in the central valley is called that. But if there are rivers running through your downtown, you're called the "city of trees", and you're known for the growing beer scene (including the largest craft beer festival on the West Coast)...sounds like a great place for me to look for faculty jobs in the future!!! They have great farmer's markets, they are known as the "farm to fork capital", it's close to other places like Davis, SF, and a short flight to SoCal beach destinations!! I also learned that Harvard found Sacramento to be "America's Most Diverse City" back in 2002. These all sound like good things to me!

On Monday I drove out to my field site, but stopped in Davis for groceries. They have a chain called Nugget Markets that are amazing. Kind of like a Whole Foods sized Trader Joe's or something. It won't be somewhere I shop every week but it's definitely a treat. I headed out from there knowing I would soon lose cell service (plus side is I do have WiFi at the field house). If you remember from my Chile days...we had internet once a week 😨 So this is a big step up. I knew I would drive through Winters, CA, which is the closest town to my field site. About 7,000 people, and I've heard they have cute festivals in the summers. I purposely didn't get much fruit at Nugget because there are supposed to be amazing fruit stands close to my site. I stopped at one for strawberries and cherries. You see people literally picking strawberries in the field to sell that day at the stand. Maybe I'm not that picky about strawberries- they were really really good- but the cherries are definitely the best I've ever had in my life.

So I make it to my field site and I get out of the car, do a little stretch, look at my house, look at the sky- I'm taking it all in. I hear a rustle in the woods to my left and I assume I've startled a deer. I've visited the site briefly two times before, and often deer scatter from around the house when we start moving. But no, instead, a hawk flies out of the woods about 20 feet from me and dangling from it's talons is a snake that is at the very least 4 feet long. And they just go flying away. I'm still holding a Starbucks iced latte, fresh from Davis, CA, which is so sterile and not wild at all. I was not prepared to be introduced to my wildlife so soon. I've trapped at this site before, I've seen the rattlesnakes, I've seen the hawks, I've seen the deer, I've seen the mice, I've seen the bobcats, etc. etc., it shouldn't have been a shock but I was like oh damn! I'm really back in the field now. These things will become the norm for me.

So, I'll hopefully be maintaining this blog pretty regularly, especially given the fact that I have WiFi this summer. I have a really good feeling about the field season and I think I will be able to collect a lot of really great data to start my research 🐭😎

Thanks for reading!

I did not take this photo, but we did drive past this water tower

Again, not my photo. It actually reminds me a lot of Chattanooga

Sitting on the beach in Balboa is pure bliss

Carney's Restaurant!

The Comedy Store

I was obsessed with the hotel