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 |
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 |