Fun with Traps

Because of my adventures with children all last week (I've already gotten one thank-you note!), my mammal traps and the drift fences stayed closed. At the beginning of this week, I found myself dragging my feet in opening them back up. 77 traps yielding 2 Kangaroo Rats over a month of baiting, checking, setting up, and closing...what can I say? My motivation was flagging. But, I went ahead and moved some traps around and set most of them up with new bait. I think next week I'll start taking some down. After all, I don't want to spend my last week here cleaning 77 traps. That's going to be quite a chore!

But I digress. I set up the north drift fence (remember? the one in the prairie with the ant problems but without the spiders?) and my traps on Tuesday. The drift fence had not one but two black widows that had to be dealt with. Before you start calling me Arnold Swartz-spider-killer, I "dealt with them" by squealing, shuddering, and shoo-ing them off with my boot. I couldn't kill one because it had built its web over the opening of the pit fall trap (a bucket in the ground), so there was no ground to crush her upon. The other one - don't ask me why I didn't kill her. I don't really understand it myself. Maybe I'm afraid I'll try it and she'll out-move me and crawl up my leg and kill me.

Sigh. So that's fun.

But it yielded results. You may remember that once upon a time I had mammal traps located in the place where the North Drift Fence was, because a Kangaroo rat had been caught in one of the funnel traps. But then, I caught nothing in those traps but a snake, so I moved them. Yesterday, what should I find in that drift fence but a Kangaroo Rat! It was a little boy too - my first male. I went ahead and did all my stuff to him. Measured, weighed, photographed, and, yes, even painted his toe nails. But it's a very masculine red-copper color. He was around 10 inches and weighed a meager 67 grams. That makes him the lightest K. Rat I've caught thus far.



(That last picture should be captioned "Please ma'am. Won't you let me go?")

But I'm not done yet. After I released him, I moved on to check my mammal traps. I went to the area called "the Hunter's 80". This is the area where I catch that female K. Rat time after time after time after time (literally). Well, as it had been a week, I had wondered if perhaps she had moved on. However, there was a girl K. rat in one of my mammal traps. I couldn't find any nail polish on her, so I'm going to have to treat her as new, but I suspect that she is my diva who has let me catch her 4 times before. One interesting difference though. When I caught her the first time, she weighed 100 grams. When I caught her (?) on Wednesday, she only weight 75 grams. So maybe she really is different. I marked her and let her go and continued with checking the traps. But not before I took pictures of her (she's showing us her coy side...)

Thus far in my traps I have caught a KS glossy snake, a red-sided garter snake, cotton rats, deer mice, Hispid Pocket mice, a fence lizard, a Great Plains frog, a female sparrow, and the odd Kangaroo rat or two. Pretty distinguished list, I think, but it had one very obvious thing missing. Well, Wednesday morning that slot was also filled because I found a Box Turtle in one of my 15 inch mammal traps. When I picked up the closed trap, I heard a loud thud and a hiss. So I knew it wasn't a mammal. I kinda jostled the trap to get whatever was in there down to the back of the trap. Haha. That probably didn't endear me to the turtle either. I slid him out of the trap and waited a minute or two for him to show his legs and head. But alas, he was more stubborn than I, so I took pictures of his (tightly) closed shell.

A box turtle is called such because he can completely close up his shell - like a box - with no openings. He can do this because of a hinge on his lower shell which he is able to manipulate. At this point, there is no opening into his soft (yummy to some carnivores) parts. Mmmm - Turtle Soup!

Thursday was also a fun day for traps. I caught the same Kangaroo Rat from the previous day. I weighed her again - and she came in at 73 grams - still much lighter than she used to be. So I've either caught her 6 times now or only twice. Who knows? I suppose this is where the more tough-skinned biologists would tell me "That's what you get for not ear tagging!". But if I had ear-tagged, there would be a good chance for no recapture, because K. rats marked with ear tags have a higher mortality rate than those marked by other methods. And don't even get me started on toe clipping!

Today I had nothing in my mammal traps, but I did have a new creature in the drift fence. This was an Eastern Yellow Belly Racer. These guys are green on top and yellow on the belly (as you might have guessed). This guy was super nervous and struck at me several times. He also really didn't like the flash of my camera. When I let him go, he gave me no chance to get some pictures of him without it looking like he was in prison. If I had been thinking properly, I would have used my camera to video-tape how fast and smooth he moved. It's almost unreal. Snakes are just so cool!