Saturday, October 30, 2010

Lots of acorns, other mast and fungi this year.







"Mast" is the edible vegetative or reproductive parts of woody plants. Tree species such as oak and hickory produce hard mast: acorns and other nuts. Other trees and shrubs produce soft mast: buds, catkins, drupes and berries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Lunch

Cathy, Rick and Cory having lunch at UT's Space Science Institute, after giving a presentation on the project to our AEDC liason, Rick McWhite. Array 1 is about a mile north of here.
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Coyote on Array 1.

Monday, October 4, 2010

The Lizards are Back!

After a very hot, humid, and limited trapping success for the summer, the few degrees difference at night now is making the lizards come back to hide under our boards and burlaps! The past few trips we've caught dozens of lizards under the older established boards from SRS's sites but we are consistently getting lizards under OUR boards (WC and MC) and a bunch under our burlaps! We usually get lizards on the tree under the burlaps but we have had a few sneaky ones hiding between the burlap flaps. As for ticks, about a month ago we were able to pull a few off some skinks but since then we haven't seen any on them.

Our mammal trapping seems to have hit it's peak of 4 mice a night per site. We trap at least one medium mammal a trip. NO ticks are on mammals. Not even adult dog ticks anymore.

As for vegetation, it still goes on...

We have been getting an increase in lizards and snakes in our pitfalls. We had (I think) a young cotton mouth in a bucket! I got to use my snake hook for a snake!

Here are some pictures from a few of our trips.

Sleeping on our drift fence.

Krissy in our veg grid.
 Itty-bitty ground skink.
 Scelop with a tail break.

See you all soon!