Lyme Gradient Project holds its Year-1 team meeting at Patuxent Research Refuge, Maryland

Some fall photos from SRS

Critters from under the AEDC coverboards

Two nice photos by Cody Parmer - ring-necked snake and slimy salamander.

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)

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.

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!

TN herps - still eluding us

Just one skink (and a ringnecked snake) this trip :(

Meanwhile, the mice are busy making nests from our lizard-free burlaps ....

Goldilocks can't top this one...

You should have seen him talking to the bear and telling it to stay!!!! Wisconsin Bears Rock!

Clean-living Tennessee critters!

No ticks on these little guys ...

A Week of Mondays

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We had little fawns on all 3 arrays.

This session is that last session for the summer season for Bill and me because of fall camp which is an entire semester spent out in the field. Of course, because of that fact, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We had heat indexes of 105 to 110 and some nasty storms. I was stung by a bald faced hornet and bitten by a shrew within minutes of each other! Buckets were flooded, a higher than normal number of mice captured, raccoons in distress from the extreme temps, a tree down blocking us from one array and loss of access to another because of an erosion project closing the road. And most of that was all on the same day! But, we made it through and it just made our days off after that much sweeter. The sardines are a huge success at our site. In array 2 on the second day we had one possum and two raccoons waiting for us. On the other hand, we have a very wiley animal in array 1. It is climbing into the tomahawks, stealing the fish and avoiding the treadle plate. We are trying to camouflage the treadle plate with detritus but on the last day of trapping, nothing was eating any bait in array 1 so I do not know if that is a good solution.  We had our first ever Eastern box turtle in the tomahawk.  It was trying to get a free meal but could not avoid setting off the trap. It has been an amazing summer and we have thoroughly loved being part of this project. Thanks to everyone for all the advice and the expertise you have shared with us!   ~Heather and Bill~