March 4, 2001
Yikes! For almost a month I've been messing around with my picture publishing problem, and it's still not solved. At least I don't think it is. I'll know when I try to publish this. Thanks for bearing with me, and I particularly want to thank the new readers who have been so kind as to e-mail us.
Well, I really didn't know it was going to come out that big, but here's the little boat and me with a big smile. I scanned the picture in from a photo some friends in another boat had taken, and wasn't sure how it would turn out. Hummmmm. The older I get the less I know. I'm sitting in Lake Arbuckle, the one we're parked next to, and as I recall, this was a fishless day. Beats shoveling snow, though!!
When we're not running the trap line, or tracking the coyotes, or doing odd-jobs around the office, we're "scat scouts" and on the left we have Barby picking up her first bit of coyote droppings. They will "mark" their territory in a variety of ways, and leaving droppings along roadways is one of them. We'll keep it and use it as a scent bait when we set traps again. The idea being that this coyote is outside of the range of where we'll be setting the trap, and some local coyote will come sniff it out to see if there's a competitor in his territory. That's the plan, at least. We have yet to trap a coyote on a scent bait, all we've had success with is food bait. On the right Barb is tempting a Florida scrub jay with a peanut. She's not had any come to her yet, but others have been done it so we'll keep trying.
The Florida scrub jays on the left are protected so strongly here, that it's a 3rd class felony to mess with their nest or to molest the bird. That's a worse crime than child molestation or wife beating, but you don't want to get me started on my opinions of things of that sort. On the right, Keith Morin, the fellow we work for on the tracking project is listening for a coyote that was recently collared. And that truck he's standing on saw duty in the Desert Storm activity, and really deserves to be retired. It's the roughest riding vehicle I've ever been in, and since it's a standard cab, Barb gets to ride in the middle. But it's a diesel and consequently we have no interference from the ignition when we're riding around looking for radio signals from the collars.
This tracking of animals is always exciting to us, because we're never sure who we'll find. In this case on the left, we saw some pretty big paw prints, as you can tell from the ball-point pen I laid in the sand along side the prints. When Keith saw them, he came to the conclusion that it was a pretty big hunting dog, and the prints were several days old and the sand had shifted making them seem larger than they originally were. So much for us finding Florida Panther prints. On the right, if you look carefully, you'll see Keith and me stumbling along in the palmetto bushes looking for a dead coyote. When one of the collars has no motion for 24 hours it gives off a signal that is twice as fast as the normal "beep.......beep" and then we know that we have a dead "dog" someplace. It's important to try to determine the cause of death for the study, so we hiked around a bit to pinpoint it.
And there on the left is the remains of the critter -- and the collar. It was unfortunate that we could not determine how he met his demise. He was only about 4 or 5 years old, and was part of a small family group and may have been killed by a hunter (which is legal) who didn't bother to bring us his collar, which is the normal thing to do. On the right I'm working with another biologist, Marian, to establish one of the 52 scent stations throughout the range. We clear a patch of ground 3' round, place this stinky tablet about the size of a quarter in the middle, and then check the next day and the 5th day to determine from the tracks who came to sniff.
On the left Barb and Marian are sifting the dirt to remove vegetation from it so we'll get a better bed of sand/dirt in which to get tracks. Like on the right. The white thing more-or-less in the middle is the scent tablet.
On the left, we have a normal traffic jam when we're working on the facility. There are several cattle leases that the Air Force has. It's good inexpensive grazing for the cattleman, and additional income as well as some vegetation control for the Air Force. And on the right is something that tasted a whole lot better than it looked. A delicious crumb cake that helped reduce the amount of flour we're carrying around. And that's what it looks like if it's put into a 10" bread pan rather than a 10" tube pan. I'm looking forward to having it again, now that we found the tube pan. Having a microwave/convection oven is a great combination, and we don't even have a traditional oven. Of course, learning to use the rascal is another story in itself.
These pictures show how hard it is to get a good shot at a Sherman's Fox Squirrel. Face looks like a monkey, beautiful bushy tail, and loves to sit up and look around when it's on the ground. But break out a camera, and "poof" it's gone. Usually, like this one, up a tree. One time, there was one in the middle of the road, and it would run down away from us and turn and sit up and look to see if we were still coming, and then it would run again. It did this several times before darting off into the brush.
Well, now it's time to boil the traps. And to mask the human scent we add Gulberry leaves and branches to the water. We take the brush and put a frame with screen over it in the bottom of a 50 gallon garbage can, put the traps on top of the frame, and fill it with water. On the left Keith is clipping and I'm holding the Gulberry that we use at the bottom of the tank. And on the right is one of those things that only seem funny in retrospect. I was screwing in the hose to the faucet on the plastic pipe. Only the faucet came off in my hand and the water came shooting up out of the pipe, soaking me and everything within about 10'. You can see the water going up the wall from the pipe which is only about 3' high.
Well, Keith ran around looking for the cutoff for the water, but not finding it I went and just shoved the faucet back on. As I was standing there wondering if I had any dry places on me at all, Keith came over and observed that the bracket holding the pipe/faucet to the wall was loose. Right. Like I found the information interesting or something. Grrrrrrr. And on the right I'm standing on the "ears" of a trap getting ready to set it, and alongside me is a trap that is sprung. Isn't it interesting the way Barby can catch things in a picture that make sense. I couldn't have planned a shot like this without several minutes of study and planning, but she just seems to see things I don't.
And as they say, two heads are better than one. The traps are boiled and waxed and we're storing them in the "clean trap" box. We wax the traps to keep them from rusting which gives them an odor that the coyotes can detect and thus avoid. The block of wax goes into the boiling water and as the traps, chains and anchors are drawn out of the water, the wax adheres to everything. We have a long-handled hook we use to pull the traps out, and it's kind of tricky keeping them from trapping each other. Keith devised a little wooden wedge that we can jamb in under the trigger of the traps to keep that from happening, and it mostly works. He's holding the hook in this picture.