Preparing the Study Area

Thursday, 7/17, Tean Scat Track Fever with the help of Dan (whitepinesprograms.org) set up our study area. We created three transect lines of 100 by 10 meters each. One begins 200 m into the woods of the Warren property to sample presence of interior forest mammal activity. The second begins at the agriculture/ forest interface and travels 100 meters into the beginning of the woods. This is the "forest fringe" where there is an ecotone between the forest ecosystem and the more heavily managed farm ecosystem. The third transect bisects the agriculture land along a riparian strip of a dry creek bed that runs across the interior of the farm.

We hope to see what are using these corridors/habitats as the farm shares a boundary with the 1300+ Barrington Headwaters Reserve Land. Large unbroken forest land is rare in this ever developing region and the presence of large ranging critters like moose, coyotes, bear and bobcat can tell us a lot about the resource needs of these animals in such a increasingly pressured region.

The wild life we found was impressive and exciting! Of course, lots of deer, but we also found moose tracks and scat, fresh coyote scat (they're feeding heavily on blue berries right now. Thats right. I said coyotes are feeding on blue berries!), and the jack pot winner of the day were confirmed bobcat tracks. This was very exciting and Dan the Tracker was super stoked about this.


We set up a small soot trap (open ends with bait in the middle. Critters walk over black soot and leave prints on contact paper as they move toward the bait and they are then free to leave) for smaller rodents/lagomorphs and even maybe a small predator (weasel) within the 10 meter buffer of the forest/farm interface transect along with a motion trip camera to "trap" any critters that travel on this "corridor" to the farm. Man, I hope it works. Seeing a bobcat would really make the summer for me!. We then placed a large soot trap by the interior transect in the hope of capturing tracks of a meso predator (meso meaning "middle/medium") like a fischer, skunk, raccoon etc. We baited the camera traps and large soot trap with pork fat.
Mmmm, pork fat.






Now we wait. I'll catch you up on Monday as to whether we had any success.