Training in Kananaskis

We three new grad students have had a pretty hectic several days learning how things are done here in Kananaskis. Jack, our supervisor, was here when we got here. He just left today and will be back in a few weeks to check on us. I will once again do this in lists since I find it easier to get my thoughts down this way, and it doesn’t leave any of my readers with too much to read.

Things we learned:

- How to operate, set, and lock live traps.

- Where to put them when trapping.

- How to identify, handle, weigh, sex, and ear tag deer mice and red-backed voles.

- How to tell if females are non-breeding, breeding, pregnant, and lactating.

- How to tell if males are scrotal or non-scrotal.

Things we REALLY learned:

- Males are often feistier than females and do not like it when you feel around for their testicles

- Red-backed voles are much less docile than deer mice. Expect to be bitten. Several times.

- Expect to be urinated and defecated upon. Continuously.

- Tagging is difficult to pick up. You have to get used to holding a squirming mouse in one hand and using a tag stapler in the other.

- Mice and voles do not like being given overlarge and unattractive earrings.

- Chipmunks do not like being stuck in traps.

- Weasels smell really bad.

Crisia has already done all of this before. So Nikhil and I have been lucky to have had someone here to tell us stories from previous summers and to show us what to do without us feeling stupid and inept. I think Nikhil and I are picking things up rather quickly. Today, we did tagging in the field rather than taking the animals back to the lab. We had a 43% trap success on the one long-term grid that we did; 10% is considered to be good. We also had no escapees, which is pretty much unheard of in the first couple weeks of doing this.

We are not constantly doing work here and have a lot of free time at least until we get our own projects set up, and we start thinking about our own research proposals.

Things we’ve been doing to keep ourselves occupied outside of being in the field:

- The Internet

- Reading

- Cooking

- Taking pictures of mountains and ground squirrels (see my pictures)

- Finding an excuse to drive out to Canmore (20 minutes away) or Banff (40 minutes away). Both of these are very touristy mountain towns with cute shops. We actually didn’t need an excuse for the last one since it was Jack’s idea. We will, however, need excuses in the future, so if you come to visit us here in Kananaskis (and we encourage guests since we have extra beds and like showing people what we do), please bring a car since we must log the kilometres on our vehicles and cannot constantly use them for our own pleasure.