So I have definitely dropped the ball on updating this for a year now and I apologize to anyone who reads this to keep up with the project! Anyways, I am here to update you now on how much has happened over the last year! First off, we completed field season #3 with a total of 718 individual pygmy rabbits captured throughout the project! It was a pretty rough year in the sense that we didn't catch as many rabbits as previous years despite our increased effort and at West Gulch, we actually went an entire month without catching a single rabbit. However, it was also a great year at one of our sites in Austin, where we caught a whopping 96 individuals and our smallest baby to date! In some more personal, but still PhD related news, I started off the year by getting new 'PYGMY' license plates if anyone was still unconvinced about my love of my study species. After the field season I took a trip to Utah to visit Hannah. We took a trip to Zion, got to catch up, and I also got to tag along to trap some prairie dogs! At the end of August, I got my first 2 tattoos - 1 of an outline of a pygmy rabbit on my wrist, and the other of my dog's paw print on my foot (we lost her in January after a wonderful 12 and a half years). In December, I took and passed my written comprehensive exam and then in March 2019, I finished my dissertation proposal and took my oral comprehensive exam and I am now officially a PhD candidate!!! Even though 2018 was a bit of a let down overall, it gives me a lot of hope going into the 2019 season. I have hired 3 amazing ladies to join me April 15th (my 29th birthday!) to start trapping for our 4th season and survey and resurvey pygmy rabbit sites around Elko and Austin. We are also going to have 2 additional people surveying and resurveying Hart-Sheldon sites throughout the season. We are really hitting the survey aspect of the project hard this year!
Hopefully, I will have more time to update this year, but probably not since I need to be analyzing data in my free time ;) Until next time!!
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We are currently sitting at 2 days before the 2018 trapping season starts at West Gulch in between Hart and Sheldon NAR, and as usual, I am not packed. I find it very hard to pack for 6 months in the field! Especially when we encounter temperatures from the low teens to the hundreds and weather from every season! Does anyone else have this problem?!?!
Luckily, we have gotten a lot done since the last field season! I have finally published the second chapter of my Masters thesis, we have sent the first batch of genetic samples to University of Idaho to begin running SNPs, my new tech and trusty sidekick, Jacy, has extracted DNA from over half the ear biopsies we have so far, and Kevin and I have been working on incorporating the burrow surveys into the SECR model to estimate pygmy rabbit densities. Unfortunately, it was a pretty dry winter (up until March..), so we were only able to get out to Austin for a couple days to collect fecal genetic samples. However, we have some new strategies we are going to try out this season, including sweeping sites. This involves going to a site where we need genetic samples, completing a burrow survey and clearing away poop from burrow entrances, and coming back for the next couple days to collect poop at those same burrows! Well, looks like I should get back to packing so wish us luck and I will update when I can!! Last week I headed out to Bodie Historic State Park near Bridgeport, CA to help Scott trap pygmy rabbits for an upcoming paper that is being published. The hope was to catch as many individuals as possible for more robust genetic analyses. Unfortunately, we only caught 7 total pygmies at Bodie. Excitingly (is that even a word?), this is the 6th state I've trapped pygmy rabbits in! We had such a blast reliving the beginning of last season and touring the old historic town and stamp mill!
Additionally, Scott and a tech trapped Crowley Lake, CA at the beginning of August and caught a whopping 24 rabbits from the site Jen and I had visited last year! I am hoping we have enough funding to keep trapping these CA sites for the next few years!
I have been slacking hardcore on updating this blog-and for that, I apologize! It has been a hectic month and a half finishing up trapping in Elko, and moving to Sheldon to begin trapping there.
The beginning of May we finished trapping our permanent site, Jiggs, and caught a total of 66 new individuals with a mere 3 recaptures from last year. It was rather disappointing that we didn't get more recaptures, but I'm hoping when we do the genetics we will find that more of our rabbits from last year are still alive and reproducing! In addition, we saw the gorgeous badger, who we named Basher, twice and got a video on the GoPro of another! We also trapped a new site that we nicknamed RZ, which is about 9 km (~30 min drive) from our permanent site. We only caught 8 rabbits there, but the density of rabbits estimated for RZ seemed pretty good! Moving on to Hart-Sheldon on May 17, we got settled into the bunkhouse at Sheldon and immediately started setting and trapping the site on the Nevada-Oregon border. We were hoping to turn this into another permanent site, but we only caught 5 rabbits so we left it at just one session and moved on. We then trapped Big Spring and Andy's Place hoping the latter would give us great success, but unfortunately, we struck out big at both. We caught zero pygmy rabbits. At Big Spring though, we did catch 2 species of woodrats (desert and bushy-tailed) which was a first for me! We finally decided to start West Gulch, since we were tired of catching nothing, and we were rewarded with 5 rabbits our first visit, 2 of which were recaps. One of those we chased into a trap while we were checking too! It was the most incredible thing. She was a juvenile last year, and when we caught her, she was so incredibly pregnant! Over the upcoming week, we will be finishing session 1 and session 2 at West Gulch and then I am off to ASM in Moscow, ID- my old stomping grounds! Our last visit to our permanent South Fork site occurred on April 21. We totaled 45 new rabbits tagged and 6 recaps from 2016. My friend, Danielle, from the Applied Population Ecology lab at UNR joined me on the night of the 21st to start trapping Jiggs. My new technician, Hannah, got to Elko on April 25th when we could finally do the second visit to Jiggs and we did pretty well! Plus, Hannah, who is from Ohio, got to hold her first pygmy rabbit! After that, we had to stop trapping for 5 days while it snowed, hailed, rained buckets and was windy and cold beyond what we could handle. But it finally passed and we were able to trap again on the morning of the 30th! It did rain again last night/this morning (May 1st), so we had to pass on trapping again, but we're hoping with how good the weather was today, that it will stay this way long enough for us to finish trapping at Jiggs, a one-year Jiggs adjacent site, and hopefully a site up north a ways.
As I write this, I am running the final model for density estimates for South Fork in 2016 and 2017, which will be revealed at the American Society of Mammalogists meeting this year in Moscow, ID! Also, today (May 1st), Hannah and I did a complete burrow survey of South Fork to finish out this 2017 year at that permanent site. Eventually, we want to compare burrow densities to densities of trapped rabbits at all trapped sites, but especially we want to compare burrow densities over time to trapping densities over time. Stay tuned for how trapping the rest of Jiggs goes!
This is quite a delayed post- but I guess late is better than never! On January 16th (Happy New Year!), my friend Katie and I took a day trip down to Austin to collect genetic samples at a couple of previously surveyed sites. There was a couple inches of snow which had fallen 3 to 4 days before which was perfect for what we were trying to accomplish! We managed to collect 25 fecal samples and 1 hair sample (in about 4 hrs....) at KPS which is about 49 km from our established Indian Valley site (OIV). We also managed to make it to another two sites, KSC and RSC, almost 2 km apart from each other, 5 km away from KPS and 52 km away from OIV, where we were able to find burrows and pygmy rabbit sign between the two sites! Making them one large site! We also collected 35 fecal samples from KSC/RSC. We saw at least 10 pygmy rabbits today as well! Most at KSC although one came out of a burrow right next to us while we were collecting a fecal sample at KPS. Although it took much longer than I expected to collect fecal samples, it was a pretty great day overall! Can't wait to get back out there already!
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Field work updatesA place to update on happenings in the field throughout the year. Sites visited. Status of the sagebrush-steppe. Samples collected. Milestones in lab work. Rabbits trapped. Pictures! Archives
April 2019
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