Back again!!!

I can't believe it's been almost 6 months since my last post!  Sorry about that... guess things got a little busy. Well that and we don't have internet at our house, so instead of sitting comfortably on the couch and taking my time to type a post... I have to sit in my little cubby in the grad lab at school.  Definitely not as comfortable!

Well, I'm sure all who reads this already know that Bob and I got married in August.  We are settling into married life and settling into seeing each other ALL THE TIME... and slowly getting used to it :)  So far, so good!

Our wedding party :)

Bob was able to get a job at the local hardware/building supply store, McCoy's.  He has been looking around for wildlife jobs or even volunteer positions, with little luck.  Unfortunately any wildlife volunteer work he could do down here would include a lot of driving, and we'd be spending a lot of money (that we don't have) just to pay for gas to get to the various sites.  So, although he doesn't currently have a job in the wildlife field he has been able to get the job at McCoy's (which according to other citizens of Alpine is one of the better jobs here in town).  He's enjoying it as much as he can and has even picked up a few fishing buddies out of it :)  In addition to that he is still working with his animals.  He just had 3 beaded lizards hatch out of eggs that one of his females laid back in the summer.  There were more eggs in the clutch that didn't make it, which was really disappointing to him.  Since the eggs were still in PA, it was difficult for him to make sure they were still in the conditions they needed to be in the incubator.  Beaded lizard eggs aren't the easiest to hatch either, so it was no fault of his own that they were not 100% successful.  Still, he's really excited about the ones that did hatch, and his parents are taking good care of them in his absence.  

Here is one of the first beaded lizard babies hatching out of its egg :)

That third egg hatched shortly after the first 2

Completely out of the egg and eating one of it's first meals! Yum!

Since we've been down here he's also acquired a few more snakes that he wasn't allowed to have while he lived at home in PA.  The reason for that was - they're venomous too!  He has 1 rock rattlesnake, 2 albino eastern diamondback rattlesnakes, and 3 copperheads (1 osage, and 2 trans-pecos).  Although I sometimes get nervous having them around, Bob is VERY cautious and responsible when feeding/handling them.  He has a ton of books on the care/handling of venomous animals, and lots of friends to ask advice from.  And of course, they've really grown on me too now that I've become accustomed to having them around for a couple months :)

Here is a picture of one of the albino eastern diamondbacks.  They're just babies now, but they will get BIG.  They've already grown a lot since we've had them.

Another picture of the AED

This is a rock rattlesnake.  There are lots of different variations on colors depending on where the snake came from.  Since they have to blend in with their surroundings (rocks) they usually match the color of rocks in their habitat.

Another picture of the rock rattlesnake.

Here is the osage copperhead.  Bob got this one off of a friend of his that he's met since living down here in Alpine.  He also has 2 trans-pecos copperheads that we don't have pictures of yet that he is keeping for a little while for another friend of his.

Bob has also acquired quite a collection of these guys... They are pretty small - not nearly as big as it looks in this picture!

Here is another picture of a scorpion.  This shows how much they glow under a black light! Most people who go out and look for these critters usually use these lights to find them.

Those of you who know Bob also know that he loves to garden!  Although it's January, we have a very successful garden growing in our backyard curtesy of Bob :)  There is a material that you can buy to cover a garden with that keeps the inside temperature about 10 degrees warmer than outside.  So although it still gets chilly at night, and sometimes during the day, this covering has allowed us to start a very nice garden.  Not much else is new with Bob. He's enjoying his time down here (so he tells me) which makes me happy since I'm kinda the reason he had to move away from PA!

Our garden :)

Well, enough about Bob... lets talk about me now :)  Things are going pretty well with school, although there has been a change of plans.  I found out mid-December that there is not enough funding for my project to pay me for the summer.  This means that if I were to stay and complete 2 full years of field work and graduate May 2013 (as originally planned) I would have to get another job in addition to doing field work for my 2 projects.  There are various other projects that I could work on and get paid for as a technician, but they would require just as much field work as my own projects and I would be very busy.  I also doubt I'd get hired, or even make any money, at a job in town when I may only be able to work there 1 or 2 days a week.  So my advisors gave me the option of using only 1 year's worth of field data to write my thesis and graduate in May 2012.  After talking it over with Bob, and asking for some advice from my undergraduate advisor, I made the decision to take them up on their offer and try to graduate early.  So, I am now in the thesis-writing stage of my time here at Sul Ross.  Although I am excited to be done with this stage of my life and earn a higher degree, it has been somewhat stressful having to change course this close to May graduation.  Now Bob and I have the challenge of finding jobs and possibly relocating to a whole new area to start the next chapter of our lives.  We feel as though we are being rushed in doing this, which has caused a lot of pressure and stress on the both of us and our marriage.  But we are talking through our issues and concerns and trying not to let it all get the best of us.  Luckily, we both have awesomely supportive families, which understand they could possibly be gaining back some live-in children if we don't find something else by May.  So we are currently looking for places of employment where we can use our degrees, or where I can go on to get a Ph.D.  Although I am slowly getting worn out by school, committing to a Ph.D. program would actually allow us to settle in one place for more than just a year or 2 since it would probably take me at least 4 years to complete the program and graduate.  Also, it would be nice to get all schooling out of the way now, instead of working for a while, and then going back :)

So that is where we are in our lives right now.  I will leave it at that for now.  Hopefully I'll be able to write posts more frequently now!  I'll have to catch you all up on pictures from different things we've been doing for the past 6 months!

Hope you all are doing great and enjoying the new year!

Thanks for reading,

Laura CULP :)

Bears in the spotlight followup...

Peter said he had some trouble opening the link with the news clip video.  He said this one worked for him, so hopefully it will work for everyone else too!

Here's the link: http://www.cbs7.com/video/index.asp?vid=13714

If that doesn't work go to www.cbs7.com and click on the "Video" tab (directly below the "News" tab underneath the picture of all the news anchors). Once the video page is open scroll down a little bit and look on the right hand side of the page and you'll see a link that says "Video Archive."  It's pretty small writing so you may have to look carefully.  That will take you to another page that has several video clips you can click on.  You're looking for "Searching for Black Bears in Big Bend."  Hope one of those works out!

TX Bears in the Spotlight!

I know it has been a while since I have posted anything.  After I caught the 2 bears in Black Gap, things kind of slowed down for me for a while.  My dad came down to visit a couple weeks later for a few days (which was SO much fun!! I'll post some pictures from that eventually too), and then I had to do some small mammal trapping - which wasn't nearly as fun as the bear trapping - and then I had to get ready to come back home to PA!  I am home in PA now - since Monday - and feel as if I've been going non-stop since then!  I knew things were going to be busy and it's frustrating trying to fit in so many things into such a short period of time.  Still, I'm glad to be home with family, and especially glad to have some time with Bob before we get married!

Anyway, I figured I'd post a couple news/media related things that have come about since we captured our BG bears.  First, Dr. Moody (my advisor) and I had an interview with a man at the University who is in charge of the school newspaper.  He regularly keeps up with different projects that the students are doing in our department, so I wasn't too surprised when I found out he wanted to talk to us about the bears.  The article he wrote was released to the school and was also picked up by other newspapers throughout Texas. He even sent the article to a newspaper in Plainfield, NJ, since he mentions in the article that I grew up there!  Anyway, here is a link to the article on the Sul Ross website: http://www.sulross.edu/pages/6360.asp.  Also, if you do a google search with the words "black bear researcher moves west to Sul Ross" you'll see a lot of other newspapers that picked up the article.

The second thing that happened was a news crew from Midland, TX (about 2 hours northeast of Alpine), came down to do a news clip about the bears.  We took the two women down to Black Gap and showed them around and even got to see a bear that wasn't one of our collared ones!  They posted the clip on their website.  If you click on this link, http://www.cbs7.com/video/index.asp?ID=13714, and then look for the clip titled "Searching for Black Bears in Big Bend" (dated 8/3/2011) the video will play on the side of the screen.  I'd say I did ok, considering it was my first news interview :)

Guess that's all for now.  Sorry, no pictures this time... I'll try to get in a couple more posts in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for reading :)

Laura

Black Bear Follow-up...

I forgot to mention... catching these bears was really important to me because this was the first time that it was completely up to me to make the decisions on bait and where to place the traps in order to capture them.  Also, since neither Ron nor the Harvesons were there when we were working up Slick (the second bear we caught) that was the first bear that I ever worked up where I was the most experienced person.  The other guys that were helping me were great, but since they had never worked up a bear before I was the one in charge.  It was a HUGE confidence boost and I was able to show myself that I am capable of making the important decisions and successfully working up a bear.  Although like I mentioned before, once the Harvesons finally did get there when we caught Slick, they still helped me with the collar... Still, I was proud of myself!

Hopefully I'll have many more bear success stories in the near future :)

Black Bear Captures!!

I can proudly say that I now have a real life bear component to my thesis project! Looking back it doesn't seem like it took me all that long to catch a bear (9 trapping nights to be exact), but at the time it seemed to take forever!  Still, after catching a couple foxes, having my bait stolen and my traps rolled, I still got 'em!  I learned a lot about bears and how to trap them during that time.  The bears definitely outsmarted me way before I was able to outsmart them... but they had to make a mistake sooner or later!

Trapping bears down here in the desert is a much different experience than the one I had in PA trapping bears with the Game Commission.  For one thing, I wasn't able to use the sweet smelling Krispy Kreme donuts that we used in PA.  No, first I used good and ripe - almost rotting fruits - to try and get their attention.  But because it's so dry down here the bait would dry up almost immediately and be useless.  So then I opted for the stronger smell of sardines to try and entice them.  That was a success, and how I caught the first bear!!  But I had been getting pictures of a rather large bear on my trail cameras and soon realized he was not going to go in the barrel traps that I was using.  So after 2 flat tires and a lot of running back and forth, we finally got the culvert trap out to where the bears were.  The only problem with using the culvert trap was that I was going to need a much larger (and smellier) bait to attract the bears.

The first night I used dog food and a lot of sardines, but had nothing in the morning... Luckily (well we thought it was) the next morning there was a fresh roadkill javelina on the road.  So... to spare you the gory and smelly details... we had a much bigger (and smellier!) bait available to put in the culvert trap.  Unfortunately, again I still didn't get the bear - but he had rolled a couple of the other barrel traps that also had parts from the javelina as bait... so we knew he was interested!  (Quick explanation - since the barrel traps have a door that closes from the top, like a guillotine, this bear would roll the trap on it's side so that the door would stay open.  Still, I realized he wasn't going in the trap to steal the bait.  He was obviously leery of going into such a small place - hence bringing out the big culvert.)  We found a way to keep the traps open during the day with no risk of the doors closing, hoping that would cause the bears to get used to going into the traps and realizing they could get food out of the deal.  So after we hung the javelina bait with no luck that night, the bear came during the day and stole it while the trap was chained open.  Although it was frustrating that the bait was gone (meaning I had to go cruise the roads for more - less fortunate - wildlife), it was a good thing because now I knew that he would go in there expecting a meal.  Unfortunately I couldn't find another big bait to hang in there, but found something smaller that apparently wasn't interesting enough because I still didn't get him the next morning.  Again, to save you all the details, the next day I found another roadkill - a deer this time - and hung that up in the trap that evening when I set the traps.  Sure enough the next morning I caught the bear that thought he was so clever rolling the traps and stealing the bait!!

Well, that was a lot of background info that most of you probably skimmed through or skipped over, so I'll just get to the good parts - pictures!

We named the first bear BooBoo... I'll explain the name later :)

Here is what a barrel trap looks like.  The one thing I was most worried about with trapping bears down here was making sure we kept them cool.  It gets hot really quickly here and those traps can heat up fast in direct sunlight.  Shade was limited, so we made sure we had plenty of water and ice to keep the bear cool.  Luckily, there was some cloud cover this day (rare in the desert!), and it even rained later in the afternoon (even more rare after about 8 months of no rain!) which couldn't have been more perfect!  Once we had the bear out of the trap we checked his temperature about every 10 minutes to make sure he wasn't over heating.  This bear didn't even get close to over heating which made me much more relaxed while working on him!

This is a picture of me loading up the drug in the jabstick.  Basically the jabstick has a syringe with a needle at the end and you "jab" it into the bear to administer the drug.

After administering the drug, we had to wait around for it to do it's job.  It was really dark in the trap... even a flashlight didn't help!  We soon realized he wasn't going down - so either I didn't get the drug in when I jabbed him, or we underestimated his weight and didn't give him enough.  To make a long story short, it was both.  We're pretty sure the drug came out the bottom of the syringe the first couple of times I tried jabbing him, and we were off on his weight by about 20 lbs or so.  So, because of that we ended up giving him drug SIX times, and it took him 2 hours to be sedated enough for us to work on him! Poor guy!!  That's why we named him BooBoo.  It's not something I like to admit... but it's the truth.

Once we finally had him out of the trap there were lots of measurements we had to take.  We also put a PIT tag in him which has a unique ID number that will help us determine who he is if we (or anyone else) catches him in the future without a collar on.  We check his overall health by looking at his teeth and claws and checking him for ectoparasites or wounds.  This bear was in really good shape considering his environment.  I was really surprised by how good he looked! (We'll take all this information down on every bear we catch - as well as the info listed under the next picture)

We also took some biological samples: hair, tissue, and blood.  In this picture I am trying to draw blood from a vein in his hind leg.  Now I've taken blood from bears before - at a bear check station where they are already dead and can't be hurt... So I was a little nervous about doing this for the first time on a live bear.  Whether it was my nerves or lack of skill, I could not get any blood! After poking him a couple times I figured I had stuck a needle in him enough times for the day and gave up.  My advisor, Dr. Moody-Harveson, helped me out and got some herself.  I guess that's something I'll have to work on! (Actually when I drew blood from the second bear I got it on the first try!!)

Here is a picture of what the collar looks like.  It's so bulky!!  Bears are really good at taking collars off so we needed to make sure it was snug enough that he wouldn't be able to get it off, but because bears put on weight in the fall we also needed to make sure there was room enough for him to grow a little.  These collars have a remote drop off system.  So if I ever get pictures of BooBoo on my trail cameras or see him in person and notice that the collar is too tight or there is something else wrong with it, we can have it removed without having to capture him again.  Another great thing about these is that they are satellite GPS collars.  That means that through satellites we get this bear's locations sent to us automatically in an email and we can import the data into ArcGIS or GoogleEarth to see the locations on a map!  Isn't that so cool??  Even though the collars are expensive (about $3500 each), in the long run it saves a lot of time and money compared to regular radio collars.  If we were to just use radio collars we'd probably need to hire a helicopter crew to fly with the telemetry equipment in order to get better fixes on the bears.  Using the satellite GPS collars is a much more accurate method of tracking their movements.  And we can get 4 locations per day instead of going out every once in a while to look for them if they had regular radio collars.

Here is another picture of the collar we put on BooBoo.  Ron put some padding on the inside of this one and wrapped it with some electrical tape.  The tape and padding will eventually wear off and allow more room for BooBoo's growth this fall.  Since he was a subadult (1.5 yrs old) he'll probably do quite a bit of growing in the next year or so depending on resource availability.

What a mess! This is the crazy way we came up with weighing BooBoo.  In PA we had a tripod that we could hook the scale up to and we'd just hoist the bear up off the ground to weigh it.  Here we had to come up with a different method.  Maybe a better weighing system is something we can invest in if we get more funding!  BooBoo weighed about 100 lbs.  He may have been a little less since he was soaking wet in this picture :)

Here he is!  I liked this picture because he's sticking his tongue out.  What a cutie!  One thing you can't tell in the pictures is that because of how long it took for the drug to work, BooBoo was pretty aware of what was going on and even moving quite a bit.  Because of this we didn't take a tooth (a premolar that they don't use after a certain age) figuring he was a little too awake for that.  (Teeth can be used to age a bear).

Another picture with his tongue sticking out! So cute!!  That is my advisor in the picture with me.

Ok, now onto the second, larger of the two bears, Slick (named for his thinking he could get away with rolling the traps and stealing the bait!!)  I don't have as many pictures of this one since the other 3 guys that were there were helping me more than taking pictures. But I will say - I only had to jab Slick ONCE (not six times) and he went down in about 10 minutes (not 2 hours)!

Here Dr. Harveson (my advisor's husband and another professor on my graduate committee) is helping me put on the collar.  The Harvesons arrived after we did everything else on the bear.  It was good when that they showed up when they did though because all we had left was the collar and it was way to small for the bear! Not even close to fitting!!  So I freaked out a little before they got there wondering what I was going to do.  We ended up cutting off a piece of a regular radio collar and using it as a spacer to make the collar larger.

Another picture of putting the collar on.

Here is a close up of the collar on Slick.  As you can see there is a narrower material holding together the two wider parts of the collar.  That narrower piece is what we took from the other radio collar to use as a spacer.  This picture really shows how much bigger we had to make the collar in order for it to fit around his neck!

A good shot of his teeth!  We didn't get a chance to pull a tooth from Slick either because he was starting to wake up and we needed to get the collar on.  Plus he was between 230 and 250 lbs (because he was waking up we also couldn't get an exact weight on him) and I didn't want to pull a tooth out of bear that large that was waking up and moving his head and legs!  Anyway, depending on the wear and color of the teeth we could probably get an approximate age, but I've never done that so don't have any guesses... And by the way, do you see that little took barely coming through the gums behind his upper canine?  That is the premolar tooth we pull if we are pulling teeth.  Bears have four - and upper and lower left, and an upper and lower right.  Any of those can be pulled.

This is a picture of the culvert trap that we used to catch Slick.  As you can see it is quite a bit bigger than the barrel traps that we used to catch BooBoo.  A bigger bear like Slick seemed more comfortable going in a larger trap like this, rather than the smaller barrel traps.  Hopefully this trap will come in handy again in the future!

Here we are! Slick and I.  He was already moving a lot at this point.  We still couldn't resist getting some more pictures with him.  (In fact we kind of had to sit on him when we were putting the collar on since he was moving so much!)

Sticking his tongue out :)

I figured I'd put this picture in there so you can get some what of an idea of what the telemetry equipment looks like.  I'm hold the antenna up in one hand and the receiver in the other hand.  Telemetry equipment comes in various shapes and sizes, but all does the same thing.  In this picture I was listening for BooBoo the day after we caught him to see if he was still nearby and to make sure that the radio part of the collar was working properly.

Well that's pretty much all I have for the bear captures.  All these pictures were from the Harvesons, except the one of Slick's teeth (that one was from Richard, another graduate student that was there helping).  I know that he has more, and so do Dewey and Travis who work at Black Gap.  I'll try to get those from them since I think they got some good ones!  When I'm home in August and see a lot of you maybe I can show you some more pictures if you wanted to see them all :)

I can't start trapping bears again until we get more satellite collars.  Like I said, they are about $3500 each!  That's not very easy to get when we are already limited in the funding we have for this project.  I've already started getting in contact with some other wildlife organizations hoping they can help support our project financially and/or donate some collars.  I'm also hoping that we'll have a few more by this fall so that I can start trapping again as soon as possible (that is, if the bears haven't moved somewhere else!)

I guess that's it for now.  I'm planning on coming home to PA August 1st (or close to it).  Bob and I are getting married exactly one month from today!!  I'm so excited for that, and so excited to see everyone who is coming :)  Can't wait!

Life at Black Gap

I know it's been way too long since I've posted anything.  Sorry about that.  I still don't have internet yet in the house I moved into last month and although I often go to the grad office a couple hours a day to do some things on the internet, I can never sit in that little cubicle for too long before I need to get out of there... so I just haven't written anything.  Even now I don't really feel like writing too much, so this will be a mostly pictures (and maybe some explanations) blog... which I'm sure none of you will complain about.

This week I am down at Black Gap trying to trap black bears!  I had trail camera's set up for about 2 weeks prior to coming down here to do the actual trapping.  I had ten cameras up and had bear pictures on every single one!  There are bear signs everywhere and I've also talked to 2 people who said they'd spotted 4 or 5 roaming through Brushy Canyon (which is the area on the Management Area that they usually stay within and where I have all the cameras and traps set up).  So although I've had the traps open for 2 nights so far and haven't caught anything, I am still optimistic... although a little frustrated!  Last night I actually got to see one for myself, and he happened to be right by one of my traps that I was coming to open!  I thought for sure he'd be in that one this morning, but unfortunately for me he wasn't.  Maybe I'll get him tonight...  Anyway, right now there are 2 different dirt tanks that still have some water left in them (Lavern and Rainbow).  We still haven't had any significant amount of rain since September, and everything out here is hungry and thirsty.  So of course those are great places to set up cameras!  The pictures below are all from the cameras I've had set up at various places along Brushy Canyon, including each of the traps that I have set.  Enjoy!

First, Lavern Tank...

Just a little cottontail that you can barely even see!  They're so cute :)

I had to look this one up because I wasn't sure what it was.  But I'm pretty sure now that it's a Harris' hawk.

Looks a lot like the same thing as above, but this is a red-tailed hawk.  See it's red tail?

I think this is a burrowing owl.  Not positive though since it's a little hard to key it out in black and white.

A badger!  I've only ever seen one badger in person and this is the first time I've ever captured a picture of one on the trail cameras.  I think they're so cool :)  Although I've heard they're not very nice...

The black stuff in this picture is water... can you guess what all those things are shining right at the edge?  Frog eyes!

I actually had several lion pictures from this camera.  I'm assuming they were all of the same one, and he was just hanging around for a couple days.  I thought this was a great picture though! Maybe the best lion one I have so far!  Still haven't seen one in person though...

I have a ton of bear pictures from Lavern Tank and wanted to put all of them on here!  But instead I went through and picked out the best ones... which is still a lot! I think the bear in this picture and the one right below are the same bear.  This one looks like it's in pretty good condition too!

This is the female and you can kind of notice in this picture that she even has white on her chest!  I love when black bears have that!

I think this might be her again.

You'll notice the black head sticking out of the water.  Having some fun in the pool!

Still hanging in the water.

No wonder they like this area... it must be nice for them to be able to go cool off in the water!

Just sitting by the water.

Shortly after this picture was taken, all the rest of the pictures were of the ground because this bear decided he didn't like having his picture taken and knocked the camera over!

Next location, the second trap along Brushy Canyon (I call it Brushy Draw Trap)

I think this is the female again.  You can see the bear trap in the background, but this is before I had them open.

I figured I'd include this picture because I thought it was cute.  The fox's ears look so big!

Next is a guzzler along Brushy Canyon (I call it Rainbow Guzzler because it's near Rainbow Tank)

This little guzzler may be enough for this one deer...

...but she's got to share with all her friends too!

Couple of foxes getting their fill.

I think skunk pictures are so funny.

This guzzler attracts a lot of vultures.  I know they're ugly, and smelly, and eat rotting flesh, but I think they're cool.  Plus I thought this one was funny.  Guess the one in the background figured he'd just get in the water completely.

Another lion just walking out of the picture.

And finally! A bear!

And two more bears!  Both look to be in good condition too!

Up next, is Rainbow Tank (the other dirt tank besides Lavern.  There's even less water in this one!)

This is the edge of the very tiny pool that is left of Rainbow Tank.  I actually got a couple pictures of roadrunners. Not sure if they're all the same one though.

Another skunk picture.  Look at that tail! And those tiny beady eyes!

I didn't get any full body shots of bears with this camera, but I did get a couple like this one and the one below of one scrambling out of the water.  Almost looks like it's slipping!

Next location is pretty close to the tank.  It's the trap that I have at Rainbow Tank which I cleverly call Rainbow Tank Trap.

This one was taken a couple weeks back and seems pretty big in this picture!

This picture and the one below were taken last night.  Literally an hour before I came to open the traps for the night!  I actually got to see this bear in person too! I was so sure that it would be in the trap in the morning but it wasn't :(  Maybe I scared it away.

Here is another location along the road down Brushy Canyon where I set up a camera because I always see bear prints.

Again, shortly after this picture was taken, the camera ended up on the ground...

And last, but not least, the location of the fourth bear trap.  I call this one Upper Brushy since its the furthest trap back in the Canyon. (Although it's the furthest one south, so maybe I should change that...)

A big jack rabbit.  I always get rabbit pictures from this camera.

And a bear! I love this picture.  Animal ears are so cute!

Well, this is exciting and frustrating all at the same time!  Obviously the bears are there and now I just need to convince them that they need to go into the traps!  I've only been at it for two days so I'm going to try not to get too discouraged this early on.  I'm just going to keep trying and see what happens.  It's difficult doing this, especially now, because the weather down here is so hot!  For the past month, or probably longer, the temperatures have been over 110 degrees in the Black Gap area.  It's usually over 100 by 10am and doesn't drop below 100 until AFTER the sun goes down.  Luckily we had some cooler weather blow through here last night (and by cooler I mean that it will only get to 105 today and not 120) so maybe I'll be able to keep the traps open a little longer in the morning and open them a little earlier in the evening.  I want to catch a bear so badly, but I will not put it at risk of roasting in the trap.  So although I know from my cameras that they are still moving around after 10am, it would just be too dangerous for them if we kept the traps open that late in the morning.  So now I just need to give them a reason to go in at night instead! (While also keeping the foxes from stealing my bait!!)  Hope you all enjoyed the pictures! I'll be sure to post any more good ones I get.  And if I do catch one I'll be sure to post the pictures of that!

Thanks for reading :)

Laura