Ringtail on the beat

Here's some night action on a seasonal creek in Butte County, California.

Gray foxes, striped skunks, and raccoons use the creek bed as a thoroughfare, and are the most frequently filmed camera-trapped visitors.

Bears and bobcats stop to drink and then cross it and move on up the slope.

When I get better video of these common visitors I will post it.

This is the only footage of a ringtail I've gotten on this creek, but it is one of the more satisfying clips.

This ringtail didn't want to get its feet wet, unlike its relative the raccoon with its underwater hand-jive routine.

As you can see, it's a good rock-hopper.

In the family way

We're hoping this badger is in the family way, and we can't even prove it's a she-badger.

But she looks feminine, and she is doing all the right things. 



She's spending an awful lot of time in this one burrow at the Chimineas Ranch, and the burrow has a huge tailing of fresh dirt.

And it's baby-badger-time-of-year. They give birth in March and April.

With the help of our trusty friend Craig, and his assistants, RandomTruth and I spent a few days at the ranch last month setting cams at carnivore dens.

At this promising den I set a Sony s600 for stills, and a Bushnell Trophy for videos of playful badger babies.

Regrettably, the Trophy can't be set for night time only, so there's been a flurry of false triggers in the heat of the day.

Craig, our good man in Chimineas has been cleaning the lenses and checking the memory cards.

Here's his most recent message.

"It seems that the badger shots decreased quite a lot over the course of the month.  I'm hoping it's because she had youngsters. 

As the badger usage decreased, Heermann's kangaroo rat visitation increased.  There are many shots of them bouncing around the entrance to the den. 

When I reset the camera, I saw that there was a rodent hole just above the badger den.  It seems unwise for a fossorial small mammal to have a den next to a badger den, but kangaroo rats were never known for their smarts.  

Raccoons visited the den and sniffed around a few times over the course of the set.  I still think that the badger is using this den."  

Knock on wood, my friends.

Let us hope the blessed event has transpired and that mom is blissfully nursing her litter.

Going for shrew and bagging shrew

A chance encounter between two Trowbridge shrews (tentative id) 

Humbolt County, April 2013:


Question: Why don't camera trappers photograph more shrews?

Answer:  They aren't looking for schtinkin' shrews, because they aren't interested in shrews.

Who cares about little tiny ferocious mammals that eat 1.5 times their own weight a day in insects, spiders, centipedes, and worms?

Shrews may be one of the most abundant predators in woodland habitats, but it's their small size that makes them hard to photograph.

Camera trappers focus on the larger animals they know, and when camera traps are set for larger species shrews are usually undetectable.

Shrews live in a different time-space continuum, and I've photographed only a few by mistake.

They are usually a speck in the overall image, often partially hidden in leaf litter, and they are hard to identify. That's why most good pictures of shrews are nature-faked.

But they are intriguing subjects, and a few months ago I set a camera specifically for shrews.

I knew it might be a waste of time, but I staked the camera close to a rotting redwood log, and clawed away the surface litter, thinking the disturbance might attract a hungry shrew.

The batteries lasted 70 days, and there were 83 photos.

But only three pictures were of animals, and as far as I can tell, all were Trowbridge shrews with bald tails [yes, older shrews can lose their bicolored tail pattern to baldness].

The surprise was a pair of shrews having an altercation.

Going for shrew and bagging shrew may have been a stroke of good luck.

I'll have to repeat the exercise several more times to convince myself that I really know how to hunt shrew.

Burmese trail muggers

From a camera trappers perspective Burmese villagers fall into three categories.

Dream walkers don't notice or don't care about the camera -- they just want to get home with their loads of bamboo or firewood. 

Poachers steal the camera because they don't want to be caught poaching.

And Burmese trail muggers strike poses hoping they'll be discovered by Hollywood.  

Epitaph for a discarded book

Bound in orange buckram, my copy of Walter Dalquest's Mammals of Washington once belonged to the Port Angeles Public Library. 

The book went out of print in the 1950s or 60s, and the Librarian deemed it an irreplaceable reference, meaning it could no longer be checked out.

How often it was used is anyone's guess, but one reader scrawled a hand-written note to future readers, risking a fine and the librarian's scorn.

Eventually the book competed with more popular volumes for shelf space, and the librarian deaccessioned it and stamped DISCARD on the title page.

It became fair game for prowling used book dealers, and whoever bought it made a tidy profit.

You see, the codger paid $25 for this beat up copy of a discarded library book.

Some would consider it politically incorrect. It shows recently killed animals, describes trapping techniques, and lists pelt prices of bygone days.

But Mammals of Washington helped to set scientific standards for state mammal guides.

True, some scientific names have changed, and taxonomists have added several additional species of small mammals.

At least one charismatic mouse escaped treatment; the intrepid Dalquest apparently found the red tree vole too hard to find.

Mammals of Washington has detailed descriptions of geological history, climate and vegetation, life zones and ecology, and physiographic provinces, and it discusses the emigration of the state's mammal fauna from the Great Basin, the Pacific Coast and the Rocky Mountains.

Its distribution maps are based on specimen locations or verifiable records  -- the gold standard.

In 1936 Mammals of Washington was the dream of two young naturalists from the University of Washington's Zoology Department: Dalquest was a 19-year-old undergraduate, and the 30-year-old Victor Scheffer was completing his Ph. D.

They drew their inspiration from Vernon Bailey's Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon (1936),  and W. B. Davis's Recent Mammals of Idaho (1939).

A checklist of Washington's land mammals had been published in 1929, but Mammals of Washington was yet to be written.

The call of gainful employment soon lured Scheffer away from the project, but he continued to help the young Dalquest who toiled on with the dream.

In his memoir Adventures of a Zoologist, Scheffer noted that Dalquest the workhorse had "a charming disregard for tradition and rules".

He was also a multi-tasker.

He spent the next four years taking courses at the university, and in his free time collected mammals all over the state of Washington, a commendable achievement for a kid in his twenties.

More remarkable is that he also found time to court Miss Peggy Burgner.

And it never hurts to be on the good side of your girl friend's brother. Dalquest enlisted Robert Burgner to help him study shrew moles on the university campus.

Walter and Peggy married when the statewide field work was finished in 1940, but he was saddled with an overwhelming volume of data.

It was too much to turn into a thesis in a reasonable amount of time, so he whipped out his masters thesis on geographic variation in snowshoe hares.

Then came December 7, 1941. Dalquest's daughter Linda writes,

"..dad went down the next day to enlist in the Navy, but during his physical exam they detected a partial hearing loss in one ear . . . the doctors discovered some plant seeds in the ear – apparently similar to what we call foxtails in Texas – which he probably acquired while camping outdoors.  Apparently they had punctured the ear drum, and he was turned down by the Navy and ended up working in the shipyards during the war. 

Mammals of Washington was published 7 years later.

It contained enough scholarship for an advanced degree, and would have been the academic swan song of many other students.

Dalquest tackled two more faunal studies of similar scope in Mexico before getting his Ph D. for Mammals of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.  

Mammals of Washington contains some amusing lessons about field work, like, never reach into a burrow for a sprung trap . . . "A female long-tailed weasel promptly fastened its teeth into my forefinger and clung on, bulldog fashion, to be lifted into the air with the attached trap swinging".

He was a pro at finding shrews and moles, fished 9 Townsend moles from the bottom of a well near an old cabin in the woods. By identifying road killed moles he discovered differences in above ground activity between species. (Coast moles don't get the "Firestone press").

He was the first to discover a nest of the mystifying American shrew mole (Neurotrichus gibsii) -- of all places in a hollow stump above ground, and he corrected the anatomist A. Brazier Howell, who claimed that shrew moles can't assume the picket-post (=bipedal) posture.

He proved it with a photograph in a separate paper devoted to the biology of the species.


Dalquest's colleagues Norman Horner and Fred Stangl noted that the old Swede had the hard driving work ethic of early American naturalists . . . "his personal vertebrate catalog number exceeded 24,000, and 50% of those were mammalian skins—a level of collecting activity rivaled by very few". 

My discarded copy of Mammals of Washington is a labor of love and remains fine fodder for mammalogists.

The loss of the Port Angeles Public Library was the gain of a grinning old camera trap codger.  

[Many thanks to Drs Linda Schultz and Frederick Stangl for information about Dalquest.]

References

Bailey, V.  1936.  Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon.  North American Fauna 51:1-416.

Dalquest, W.W. and D.R. Orcutt. 1942. The biology of the Least Shrew Mole, Neurotrichus gibbsii minor. American Midland Naturalist,  27: 387-401.

Dalquest, W.W. 1952. Mammals of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. Louisiana State University Studies, Biological Sciences Series 1:1–229.

Davis, W. B. 1939.  Recent Mammals of Idaho. Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho. 400 pp.

Horner, N. V. and  Stangl, F. B., Jr.,  2001.  Obituary. Walter Woelber Dalquest: 1917–2000.   Journal of Mammalogy, 82(2):604–612.

Scheffer, V.B. 1982. Adventures of a zoologist. Encore Editions.

Taylor, W.T. and W.T. Shaw. 1929.  Provisional list of the land mammals of the state of Washington. Occasional Papers Charles R. Conner Museum. No 2:1-32.

It wasn't pleased to see me

It was only last week -- we were driving back to camp through the western hills of Burma when I spotted a kid on the road carrying a big cat.

It didn't look exactly like a house cat, so I asked the driver to stop -- "Yeppa, yeppa" and jumped out with my camera.

The boy was clutching a jungle cat (Felis chaus), one of Asia's most widespread small cats (Egypt to SE Asia and SW China).

It wasn't pleased to see me and meowed constantly, but it didn't attempt to escape.

Normally I would have asked more questions, but I was part of a group, and the group had a busy agenda.

My guess is that the cat's mother was caught for the pot, and the boy raised the kitten.

Only a hand-reared jungle cat would be so tame.

In a patch of horsetail

 I have been stumbling into patches of horsetail for several years now.

You know the stuff . . . scour brush . . . puzzlegrass . . . Equisetum.

It's a bizarre and ancient family of plants, a living fossil.

I think I read somewhere that native Americans used the gritty stems as toothbrushes. If true, they had calloused gums and no tooth enamel.

Horsetail grows in moist soil, in small patches or large monocultures -- Jurassic gardens, so to speak, and an authentic venue for war games with dino toys.

I've wondered what if anything lurks in horsetail, until last September when I finally got around to setting a camera trap in a stand near the Mad River.

It was on a silted flood bench, measured about 60 by 30 feet, and was surrounded by riparian woodland -- sword fern, alder, willow, Ceanothus, and bay laurel.

It was a troublesome set.

The camera happened to be one of my early constructions with a rocker switch on the bottom, not a recommended design for a macro-set with the camera sitting on the ground.

Two months later (early November) I found that I had inadvertently switched off the power when I set the camera.

I set it again and waited another 75 days.

The battery pooped out after 53 days, but I was gruntled to find there were 260 exposures.







The usual suspects, woodrats and deer mice had evidently triggered many of the 110 blank exposures,

but we also got opossums, raccoons, bobcats, and a spotted skunk.








And a song sparrow.













Many of the larger mammals were captured as partial images, because this was a macro-set, and my real goal was -- you guessed it -- shrews and white-footed voles.

So I was pleased to get the shrew at the top of the page.

As for its identity, we can dismiss two possibilities.

The marsh shrew has a dark belly, nearly as dark as its back, and the fog shrew has a unicolored tail.

That leaves us with the Wandering shrew and the Trowbridge shrew, both of which have bicolored tails and winter coats of gray.

The site was suitable habitat for both species.

If we can find an even bigger patch of horsetail, I'm game for another set.