Rodent rendezvous, cont'd

Pigeon holing your wood rats isn't as easy as it used to be.

We can thank molecular biology for that.

As a result of recent investigations using traditional morphometric and molecular methods there are more species of wood rats than there were a couple decades ago, which is a good thing.

So here is Bryant's wood rat, which rendezvous'd with the other rodents at Badger Head Gulch.

It used to be called the desert wood rat (Neotoma lepida), which is the smallish and generally fair-haired wood rat of the greater southwest.

Professor Patton and his colleagues at UC's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley painstakingly revised the desert wood rats, and showed that the California populations deserve recognition as a separate species.

This is the first time we've photographed the species at Chimineas.

The mouse below,  however is in all probability the Tulare grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus tularensis).

It's hard to confuse this little snub-nosed predator with anything else in the area.

Onychomys torridus 

And for those of you who prefer birds to rodents we have the California towhee, which seemed to be drawn to the burrow.

California towhee

Reference

Patton, J. L.,  D. G. Huckaby, and S. T. Álvarez-Castañeda. 2008. The Evolutionary History and a Systematic Revision of Woodrats of the Neotoma lepida Group, UC Publications in Zoology, Volume 135. 

Rodent rendezvous

The large burrow at the mouth of Badger Head Gulch

The mouth of Badger Head Gulch was a broad dry-wash with a sandstone bank, and in that bank we found a burrow large enough to be a carnivore den.

Since Fred kept coming back to sniff the burrow, it became camera trap set 393.

The camera snapped 155 pictures during the next 42 days of August and September, and the site was bustling with rodent activity.

Four species.

I am not sure what the attraction of the site was to these rodents, but not a single carnivore made an appearance.

Heermann's kangaroos rats were the most common visitors.

Adult Heermann's kangaroo rat (Dipodomys heermanni)

Some of them were juveniles.

Juvenile k-rat before filling the external check pouches

You can tell them from adults by their fetching, sleek, big-eyed looks. Very cute.

after filling the cheek pouches

The California pocket mouse was the other heteromyid rodent that visited the site, and though it is widespread at Chinineas, it was infrequently seen at this site.

The California pocket mouse (Chaetodipus californicus)

The hoax makes the news

The photoshop hoax that used my camera trapped photo just became a story in the Yakima Herald.

Thanks to Scott Sandsberry for hunting me down and producing the article.

My blog hits are waning a bit, down to the high hundreds now, but I definitely picked up some new readers.

Thank you, artful photoshopper, wherever you are. 

A Lone Ranger in the gulch

The night flier and a grounded rodent.

A chance photo of a bat is always icing on the cake.

Identifying bats from photos like this one is a guessing game, but sometimes you get a hunch from some diagnostic feature like those teeny weenie bat feet.

The night flier with the Lone Ranger mask was possibly the Western small-footed myotis, Myotis ciliolabrum, which we have previously camera trapped at the Chimineas.

Whatever it is, the image brings to mind a staccato hi-frequency voice amidst the nocturnal buzz and chirps of crickets, a piping poorwill, and the imagined footfalls of predators in the arroyo.

And there were other stunt fliers.

Night life in Badger Head Gulch is a contrast to the hushed stillness of the summer afternoon when we set our camera.

The big cat cometh

August 12, 2010, 3:46:10AM

The big cat came 3 nights after we set the camera trap.

That was the same night that Studly unearthed the can of cat food.

The trail was hopping with activity before the cat's appearance, but white-footed mice, wood rats, and even cottontails make a meager meal.

The cat walked on by, and after its brief appearance activity on the trail was nil.

Coyote takes a sniff

August 18, 2010,  21:44:45

"Big ol' head, big ol' ears, skinny body," said the cowman, "must be a young dog coyote".

Meaning "male".

It was day 9 when the yote took a passing sniff at the bait rock, and neither he nor his kin were seen there again. 

Lil Red moves through

Twenty-eight days passed before a young Bobcat came down the gulch

It didn't stop to smell the cat food -- if it did, the camera missed it.

It was still on the move the next night,

and 26 minutes later it was back, retracing its tracks up the gulch.

A wood rat and this kangaroo rat were the only other mammals photographed.

These were quiet nights at an otherwise active camera trap set where we found rodents, cottontails, and Studly making numerous appearances.