7-26-23 Day 8: the last day of data gathering

THE LAST DAY.  I am sad, I am exhausted, I am a little excited to head home, I will miss this, I am sad.

So the today is set up as a typical day

• morning: small mammal traps
• afternoon:  hike to site 1 to gather data

Morning:

Because it was the 3rd day of this area (the Tristaina plot from Uri’s presentation), we will collect the traps as after we check them, clean them, and bring them back to base camp.

Today’s captures were decent:  we caught a bunch of bank voles (which we are all totally over with, we get so many – now if the capture is a bank vole, many of us don’t even wait around to watch the measurements – we just move on to find the next trap), but we also got a garden dormouse, which I think are super cute.  This one was feisty, watch the video

Garden Dormouse in the bag

And some last pictures of us at the site 💔

And then I was part of the cleaning team while half of the group went to the other 36 traps (which had yielded only 1 capture, so it should be quick).  4 of us and Jana parked ourselves at the stream and went to work – teamwork, it was quick!

We had finished with the small mammal plots so quickly that we headed up to site 1, which Uri said was “a super easy hike, maybe 10, 15 minutes up.”  Which…he was actually correct about this, it looked hard, but maybe because we’ve been conditioned to these steep slopes over the past week, it wasn’t hard.  In fact, we could see site #1 from the big site 9 hike:

Site 1 had 3 lakes to take water samples from, camera traps, nest boxes, dendrometers to read, a bird banding site, and tea bags to dig up.  So kind of the usual thing:  we split up between Jana and Uri to divide and conquer, but like previous Earthwatch trips I’ve been on, towards the end of the trip, once we become competent at the tasks, they will often further split us up to be more efficient, and so myself and these two other ladies were assigned the dendrometers on our own:

We had 11 trees to find, and Jana always was able to have her eyes on us while she worked with another group to find the tea bags.  So off the dendrometer team went!  Ewa had the GPS to find the trees, and then myself and “C” each read the dendrometer and compared the reading to make sure we agreed.  We also had to note if the dendrometer needed to be changed out, like this one (notice how it is off scale)

In addition, we had a reading on a tree that was LESS than the reading in June:  6/9 reading – 55.0 ; 7/26 reading – 54.7

So anything we felt was off/we felt the dendrometer needed to be changed, when we were done we had Jana come up to the trees and she confirmed what we thought, and then changed the dendrometers (she needed to change three of them), and then super interesting, she commented that for the tree that “shrunk” that happens sometimes when the conditions for the tree are not good for growth, and they really take into account the competitors for the tree around the original 10m radius they plotted.

The team with Uri took some great pictures while they were collecting their data, but they had 40 more minutes of hiking to do than we did, as the camera traps were pretty far away

By 2pm, we had our lunch, and then dendrometer tree team for site 1 followed Jana to a third lake, where we collected a water sample, and met up with the rest of the group down at a bird banding site.  Per usual, the hike down was gorgeous – in fact, the bird banding site and nest boxes for site 1 were pretty close to the small mammal plots (near the moo cows!)

Path down to the third lake

We did set up the bird banding, but unfortunately at this even higher elevation, it was so windy that we had no captures.  So we packed it up, and headed back to the hotel.  Our adventure ends 💔.  Reflection blog to follow.

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