Project Squirrel

Great article in the Portland Press Herald on Sunday, Nov 6, 2011 about our squirrel project.

http://www.pressherald.com/life/outdoors/Collared-and-tracked.html

PS.  For those who commented on the blog about spam…. yup, we need a serious filter.

While out doing telemetry, one of the squirrelologists decided to dig around at the entrance hole to a tree cavity.  This tree is in the central, perhaps busiest parts of campus.  He found half of a blue mussel shell.  Although this picture is not the best, close inspection shows no real evidence of having been cooked.  Perhaps a squirrel foraging on the beach carried it over?  A gull certainly could have carrier it over too.  The closest sandy beach is 0.31 miles away.  Hmmmm delicous.

Thanks to a herculean effort by UNE’s Neal Jandreau the squirrel telemetry map is now much more functional.  Our old technique could not handle the amount of data we were adding and this new system is nearly unlimited.  Lots more data to be added…. And one of our newly collared squirrels has slipped out of its collar in a tree cavity that is totally inaccessible.  Arg!

There is zero acorn mast in coastal Biddeford this Fall.  I first noticed the low mast last week.  I asked the campus grounds crew and they noticed the same thing.  Last year there were so many acorns on campus that students were slipping and falling down while walking between classes.  I rode in this morning and carefully looked at 12 miles of largely oak-lined streets.  I did not ride over a single stretch of pavement with acorns.  Hickories do seem to have mast, but they are fairly low in abundance.  I cannot imagine how caching animals are going to survive this winter….or even fatten up for that matter.  Heavy snows last winter, although not terribly cold, were tough on squirrels.  And that is with a huge mast year to prepare and cache.

Wow what a day.  After some incredibly accurate bait advice from Steve Sullivan (use shell-on nuts!), our traps have sure been favorites of campus squirrels.  In the mist and rain, today we put on three new collars, leading to a total of eight active collars to follow.  Outstanding work by the most valiant squirrelologist crew east of the Mississippi River!

We are changing the data upload for the telemetry map on the website, and it should be all caught up in a few days.