Almost one year later?

Wow..time flies. I am not so good at updating this Blog site. But I will aim to improve things this field season. Last year was a success with many flying squirrels captured on our grids and lots of night tracking sesssions! The night tracking sessions were the most interesting work that we have done so far. Instead of using triangulations to estimate the locations of flying squirrels (which is prone to error) we decided to track squirrels by following them in the forest and use head lamps to observe their behaviour. We were able to get quite close to many of the squirrels and observed them eating tuffles, mushrooms, buds, and fir cones. In many cases the flying squirrels seem quite undisturbed by our presense and went on doing their thing. The only difficult part was when they took off quickly and we were left in their dust. As expect males had the largest home ranges with some of the home ranges over 20 hectares in size. One little guy moved over a kilometer in a half between two mature forest patches. I suspect that he was born at one of the sites and was trying to decide where to settle down.

Here is a picture of one squirrel eating a cone a night. Here name is Fanny. You can see the radio collar underneath her neck. Mike Avery took this picture.