July 5

This is a male eastern fence lizard (notice the blue stomach, females only have color under their neck).

Our last site was finally approved!! This site is called Long Tin, it’s right next the original Long Tin site (which is just a bunch of long pieces of tin so we couldn’t use this area because there wasn’t enough room). Today and tomorrow are long days. We checked the tins at the original Long Tin, which is now called Long Tin Tin and found a fence lizard (Sceloporus undulates). Then we went off to Long Tin Site and carried all the supplies in (40 coverboards, 49 Sherman traps, 4 Tomahawk traps, 20 buckets, stakes, shovels, and on and on, basically a lot of stuff). While the others were plotting out the arrays I set up the Sherman traps and coverboards and organized the other materials so it would be easier to setup once everything was mapped out. After a short break we dug the first set of pitfalls (5 buckets and 4 pieces of tin sheets). This took about an hour to do and we intended to dig more but by the time we finished everyone decided the rest could be finished tomorrow, no need to run ourselves down on the first day. We took a few hours break and headed back out later when the temp went down a little.
We opened all the traps at Four Mile, Dry Bay and Long Tin Site. All the mammal traps are good to go at Long Tin so only the pitfalls and weather station need to be done tomorrow. It may not sound like a lot but its going to be a long day because we need to check all the traps at the other two sites, check coverboards, process all the animals we catch and finish up Long Tin Site.
The two exciting things that happened today was we saw a bobcat on one of our motion cameras at Four Mile and then while driving to Four Mile we passed two adult feral pigs with about 7 babies pigs running through the woods.