Today was our last day of trapping and in my opinion we caught our coolest animal yet. At Dry Bay we trapped a female opossum (Didelphis sp.) with her newborn babies in her pouch. We sedated her as the protocol says and her babies were unharmed they were still moving and feeding. You could actually see the milk in their stomachs because their skin was still slightly see through and hairless. She did not have any Iscap on her. Once we were done we moved her off the array and kept a close eye her to make sure her and her babies were ok. We also caught our tailless rat, Cotton rat (Sigmodon hispiidus) again and for the first time I held a rat. We had her in a bag so we quickly checked her for ticks and then I took her out to release her, but I needed to work on my hold so we went through the basic procedure of checking her for ticks while I held her. We didn’t have to do anything else because we had all her data from two days before, it would just be unnecessary to put her under excess stress for redundant data.
At Four Mile we caught our Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) again and like our Cotton rat we checked it for ticks and let him go. We also caught two deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus). Like all of our other mammals we haven’t found any ticks on them so the debate still continues why we haven’t any ticks. Until next time…
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