Day two May 18

Day started really early so we could check the traps at Dry Bay, unfortunately we did not find any mammals but we found a lot of lizards including Anolis, 5-line and broad-heads in the pitfalls. All of which we processed and began toe clipping which is our way of identifying individuals we recapture. We found many deer ticks (Iscap) on these lizards, which we removed and placed in a vial with ethanol for later analysis in the lab.
Once we finished at Dry Bay we found out our second site (four-mile) was approved so we headed out to start mapping out the grid. First we picked the origin corner then using a meter tape made one row with seven points 15 meters apart, each marked by a flag. From each point we made a perpendicular line with 6 point 15 meters apart. At each point we setup and opened a Sherman trap, eight medium size mammal traps (Tomahawk Trap) were set up around the perimeter, and at each corner a pitfall trap was flagged. It doesn’t sound like much but this took several hours.
We then headed back to Dry Bay to open the Sherman traps for the second night of trapping and checked to pitfalls again to make sure nothing alive fell in during the day. We found 2 leopard frogs (Rana sphenocephala) and a southern toad (Anaxyrus terrestris) in the pitfalls. Frogs and toads are not our target species so we note that we found them and check them for ticks (which they don’t have, but we still have to check). The picture is of me with an Anolis.