My mother might not want to read this one...

I haven’t had too much time to write lately because we’ve been working really hard this week on both projects and prep for our next lab practical. My project… well, it involves fire and I’ll tell you more about it later. But what I want to share now is a part of somebody else’s project. I’m not going to go into any details whatsoever, but this morning, I went along with her when she went to check her mammal traps. I’m sharing these pictures because I figured it would be a lot of fun for you to see some of this area’s adorable rodents.

This critter is a Great Basin pocket mouse. Pocket mice are called so because, like hamsters, they have pouches in their cheeks in which they can store food to hoard for later. This handsome gent had some of the most glorious whiskers I've ever seen.

This lady with the massive ears is a piñon deer mouse. You can tell she’s a piñon because of the satellite dishes on top of her head. The bottom picture shows them better.

 Once we fished her out of the trap and released her, she was quite docile. She sat on this stem of sagebrush for a while and let me pet her. Mice have some seriously soft fur. Softer than cats even. It felt like petting downy feathers.

 This one was a surprise. These traps are baited for mice and that is what they usually attract. But this trap was extra-heavy… due to the very surprised and very feisty chipmunk that had ended up inside of it.

 This is a young female yellow pine chipmunk and man, was she angry.

 The last mouse we have here is a North American deer mouse. This one is a very light colored female. North American deer mice have relatively short tails compared to the other deer mice. This one ran about for a while before disappearing down a hole. At one point, she ran onto my boot and started to tug at the hem of my jeans, then changed her mind and ran off. Sadly, my picture of that is very blurry.

All in all, there were fifteen animals caught in the traps. Most of them were deer mice and were recaptures. To mark them, we cut a patch in their hair. These mice all have double-layered coats, and when you snip off the outer pelage, the dark fur underneath makes a clear indicator of this mouse having had human contact before. 

It’s going to be a while before I get the chance to write again. We’re taking a three-day camping trip up into southern Oregon. Lovely, wild country, but very little internet access.