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.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled post titles taken from Zep songs to bring you this information about bats.

Since this is a weekend, I thought I’d take a break from the update things I’ve been doing to talk to you about one of my favorite mammals:

There are more species of Chiroptera than of any other order, barring Rodentia. That means that there are many, many bat species. Some of them, like the various species of flying fox (my favorite!), are unmistakeable. Others, particularly the microchiropterans, are only distinguishable from each other with careful measurements and examinations, which are difficult to undertake while the bat is alive. Bats are even harder to identify when they’re in flight, which is why it was so useful that we captured a few with nets in the lab. We’re pretty sure that they are both members of Myotis californica- the California myotis- but we can’t be 100% positive without seriously traumatizing these awesome little critters- and that’s no good.

Our little guy echolocating. All bats except for the Old World Fruit Bats (the flying foxes and their relatives) can echolocate.

Everybody knows that bats have wings, but their anatomy has a lot of other cool features, too! Most bats are insectivores. A few eat fruit, some eat fish, and one species, the greater noctule bat, is known to eat small birds. And of course, the famous vampire bat, of which there are three separate species, drinks blood. As a result, their mouths are highly specialized. It’s really easy to tell what a bat eats just by looking at its mouth. Most bats drink by taking in one drop of water at a time, gently skimming the surface of the water and coming back for another drop again and again until they’re full. Bigger bats, like the flying fox, get their chests and bellies wet and then lick the water out of their fur.

What we have here, though, are not fruit bats. These are species of the Myotis and Molosser genera.  Mostly we see the Myotis bats around; they live in the bat houses and in the walls of our lab. Molossers live out in our bat cave, though. More on that when we take our hike out there.

You can tell that he's not a Molosser because his uropatagium (the skin between legs and tail) runs the entire length of his tail; the Mexican Free-tailed Bats have, well, a free tail.

 Because bats are built for flight, every unnecessary body part is a hindrance to their survival. Their skeletal structure is greatly reduced, they rarely have any meaningful fur outside of their trunk region, and other structures, such as their reproductive parts, get absorbed into their bodies when not needed. Bats only have rudimentary genital structures when not in the breeding season; after they’ve mated, they absorb the external structures back into the body cavity, basically growing them again at the start of the next breeding season. We are about a month out of the local bat breeding season; as a result, our captured specimens were hard to sex accurately. We did class our bigger one as a male; the littler one was likely male, but we could not tell for sure.

As another adaptation to their aerial locomotion, bats have very little body fat. You know the standard upside-down bat with folded wings you see all the time? That’s actually how they keep warm. Even though their wings are paper-thin, as you can see in the picture below, they are able to keep themselves warm with them. They trap air under their wings and that keeps them warm all night. Bats are also one of the only species of terrestrial mammals that can’t carry lice. They can carry a whole host of other diseases, though, so don’t touch a bat and then rub your eye and don’t provoke one. Getting bitten is not a good idea.

Infant bats are born blind and hairless, much like most baby mammals. They hang onto the mothers’ stomachs all the time; the moms breastfeed in-flight.  This is an infant bat we found stuck on the wires of one of the bat houses at the field station. It is not uncommon for smaller bats to get caught in these wires; usually they can free themselves, but this one was far too small. The main swarm of bats had already left to feed, so we returned it to the bat house because we weren’t sure that the mother bat could get it loose. 

So yeah. Bats are awesome.

Seems that the wrath of the gods got a punch on the nose and it started to flow;

The internet’s been down for a while, so I haven’t been able to do a writeup. Hopefully this entry isn’t too long for you.

We’ve done mammals and birds as of this writing, and our first lab practical’s tomorrow. I’m not too worried. I kind of like doing these vaguely journal-esque entries; they’re a good mental break from studying scientific names and Latin words.

During lunch yesterday, we found a sagebrush lizard along the side of the cabins. He was a juvenile male and incredibly adorable. Male sagebrush lizards have blue bellies during the mating season. However, since this fella’s a juvenile and it is not sagebrush lizard mating season, his belly was pale blue.

We were also interrupted in the lab by a gopher snake who decided to come in and make herself at home. She was just a baby.

Today at lunch, we found another gopher snake. He was absolutely beautiful; I know it’s hard to see how shiny and smooth his scales are, but they just gleamed in the sun. He also had a beautiful pattern coloration; his scales started out black and went all the way to a reddish brown. He was probably about three feet long, maybe a little less. When we let him go, we put him in a tree. Gopher snakes are amazing tree-climbers. The tiniest snag in the bark can become a hold for them.

After we got out of the lab, most of the class went down to the beach to study our manuals some more. The dogs came with us, and one of them actually found something really interesting. I was throwing a stick for her, and instead of retrieving it like she normally does, she just stopped and pointed. I went to see what was up and discovered that a giant snake had crawled out of the surf and curled up on the stick. This is the other subspecies of Western terrestrial garter snake; the wandering garter.

Unfortunately, she was seriously injured. A bird of some kind had taken a bite out of her and dropped her. Her entire body wall was gone; while the viscera hadn’t been punctured, her stomach was bubbling. We ended up deciding that putting her down was better than letting her suffer further.

Last night, we went on a night drive. We piled into the back of the pickup and used lights to go hunting for critters. We caught… probably seventy or eighty Western toads in all and a Western pocket mouse. Pocket mice are so called because they have extendable cheek pouches like hamsters that they use to store seeds and grains. They either hoard these in larders in their dens or just eat them as they’re moving. He wasn’t too happy to be caught and almost got away from us on a number of occasions.

We just kept catching and catching loads like this.

Getting away from the zoological side of things, we found this projectile point. It is made of basalt and probably about three to four thousand years old. Due to the low lake levels, a lot more shoreline was exposed. It’s likely that this point hasn’t seen the sun for millennia.

We also saw two jackrabbits, but it turns out that it’s physically impossible to catch a jackrabbit in a butterfly net. Along the way back, we could see the black umbrellas of turkey vultures resting in the trees. Then today, we took three-and-a-half hour hike out to what are normally islands in the lake. Due to the droughts, the water is down very low, so they’re not islands but rather spits of land connected by sandbars. We were looking for birds and boy, did we see a lot of them! We saw a whole bunch of pelicans, California and ring-billed gulls. There were some nesting shorebirds- snowy plovers, spotted sandpipers, and American avocets. They were hanging out amongst the American white pelicans, which are large, loud, and smell disgusting. We found two sandpiper nests, as well as an avocet nest. Their eggs looked almost identical, but their nest construction techniques give the parent species away. Like all shorebirds, the eggs aren’t perfectly elliptical but are tapered at the end, which makes them less likely to roll off a rock. We also found an avocet nest with a dud egg, which is being emptied out to add to the collection. There are multiple ways to determine if an egg is viable or not. Incubated eggs that the parents haven’t abandoned are warm, and if you put a dud egg in water, it sinks.

Sandpiper nest.

Avocet nest. See how it's made out of bigger sticks?

Another sandpiper nest

On our hike, we took a look at some of the local invertebrate life. Eagle Lake has no bivalves, but the transparent shells of tiny, tiny snails cover everything and get down into your hiking boots. The butterflies here are gorgeous. The orange ones that hang out on our doorknobs are fritillaries, and today on the beach we caught a multi-tailed swallowtail. Or rather, he caught us; the wind was very strong today, and he just kind of blew right into us. 

Butterflies are pretty harmless, but these guys aren’t. I didn’t even know we had scorpions in the area.

We also saw a creche of Canada geese. A creche is a few breeding pairs of adults and their young. We actually managed to catch one of the goslings. He is probably about five to seven weeks old and cannot fly yet. He wasn’t too happy, but we let him go quickly enough.

We got to see a bit about the historical context of the area. Back in the 1910s, there was a series of projects up here to pump water out of the lake to communities in the desert to the southeast. A huge tunnel was built, as well as a small workers’ town. In 1929, the project was abandoned and nature reclaimed most of the project materials. However, a few trace elements still remain. This is the entrance to the tunnel.

And this is a remnant of the telegraph line they had leading down to the relatively nearby town of Susanville.

Perhaps the best thing we saw, though, was four juvenile bald eagles, no more than two years old. Their plumage was a mix between the first and second year plumage, and they were clearly from the same age cohort. At first, there were three and we thought they were siblings. Then a fourth one showed up, which means at least two nests in the same area. That’s exciting. At first, we just saw some hunting behavior with one eagle. He dipped down and nabbed himself a little fish, probably a tui chub. Then the others showed up and the hunting stopped. They were just swirling around in a boil on the thermals and then spiraling down towards the lake and pulling up just before splashdown. One of the smaller ones started doing that fake dive and the one we saw first followed her down. Just as she was about to pull out of her dive, he knocked into her, dunking her under the water, then flew back up. She managed to get herself out of the water, and then she chased after him for a while and then gave up, going back to the swooping on the thermals they seemed to be enjoying.

You can’t tell me they weren’t siblings.


As always, some landscape pictures to finish out. Just a couple this time, though; we’re all getting pretty familiar with the lake area. We might be going up to Modoc National Refuge this weekend to look at lava tubes, or we might stay here and go kayaking further down the lake. Either way, that’s going to be interesting.

 

The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake as the children of the sun began to awake.

So yesterday we learned about herps. For those who don’t know, that means reptiles and amphibians, making today pretty much my favorite day. I’d like to introduce you to my specimen.

                                           

  I was calling him 1016, but that wasn’t his real name. He was an iguana that somebody had as a pet years ago, and when he died, they skeletonized him and donated him as a research specimen. He’s got a pretty charming little face. A real sweetheart. I bet he was pretty great when he was alive, too. Somebody loved him enough to give him immortality- here I am talking about him and taking his picture to share with you almost twenty years after he entered the collection.

I also want to show off another skeleton I worked with today. This is the rattle off of a Great Basin rattlesnake. We’ve yet to see one of those alive, but it’s likely we’ll see a few when it gets a bit warmer.

During the afternoon, we went fish seining and field herping. We did this in an honest-to-god meadow, which I was gleefully running through (along with the others) until I fell and scraped up my leg. You heard it here, folks: frolicking in a meadow is literally too dangerous for me. But it was a really good time.

 

                                     

The drive to the meadow felt like something out of a Disney theme park or an African safari. The land here just looks so… surreal. Like a really good landscaper planned it. But aren’t the best of them really just following nature’s random patterns anyways? We all crowded into the back of a pickup truck, then drove for the better part of an hour down the mountain to the start of a stream that wouldn’t look out of place in a fairytale. I kept waiting for a wolf wearing drag to come sprinting out of the trees or something.

We set up these big seine nets in the river, then a bunch of us ran downstream and herded everything towards them.

Setting up a seine.

Fish in a bucket.

We caught bullfrogs in both their larval and adult stages, Lahontan red-sides, speckled dace, and the rare-to-this-area Paiute sculpin.

Bullfrog larva, also known as a tadpole. They stay tadpoles for about two years and eat the tadpoles of other frogs, making them a dangerous invasive species.

Another tadpole; you can see his developing legs.

Newly-metamorphized bullfrog. It'll get a lot bigger.

The bullfrog and I were friends.

Speckled Dace

Paiute Sculpin

In addition to these creatures, this area is also known for its dragonflies and birds. Birds are exceptionally difficult to photograph, especially with an iPhone camera. So are dragonflies.

Dragonfly nymph.

Find the dragonfly.

We also caught two gorgeous western terrestrial garter snakes- the elegans variety, not vagrans. This one was really very docile and followed us for a while even after we let her go.

                                                   

AAs we explored, we came across a lot of interesting little things you'd miss if you weren't looking for them. For example, delicious cattails.

And a Brewer's Blackbird nest.

A lot of the plants we saw were interesting, too. We saw a lot of star duckweed and watercress. I would have taken pictures, but you know those as pond scum. This one, however, is a lovely plant. It's called eglantine, or wild rose, and it grows everywhere up here.

At the end of the day, we found a woodpecker nest in a dead snag. As we were looking at it, it toppled over! That's Russel and Michael (the professor's kid) attempting to put it back up. They... sorta got it. That's definitely not where it was when it started...

 This next bit's a bit gory, so if you don't want to see dead fish, scroll down until you see the trees again. Part of the field school- the part that was really attractive to me- was that we're doing more than just zoology and archaeology. We're learning how to prep specimens for museum work as well, which is pretty vital to what I eventually want to be doing. What we started yesterday was the prep work on four rainbow trout. We gutted them, picked through their organs, sexed them, and then laid them in enamel pans. Then we covered them with rocks so that the raccoons and the skunks wouldn't get at them but so that the flies and beetles could. Since we don't have a dermestid colony up here, we're just letting nature do the work.

Now that you've suffered through that, have some trees! Like I said, this landscape's unreal.