[Comments in brackets are by Jeannine and Duane]
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From the Northern Crew:
We saw some promising deer activity across many of our trap lines. We put 5 new traps out today and set the 5 traps we put out last week. Hopefully, I’ll be sending out scans of our first data sheets soon!
In total we are now running 40 clover bait sites and 3 rocket net bait sites. One issue we’re dealing with regarding rocket netting is that any open space big enough for a net is getting deep snow drifts, and the deer aren’t crossing those areas. However, we’ve started getting some deer activity at one of the rocket net sites, and if that continues we’ll put out a net.
The weather has been cold and windy with some ice accumulation making things slick. Today the windchill hovered around 0 degrees as we were fiddling with trap triggers with bare fingers!
Cool things we saw out in the forest this week: chickadees shredding and eating the bones of a deer carcass and the tracks from a small mammal that got nabbed by a bird!
-Amanda
Northern Crew Leader
PGC Deer and Elk Section
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From the Southern Crew:
We have been continuing to check our bait sites in both Rothrock and Bald Eagle in hopes of pinpointing those that have consistent deer activity. Out of our 30 sites in Bald Eagle, we picked the top 17 and have all of our traps out.
There were still 3 traps in terrible shape that we all had been putting off fixing for the last 2 weeks. We had to do a complete teardown and re-build of those traps before they went out into the field. We ended up finishing our traps in the dark that evening but at least those 3 traps were finally fixed! The goal was to set our traps Friday/Saturday but with this “unpredictable snowstorm” coming through, we held back on setting our traps until we are sure we can get back to them.
We have been seeing a mixed bag of wildlife and their tracks in the snow. Multiple Barred owls, ruffed grouse, and a ton of tracks ranging from voles and mice to what we think are fisher!
Have a good week and drive safe in the snow!
-Levi
Southern Crew Leader
PGC Deer and Elk Section
