River Otter Dissection

Last weekend (September 28-29-30, 2012) I travelled back west to the Finger Lakes region to visit my family and some old classmates and professors. A class I took 2 years ago, in the fall of 2010, was in progress that weekend at FLCC's Muller Field Station on the South end of Honeoye Lake.

Muller Field Station - 9/29/2012

The class, Wetland Mammals, is taught by Professor John Van Niel, and Conservation Tech Sasha Mackenzie. It's taught over 2 weekends, where the class eats, sleeps, and learns at the field station. I believe there are also some meeting times outside of those weekends in the traditional classroom. All in all, it ends up to 3 credits worth of face time with John and Sasha, and one of the best classes I've taken yet. And I took it the first round, when they were still figuring out how to run the course...I could tell this past weekend they really had established the class and articulated what they expected from their students.

I was barely able to contain my jealousy, I'm not sure those FLCC students realize how lucky they are to have classes like this available to them! :)

The part I wanted to blog about from my experience hanging out with them for the day on Saturday (9/29/12), was the river otter dissection I got to watch. The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation Region 8 Furbearer Biologist, Scott Smith, came to guest speak on the ins and outs of trapping in New York. I first met Scott when I was a student in this course, and have since gotten to work with him a couple times (Honeoye Fur Auction). He's a great biologist, down to earth, and really willing to talk about his job. He's great addition to the course.

 

Scott ran through different types of traps, methods of making a set, using scent lures, the biology of how the animals actually die (FYI, it's not drowning, it's high levels of CO2 in the blood stream), and set them all up so we could see how it was done. He explained the necessity of trapping: I am not a hunter or a trapper, but I realize the importance of these methods of harvest for managing these species of wildlife.

Scott also brought with him some road-killed specimens of interest. It's great for FLCC's conservation faculty and staff and the local DEC biologists to have such a close relationship. The students get to totally take advantage of that relationship and shadow the biologists, and also get cool presents like dead beavers, bobcats and otters delivered to them in class!

Sasha and student Rodney checking out the beaver.

Bobcat

...and student Luke with the river otter (and a couple of really excited classmates behind him)!

A side note before I talk about the dissection:

One of these is the tail of the beaver, and one is the sole of a porcupine foot.

Both have similar textures, and are REALLY cool! Glad I got the check them out.

(The porcupine picture was from the Porcupine Paws entry I wrote recently..)

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 **WARNING**

The following pictures will be increasignly gory.

If you have a weak stomach, please don't continue.

This otter was killed by a car, retrieved by the DEC and saved for educational use. It's opportunities like this that allow students an up-close chance to appreciate a rare, BEAUTIFUL animal that's slowly making it's way back up in numbers.

 

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So Scott took the otter, and strung it up by a foot for easy access and leverage while skinning.

 

 

Once he made it down the tail, around the ankles, and around the vent, it was just like "pulling a sweatshirt off"...gross, but I guess true. An analogy we could all relate to :)

On one leg, he found these parasites. I don't know what they were, but it seemed very strange to me that they were between the skin and muscle. I would expect to find them in the organs, but Scott seemed unsurprised.

 

Once the skin was totally removed (it was going to be saved, tanned, and used as an educational skin), we moved the group outdoors. A naked, dead, thawing river otter smells a bit...ripe...and we needed that fresh air.

 

Scott took the lead on the dissection, with John as back up...and as you'll see in a few pictures, a ton of student help as well!

 

Working up the animal: I thought these round, bulbous features were testicles, making this a male otter. WRONG, these are scent glands. Otters are in the Mustelidae family, along with weasels, mink, fisher, badger, and wolverine. All are stinky critters, and possess this scent gland. Both males and females have these glands, and this, by the way is a female!

 

Scott cut through the sternum and through the diaphragm to expose the internal organs.

 

Kidney(s?)...very different than what we "know" kidneys to look like. This is was all segmented and in one group, rather than separated into 2 halves.

The heart- we all agreed it seemed relatively large for the size of the animal. A human heart is about the size of our fist, right? Well I imagine if this otter made an adorable little fist with it's paw, this heart would easily be twice as large.

Gall bladder- full of bile, which is apparent because of the color of the organ.

We had a visiting professor, Lisa Tracy (North Hennepin Community College, MN) with us for the weekend, a professor of biology, who had a lot to share. It was really neat to have John (the wildlife educator), Scott (the practicing biologist), and then Lisa (the lab biology educator) all on the panel dissecting the otter. Having taken this class 2 years ago, and watching John go through this alone, I had something to compare to. Lisa talked a bit about function of the parts, and how they connect.

 

THEN...they took the large intestine and stretched it out. This picture only shows part of the students holding it. To my left there were 2-3 other people standing, stretching the organ out. It was REALLY impressive!

OK, this is the part that got me and made me walk away for a minute.

They began squeezing the contents of the intestine out. Along the way were various levels of digested food matter. Otters eat fish and small invertebrates, which stink on their own. This was truly a smell to behold in person. I'm sorry I can't convey it through my blog.

Jackie sorted through a bit of the "scat", and found these indigestible parts. There's a bone there on the right sticking up, and the thing in the middle looks like part of some kind of carapace. Belonging to perhaps an insect or maybe a crayfish?

It was really cool to see all the hands in on the dissection. Morbidly, it was like kids and play-dough! I love this kind of learning, and haven't really had the opportunity to "get dirty" yet here at Cobleskill. I know it's gross to look at, but for people like us who want to learn to be biologists, this is a golden opportunity.

 

 

 

That pretty much ends the dissection, and I walked away shortly after the squeezing of the intestines. I'm pretty tough, and can handle doing this kind of stuff. But the smell was a little overwhelming, kudos to those who stuck it out!

 

 

I miss this place, but I must move on for now!

And come back to visit as often as I can.

Thanks to John and Sasha for letting me hang out for the day!

 

New Camera-trapped Species!

 I've been in my new house now for about 4 weeks, and have had 2 camera traps (Cuddeback Attack Flash, Moultrie Game Spy D-50) set up on the property. We were lucky enough to find a house with 7+ acres for us to play on. It's been great actually, I forgot how much I missed it when I was living in an apartment complex last year.



 Anyway, I checked my Cuddeback camera the other day and was rewarded with a bunch of nice pictures.

This camera has been plaguing me since I got it, but it has been taking pictures lately like it's supposed to. Still no video, I don't get it, but I'm too aggravated to send it back to Cuddeback AGAIN and be without a camera for 3 weeks. The
Moultrie is bad too. That's another story.

So I checked the camera, and here are my best shots:

A nice action shot!

I think this is a Black-capped Chickadee because I think I can make out that black cap and white chin.

SOMEONE got a eyefull.

This is a racoon, I got a picture right before this of the 'coon, it just didn't make the cut for this entry.

A fawn with her spots still...when do they lose them?

Mystery object.

 I have no idea what this is, Mady and I were both away from the house at this time. It's a mystery...

My landlord's dog, Pumpkin, who took himself on a walk the other night.

A family of 3 'coons!

And finally, my GRAND FINALE!

A bobcat (Lynx rufus)!!!

 

I literally could not believe my eyes, when I saw this picture show up on the viewer I use in the field. The camera said 2 images had been recorded since I last checked it. That usually means it's of me setting it or checking it. Not this time! One was me, and one was this bobcat! Where I'm from, in Western NY, bobcats are quite rare. The closer to the PA border you get, the more chance you have of spotting one.

 

 

 

This bobcat below had it's picture taken at the Muller Field Station (Canadice, NY) this summer. That's as far North as I've heard of one being in that region, and a lucky facutly member was able to get this picture of one!

 

Photo credit: John Van Niel, Canadice, NY

 

 

 I've not been so lucky, UNTIL this weekend. I'm still in shock! I hope he or she comes back so that I can keep writing about NY's only wild cat.

 

 

 



A Paddle at Dusk and Beaver Heaven

Last evening (3/23/12), a friend and I went to the Muller Field Station that our college owns for a early spring canoe paddle. It's been so warm (actually HOT) this past week, that last night was so pleasant. Each night the sun goes down just a bit later and later...so we had until around 7:30 of good daylight. This time of the year is one of my favorites. I feel like there is so much color popping out, maybe it's the contrast between the dead drab vegetation from the last growing season. Or maybe new life just has a bit brighter color to it.

What my eye has been drawn to in particular, has been that amazing chartreuse color of the willows budding out. There are quite a bit of them at the field station, as it is in a swamp. Willows love moisture, we have happy willows :)

Wednesday March 24th, 2012 - Happy weeping willows (80*F that day!).

Melissa, my friend and I, are wildlife-loving nerds...so we were hoping for a quiet, calm paddle in the swamp. And hoping for sighting of a wetland mammal. I'm aching to see a river otter, which DO live in the Finger Lakes region, and specifically in this very swamp. Spoiler alert: we didn't see a single mammal. We did get to enjoy some water birds and sign left behind by wetland-dwelling mammals though.

On each side of the channel we were paddling in, were scent mounds GALORE! I get particularly excited about these little piles of gunk because I've learned so much about them in class, and they can tell us so much about where the beavers are, how active they are, and possibly individuals monitoring them (if I were set a camera trap on one...and I have in the past!). A scent mound looks like this:

Melissa is so excited about scent mounds!

A scent mound is mud dredged up from the bottom of the water body, may it be a pond, stream, swamp...whatever. The beaver uses this pile of mud to perhaps: mark territory, deposit scent, or both. Beavers work hard to build a suitable habitat for themselves, and then must defend it. I'm not actually sure if beavers participate in paw-to-paw combat, but they heavily mark and scent their territory.

Beavers have a gland, the castor gland. I'm sure many people have heard of it, even if you aren't completely aware of it's purpose. It's this little pair of glands on either side of the anus that emits this oily, sometimes slimy-gooey stuff. Castor stinks. I wish that I could make my blog a scratch-n-sniff, so that we could all enjoy it together! This scent lure to the left is one that I've been using. It is literally ground up castor gland from the beaver. Often, the castor gland is worth MORE than the pelt at a fur auction. It's very reliable when used for trapping beaver. So this scent mound in the picture above probably smelled just like this scent lure. I couldn't logistically get to it to smell, as I was in a canoe, and really didn't want to take a dip in the swamp. I would have smelled it though, I'm a firm believer in experiencing the wild with as many senses as possible. I HAVE smelled scent mounds in the past, and they have reeked of castor. I guess I should also mention that river otters make scent mounds as well. Without staking out surveillance on these mounds for days, I can't FOR SURE say they were created by one or the other. But, I'm confident in saying that I observed several other types of beaver sign nearby, so that the odds of the mounds being beaver, are high.

We continued on our paddle, noticing here a scent mound, there a scent mound, everywhere a scent mound. We passed several beaver lodges, and one seemed to be the grand daddy, Taj Majal of the beaver lodges we saw.

This was probably 5 feet tall, 10-15 feet wide at the base, and there were fresh additions of chewed sticks to the structure. You can see them above, they are lighter in color than the older, aged sticks. Also, in the foreground, bottom right, are more sticks coming out of the water. This is what I believe is/was a cache. Beaver cache food for the winter. They don't hibernate, but are well adapted to life under the snow and ice on the water. This winter I don't think they really had needed to prepare like this, but who knew this would be the warmest March in years? So the beavers collect fresh, leafed out branches, and then stick them perpendicularly into the mud of the water. The ice then comes in and freezes it in place. The beavers have an underwater entrance/exit to their lodge, and then at their whim, will swim out to their cache of food, and have access to food all winter long.

This is what I'm calling Beaver Heaven from today on. As always, in the picture, the amazing-ness of this area is lost. It was a wide open space, easy to navigate. To my right, the channel cut through the swamp. All along the waters edge: scent mounds and slides in/out of the water. To my left, you can see a beaver felled and chewed tree. On the right in the image you can see another beaver lodge. This one appeared to have been abandoned. Although there was fresh sign within close proximity of the this lodge, the lodge itself was unkempt, and there were no fresh chews within its structure.

For a bit of scale, I ve stood on top of the beaver lodge. Had I felt this was an active beaver lodge, I would not have stood on it. Partially out of respect for the animals, and partially because I'm scared of beavers. I love them, and love learning about their amazing adaptations and workmanshp. I had a terrifying experience as a child, though, with a beaver, and also as an adult canoeing in a very similar setting. I respect The Beaver.

I found this above scat on the beaver lodge that I was standing on. I am very hopeful it is beaver scat. I mean, wouldn't YOUR first impression be that scat found on top of a beaver house was deposited BY a beaver?! But, ever the skeptic I am, I can't just believe that it is. I actually didn't want to post about it until I was sure, but I'm hoping those out there who are full of crap can lend me a suggestion! :)  My go-to book has become Mark Elbroch's Mammal Tracks & Sign guide. The shape and size are consistent with the beaver scat images shown in his book. BUT it's very white and there is hair in it! My little experience with scat ID tells me that this looks like the calcified scat of a carnivore. But...but...I found it on a beaver lodge! I'm going to pick the brain of my college's local beaver expert, Sasha Mackenzie, a staff member of our Conservation Department, a wonderful naturalist, and a dear friend. And she is way more skeptical than I, and has double the experience. Anyone else care to chime in? Any and all thoughts are welcome. I guess beavers have to groom themselves, so they COULD have their own hair in their scat?

A fresh beaver-felled tree.

Fresh woodchips at the chewing site. What compels them to chew the log in the middle of the trunk? I understand that they chew at the base of the tree, to fell it and add to the dam or lodge. Or they chew along the length of a branch to get all the cambium off, which they eat. But chewing through the midsection of a tree? Seems like wasted effort to me. Unless this tree is to big to move in one chunk, maybe they have to section it up.

I love the texture of beaver chews. Their teeth leave amazing grooves in the wood. Just thinking of doing that damage with my own teeth makes me cringe. I found a 7 foot long branch that had VERY recently been stripped of it's cambium. Some of the the gaps between the chews show green cambium still. I brought it home with me and might try to fashion it into something, to have this awesome texture in my home!

It was such a great night. We found and saw many other things, but they will have to wait until another posting perhaps. Thanks to Melissa for joining me on hopefully one of many future dusk paddles!

An Afternoon at the Muller Field Station

This semester I am enrolled in a course titled Field Natural History, taught by Dr. Rob Wink. We meet once a week, on Thursdays, and take the whole afternoon to go out and explore. Each week has a specific theme of study, for example: pond ecology, bogs and fens, succession, geology, fossils, and this week was supposed to be winter ecology. We went to FLCC's Muller Field Station at the south end of Honeoye Lake. As I think I mentioned in a previous entry, we've had unseasonably warm weather here in Upstate, NY, so the ground is no where near frozen, no snow, and mild temperatures. We couldn't really study and learn about the subnivean zone, so we just took a leisurely stroll along the channel looking for signs of wildlife. The following are things we saw along the way...

A buck rub.

Deer scat.

A bird nest, unsure of species.

Beaver chewed tree stumps (Castor canadensis).

Otter scat (Lontra canadensis).

AND THEN...the best personal find for the afternoon!

 Black bear (Ursus americanus) tracks across the main driveway at Muller!

Front foot in front, rear foot in rear.

If anyone is reading this (at all), and knows me...you'll understand that this was a GREAT find for me! I love black bears. These tracks were fairly fresh, I'd wager less than 12 hours and definetely no more than 48 hours. On either side of the black-top the soil was soft and pretty wet. I was walking the length of the driveway looking for salamanders (they're know to make a pilgrimage at Muller) and was noticing deer tracks every where. And then I came across the bear tracks! I was alone, my cla ssmates were far off in front and behind me, so I stopped for a minute and tried not to yell to the others without being sure that the tracks were in fact bear, and not human tracks (which I have mixed up before). Well, it was quite obvious to me that these were bear tracks. It was very easy to see the track pattern, and individual feet prints. Bears have a notoriously pigeon toed gait, which you can see in the pictures.

Here's another for some scale:

The print in the front is actually the rear foot, and the one in the back is the front foot.

 This was a thrilling find for me! I love finding sign left behind by wildlife, and especially bears! This winter in January I'm taking a Winter Ecology course which is based at Muller. I am very excited to get some camera traps out to document the movement, although at that point the bears SHOULD be in their dens, nice and cozy!

As a parting thought, I'll leave with you this image. This was taken a year and almost a month ago at the Muller Field Station. This bear evaded a culvert trap set out by the DEC, but got his/her picture snapped! This was taken on a Cuddeback Capture IR.

For more: Field Natural History pictures.