Coyote steals the cat

My last blog entry included tons of pics of recent visitors to my camera trap site which was baited with the carcass of a Wild Turkey and a road-kill stray cat. They both were in frame, right next to each other, and many critters visited, primarily Virginia opossum(s). But all the attention was on the Turkey! There really wasn't much meat left on it either, since it had been harvested during NY's spring Turkey season, and my friend Tyler took the breast and legs. The cat appeared untouched, and I didn't really understand. KB (Romping and Rolling in the Rockies) left me a comment stating that she's seen bobcat carcasses where she lives (CO) untouched. Did other scavengers dislike cat meat?

Well, of course, no sooner did I post that, I returned to the site and immediately noticed both carcasses were gone. I knew the Turkey had been removed by a Coyote previously, but now the cat carcass was gone too. Whodunit? Well, duh my entry title tells you....I'm not good at the element of surprise...

Here's the series of photos that shows the thievery...

 

Below is the actual taking....too quick for the camera to get a crisp image.

 

The black spot on the ground appeared to be soil that had been disturbed by insects (Dermestids) underneath the cat's body.

Pawing the spot where the Turkey was. I don't think much was left though...

 

After a quick sniff to the air, when I was pulling the SD card, I was able to locate the remains of the cat about 15 feet into the brush just to the right of the frame. I think it just dissolved...it was REALLY gushy and we've had torrential rains lately that probably further softened it. I'm not sure if this 'yote ate any of it, but there wasn't much left but vertebrae and fur.

Well, so I had a Turkey leg in the freezer, from the Turkey that Tyler shot. He said it "didn't look right" when he cleaned the bird, so he gave it to me to use for my camera instead of for eating. I tied it up on a branch in the frame at this same spot with a thick electrical underground-type cable and Gorilla Tape. HOPEFULLY nothing steals it too easily!

I love camera-trapping!

Yes, there's an app for that!

There seems to literally be an app (or application for smart phones) for everything these days. In this case, I'm referring to an app that helps the user log road-killed animals into a data base. Yes, you read that right. An app about roadkill.



Photo credit: abcnewsradioonline.com

I first heard of this smart phone application over the summer. Someone sent me an article about a new app that was just coming out, in which anyone who wanted to participate, was invited to stop on the side of the road and document a road-killed animal. But I was in Alaska (did you know I lived in Alaska for 3 months???), and distracted and never really read it or thought much about it.


UNTIL...

This semester I am enrolled in a course called Wildlife Techniques (FWLD 125) (3CR):

This course will cover a wide range of laboratory and field techniques related to the sampling of wildlife. Students will be provided first-hand experience with wildlife habitat improvement, developing Power Point presentations, global positional systems, digital photography, and capture, handling, and banding of birds. Field trips will be taken to examine deer winter ranges and other wildlife habitats. Each student will independently conduct and write up a field study.

Ok, so for my "field study", I've chosen to download the app and learn how to use it. This is a 100 level course, so the field study doesn't have to include any ground breaking research. Our instructor, just really wants 2nd semester freshman (which I'm not, but I transferred in and FLCC didn't have a class like this when I was there) to get excited about the field and how to access information via the college library.

I'm going to make this a beefier project and play the angle up of the "citizen scientist" getting involved. This app, if used correctly can show those of us who care, when and where animals are moving. Anyone with a smart phone can participate. You don't need to be a biologist, you just need be able to identify native wildlife. The use of modern technology as means of data collection is obviously becoming more and more popular for it's ease of use and convenience.

The other part of this app that appealed to me, is that the developer is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Plattsburgh. It's neat that someone within the college system (State University of New York) that I'm apart of came up with something so cool.

I'll be sure to update my findings and what I think of the app as I get into the project.

In the mean time, if you'd like to check it out for yourself, check out the developer, Dr. Danielle Garneau's website. Anyone with an iPhone, Android, or other smart phone can download the Epi-Collect app, then add her project (RoadkillGarneau) to start documenting roadkill! Instructions on finding and downloading the app can be found here.

AND Danielle told me to be sure to mention that "The other thing you might note is that if you don't have a smartphone, you can still participate...the google form (to answer questions, put GPS coordinates) is at the very bottom of my webpage above. This way you can encourage participation from a lot more people!"...so there ya go, you non-smartphone using wildlife lovers!

Oh and in unrelated news: yesterday several members of SUNY Cobleskill's student chapter of The Wildlife Society of which I'm apart of, went to a wildlife festival at nearby Huyck Preserve. There was a wildlife rehabilitator there with some of her animals. These animals were unable to be released back into the wild for various reasons. One of them, a southern flying squirrel, had been legally purchased at a pet store under the species name of "sugar glider". A sugar glider is a real animal, a marsupial from Australia. Not the same as our native southern flying squirrel. I'm not sure why they are legally allowed to be part of the pet trade in NY, since they are a native species. And, their cousin the northern flying squirrel, is illegal to possess. The squirrel was owned as a pet for 5 years, then was not wanted anymore. Obviously it could not be released into the wild, so this rehabilitator took it, and let us handle it. SO very cool, and for anyone who's read this blog before knows that I love flying squirrels!!!

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!

 

Gray Foxes, Galore!

I've not had a really good gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) sighting before, except the sighting mentioned in this entry: A *NEW* Camera Trapped Species back in the spring of 2012, while I was visiting the Outer Banks in North Carolina.

These little canines intrigue me, because they are so cat-like and small!

This past weekend, I was back in Western, NY visiting my parents for the weekend. My mom and I were driving to a nearby apple orchard to get cider and apples and something caught my eye on the side of the road. In mid-sentence, I asked my mom to stop and pull over, so I could go look. She rolled her eyes, but stopped the car and let me run back and look....

 

This beautiful (young, female) gray fox had recently been struck by a vehicle.

 

I looked her over really quickly, and determined that I wanted to take it to study it a bit closer later, and not on the side of the road in the pouring rain. So, my mother let me put it in a shopping bag, and allowed me to take it back to their house to properly bag and freeze it. It's now in a freezer in the taxidermy lab at SUNY Cobleskill, where I'm a student, until I can properly do something with it. That will probably be another entry though...

 

For now, I want to address the gray fox's feet:

 

As a mentioned above, they are so cat-like. I distinctly remember learning in the Intro to Fish and Wildlife class I took at FLCC, that the gray fox have semi-retractable nails. Other canids (red fox, coyotes, wolves, domestic dogs) can not retract their claws, but all cats can fully retract them. Sometimes tracks left behind by the gray fox don't have nails that show, since they can retract them! The gray foxes have also been known to CLIMB trees, which totally astounds me! Elbroch (Mammal Tracks & Sign) says they may even BED above ground in a shrub or tree!

Check out Blazin' Trailblazer's Climbing Canine entry for some great pictures of a gray fox climbing...

 

...and Nature of a Man's Lazy Willow entry for some MORE great pictures...super cool!

Maybe I can catch a GF scaling a tree too someday...


Gray fox feet are very small, comparitively to other dogs. I think of a red fox, and I think of a small dog. Grays, for some reason, seem to be less ...observable. I was going to say less common, but I don't know if that is the case. They seem a bit more skittish than the reds, except for that one I saw in North Carolina. Many people have a harder time envisioning how big a gray fox is.

Here are some sizes for comparison:

     -A solid, adult labrador retriever (like the 2 year old my parents own) weighs about 80 lbs.
     -A gray wolf: 60-154 lbs*
     -A coyote: 20-50 lbs*
     -A red fox: 8-15 lbs*
     -A gray fox: 7-15 lbs*
     -A domestic cat: On average, I think they're about 9-11 lbs.

*Taken from Mammals of North America, Fiona Reid 2006.

A pet cat could easily be the same size or larger than a gray fox. Here are some paw pictures I took for comparison.

My pet cat, Sassy's paw on the left.

Gray fox paw on the right.

 

You can see that the toe pads on the fox are relatively larger than that of Sassy's, but the overall outline/size of the paws is similar, especially if seen by a rookie like myself. Tracking is difficult, and animals with tracks so similar to each other as domestic cat and gray fox. Dogs typically have an "oval" shape to them, and cats "round", but in smudgy imperfect snow or mud...it can be hard to decipher.

 

There are some differences though, and I found this neat website with the breakdown of the minutia between dog and cat tracks: Canine vs. Feline.

Also, notice that nub of a toe that each critter has further up the leg. That's the heel pad, and it often doesn't register...but it can, especially in a deep substrate. This can only further confuse things between the two species...

According to Elbroch, measurements are as follows for domestic cat and gray fox tracks:

     -Domestic cat:   Front 1-1 5/8" L x 7/8-1 3/4" W
                                Rear 1 1/8-1 1/2" L x7/8-1 5/8" W

     -Gray fox:          Front 1 3/8-1 7/8" L x1 3/16"- 1 3/4" W
                                Rear 1 1/4-1 3/4" L x15/16- 1 1/2" W


Finally, I have to share a final few pictures. After being away from where I live in East/Central NY, where I've moved for school, for the weekend...I anxiously checked my camera trap that I have rigged up when I got back. I could not believe the results:

All 3 pictures have a gray fox in the picture. Now, the question is: are they all the same individual? Or are they different animals? Perhaps that's another blog entry as well. I just can't believe that this malfunctioning camera actually pulled through for me this weekend, thank goodness. Talk about coincidence!

Porcupine Paws

A few months ago, while I was in Alaska, I ran into a porcupine one night while I was out for a walk. The entry Little Miss Quill Piggy details that story. In the entry I wrote that I hoped one day to be able to write about how interesting porcupine feet are, and now I have my chance!

Earlier this week on our way to school, Mady (my roommate) and I found a road-killed porcupine within a half mile of our house. We both saw it at the same time, and I whipped a U-turn in the middle of the road to go back for it, while Mady was screaming "It's ok!!! We can be late for GIS class!". When we pulled up on it, we noticed how good of condition it was in, despite having been run over. A large patch of skin on it's hindquarters had been scraped away...but it was fresh (probably just a few hours old), and not particularly gushy. We had nothing to pick it up with, or put it in, so Mady kicked it into the drainage ditch next to the road, so no one else would stop and steal our porcupine :)

That afternoon we went back armed with leather work gloves, and a big cardboard box to bring it back to our house. Mady really wanted to collect it for its skull, and I wanted to check out its external anatomy. Before Mady beheaded it, I got some great up-close pictures of this porky's paws!

Mady and the porcupine.

It was a pretty good sized animal, and very dark! The porcupines I saw in Alaska were much more brown (see below).

 

 

Anyway, here they are, those pebbly porky paws:

On the left: left front (4 toes)

On the right: left rear (5 toes)

 

Check out the texture of that pad! It's so different than any other mammal out there. If I saw just this:

 

...I'd think I was looking at reptile skin!

 

I haven't yet found porcupine tracks in the woods yet, but since we found this guy/gal, Mady found another roadkill porcupine within several miles of our house. The odds seem to be good for finding them where we live. I'm just waiting til one shows up on my camera trap! I have a good spot on our property that we're renting (7+ acres!), and have had quite a few wild visitors already.

 

The other characteristic of the porcupine's paw that I wanted to share, are those long nails. The porcupine is an arboreal critter, meaning it spends much of its time climbing up and and down trees. These nails are like built in crampons! The picture below is of porcupine I observed in Alaska, just scaling the height of this tree in seconds.

 

Those nails are like built in cramp-ons.

 

So, that's my second awesome porcupine experience. The first was of course better, because the critter was alive, but I was really able to feel the quills, and check out its feet this time. I'm not a hunter, and I don't really do blood and guts well, but I do love checking out dead animals...to anyone outside of this profession or field, I'm sure it seems like a morbid interest. It's how we learn though!