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| Vineyard Reach |
Although
I did not trap today, it is a workday anyway and the wretched fog is back! For
folks in the Bay Area the fog is like air conditioning and two days of
temperatures above 80 seems to be more than they can handle. I am from the
Midwest so humidity and heat are fine by me and so is snow! My feeling is that
the coldest winter I every spent in California was a summer in San Francisco,
Petaluma, Cotati, Rohnert Park, and western Santa Rosa! Some ascribe a version
of this to Mark Twain, but I have never read it in any of his works. Check it out!
Today’s
tasks included locating two radio tagged turtles along the Dairy Drainage and
visiting the site, we surveyed yesterday – in spite of the fog or icy wind off
the ocean! (It is an exclamation point kind of day!) In addition to these
tasks, I have samples to examine, photographs to take and file, and equipment
to clean and repair.
Working together to find turtles
Biologists
like me are usually visitors to an area. Sometimes they come from a different
continent, state, or part of the city as I do. I am from eastern Santa Rosa and
my research sites are in western Santa Rosa. Historically, many biologists have
found that one way to succeed is to learn about the wildlife and ecosystem from
the people who live in the area. That is
precisely what happened yesterday as Kate and I were surveying a section of
Santa Rosa Creek we visited earlier, Vineyard Reach. In the past, it has been
productive but during the last visit, we neither saw nor heard turtles*.
While
I was in the water looking for turtles, Peter Ourusoff walked by on the bank
above me and asked how the turtle research was going. We chatted and he told me
where he saw some the other day and offered to email me photographs. I went to
the sites he mentioned and sure enough, Kate and I heard turtles “plopping”.
Then today I walked along the same path and saw the turtles. We will have a
fruitful week largely because of Peter’s willingness to share information.
*Turtles
do not vocalize and have a distinctive call but when the drop into the water
from a basking site (i.e., log or rock) the “plop” they make when they enter
the water is distinctive.
Biologists
like me are usually visitors to an area. Sometimes they come from a different
continent, state, or part of the city as I do. I am from eastern Santa Rosa and
my research sites are in western Santa Rosa. Historically, many biologists have
found that one way to succeed is to learn about the wildlife and ecosystem from
the people who live in the area. That is
precisely what happened yesterday as Kate and I were surveying a section of
Santa Rosa Creek we visited earlier, Vineyard Reach. In the past, it has been
productive but during the last visit, we neither saw nor heard turtles*.
While
I was in the water looking for turtles, Peter Ourusoff walked by on the bank
above me and asked how the turtle research was going. We chatted and he told me
where he saw some the other day and offered to email me photographs. I went to
the sites he mentioned and sure enough, Kate and I heard turtles “plopping”.
Then today I walked along the same path and saw the turtles. We will have a
fruitful week largely because of Peter’s willingness to share information.
*Turtles
do not vocalize and have a distinctive call but when the drop into the water
from a basking site (i.e., log or rock) the “plop” they make when they enter
the water is distinctive.
Today at Vineyard Reach
Radio Telemetry
Last year the maintenance work to remove sediment in the streambed was disruptive and another researcher and I abandoned work in mid-June because the turtles were no longer in evidence. I am using is radio telemetry to track the movements of a few turtles adjacent to where they are working to help determine if this is a coincidence or one of the side effects of doing the work. Therefore, each day they work in the streambed, I am using radio telemetry to locate each turtle, GPS to record their locations, and recording the information in a spreadsheet. This may help me determine if my last year’s observations were correct and stimulate further research on this topic.
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| Hiding to the left of the bullrushes is turtle 101 |
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| Turtle 102 is resting just beyond the shadow of the tree shade to the right. |
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