This week has been veg survey purgatory for the mammals group. We did 25 vegetation surveys this week, moved all of the audio recorders, moved all the funnel traps and pitfall traps, and downloaded all of our pictures from the camera traps. We put our literal blood, sweat, and tears into our work.

We got some super cool pictures of deer, raccoons, ground hogs (It was climbing a tree!), birds flying into the camera, and cute little chipmunks (see below). Camera trapping is always my favorite thing to do because every time you plug in the SD card it’s like Christmas! You never know exactly what you’re going to find but you’re bound to find something neat.

The vegetation surveys are not nearly as fun but they are necessary data so we buckled down and got them all done. Now we begin the process of going through our bat audio recordings and try to identify them! I have never done it before but Dr. Flaherty is showing us how to use some fancy software so I’m pretty excited.

Next week we will have another group of high schoolers and will be working our extension project. Another lab wants to use our presentation and display for an IMAX premier (its going to be so cool!). We are going to try and show the public how sound can be visualized. I’m hoping that we can come up with something that will make the public interested in bats and their conservation!