Happy Halloween from the Andrews!
I am happy to report that the crew is fully stocked with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Starbursts! We made some hot mulled cider, roasted some pumpkin seeds, and carved pumpkins to celebrate the spookiest of holidays. This year, I carved Benny the Beaver!
During trap checks this morning, we recaptured one of the skunks we had fitted with a GPS collar. After realizing this was one of our special skunks, we came back to HQ to grab the remote download device. Much to our dismay, the VHF signal was EXTREMELY weak and the remote download would only work within 20 feet of the animal! Nevertheless, we were able to download the GPS data off of the skunk.
And here is what it looks like:
Looks pretty interesting! But we're still pretty disheartened by our fix success rate. Even using the swift fix technology, we are only achieving a 13.0% fix success rate. We are currently not getting any day-time locations. Even though we are attempting 27 fixes per day, the most that have been successful has been 7 locations. On some days, we are not getting any fixes. Still, this is much improved compared to our night telemetry data.
The rains are coming down in full force again, but our spirits are still high. We will continue to monitor these GPS collars and hope that we will be able to trap our special skunks again when it is time to switch their collars back to the VHF collars.
In other news, our crew has grown by another technician: Dustin Marsh joins us after working for the Northern Spotted Owl Demography Project on the Oregon Coast this summer. Dustin comes with experience working on some of the fisher and marten project in California. Looking forward to getting to know him better as the season progresses!