Day 11: Last Day at Cook's Lake

Today was our last day at Cook's Lake, we had a bunch of traps set off! At least 21 were tripped and raccoons found our traps and dismantled 11 traps. It was a very stressful day for our animals traps, you see, there are shrew holes in the traps so that they can get out. However, if the mice or voles become extremely spooked they may try to get out through the hole but once they get their heads in they usually become stuck. this happens about 1% of the time, Christina said that out of the 10 years they have done traps, only once a year that happens, Surprisingly, today a mouse not only had his head through, but his arms also, leaving him completely helpless. Christina was able to get him out and he survived. This used to be uncommon for the mouse to live, but it hopped away and everyone thought our surprises were over, that was when we discovered the raccoons got to our traps and that two more mice were stuck. Thankfully, due to Christina's expertise and experience all the mice survived which used to be unheard of. Also, we sadly got a short-tailed shrew. These are the largest of the shrews and rarely, if ever, go into the traps. For some reason this one decided to go in and may have died of starvation and distress. The starvation was due to the fact that they don't eat the seed and carrot in the traps, and with their high metabolism, it starves. The distress is that they are very prone to heart attacks, they are literally in mortal fear. Another thing I did today was run a chipmunk up the hill for 200 feet, all the way back to the start. Talk about a workout! On the whole it was a very interesting morning, when we were done with our traps we collected our camera traps and signed the new field station that we worked on. Back at the house we had lunch and some down time, that was when I discovered that my camera works (with minimal glitches)! Then it was time for the survival skills talk, Chris showed us how to set traps and start a fire. It was pretty cool! Then I went on my first adventure to the yellow house and we were off to Chris and Christina's home for the BBQ. Their house is absolutely, positively fantastic and beautiful, not only is the house perfect but the view is amazing! We had hot dogs, hamburgers and smores!!! It was really good and we got to go down to the water by their house, then it was time to look for some bats. Chris had a little machine that looked like a walkman, and it was go off slightly like a metal detector when it picked up the bats frequencies. They communicate at such a high level, we hear up to around 15 MHz or Hz (I can not remember!), and they communicate somewhere above the 40 mark. It was really neat. Then we packed everything up and headed back home. Catherine, Kelsie and I had dish duty, and then it was bedtime. Today was full of fun, anticipation, anxiety, excitement and laughter! I had a blast and can not wait till tomorrow. Here are the pictures that I said I wouldn't have.

These are some of the tools we used to start a fire during our survival talk.

Here is the infamous yellow house, it has spunk!

This is Chris and Christina's lovely home.

Here is the view from their door, it is like their front yard!!!

This the stable Chris built for their horses they have during the winter.

The group shot :)

Some of the girls just hanging out by the campfire!!!

The wonderful campfire!