Well, now that I am about to start my 2015 field season (I start trapping next weekend...) I thought I should do my post on the 2014 field season! There will be A LOT of pictures, mainly of the birds, because I love Bobwhites! They are so cute! I never wanted to or thought I would ever work with birds (I'm a mammal guy) but I deffinitely love these little guys!
This first picture is obviously not one of my birds! I just didn't want to mess with moving pictures around because that never goes well so these will be in the order they uploaded in. This first picture is of a Horney Toad. I see them everywhere. They supposedly spit or squirt blood as a defense mechanism. I've never seen that happen...
I have heard stories of how many wild boars there are in Texas. People say that they shoot boars from helicopters killing 200 in a day and that doesn't even make a dent in the wild population. I on the other hand only saw these 3 all summer. These were actually pretty small for wild boars.
This is a picture of a Scaled "Blue" Quail. I trapped these guys as well but my main focus was with the Northern Bobwhite. Their home range overlaps with the bobwhite. They are a tad bigger than the bobwhite as well. Hopefully the pictures will blow up so you can see the birds a little better.
There are a TON of turkeys around the ranch. I have grown to hate them because they always mess with my traps. They always seem to move my traps so that the bait ends up outside of the trap... It is a huge pain and keeps me from catching the birds. There are usually 20-30 that are always outside the bunkhouse where I stay. They get very loud in the morning.
This is one of the traps that I made to catch the quail. If you look close you can see a bobwhite on the other side of the trap. He is on the outside of the trap. Hasn't worked up the courage yet to go inside! By the end of the season, I ended up putting big rocks on top of the traps to keep the turkeys and other animals from moving them.
[My department is having a banquet this spring and there is usually a photo contest. I will probably submit some of my "quail" pictures. If you see one of them that you think would be good to submit, please let me know in the comments!]
After processing the birds they were pretty tame. They would usually sit in your hand until you gave them a little "shake" to make them fly away. You can see one of the radio transmitters around its neck. Those are how I tracked them all summer. This bird is a male. You can tell by the white on its head. Females have a tannish color where the white is on the males.
I thought this was a pretty cool picture with the branches framing the quail.
A Blue quail sitting on top of the trap. There is another bird in the trap.
A female, male, female.
This is Bailey. He is the guy that was in the field all summer with me helping me with my work.
This is one of my favorite pictures!
Here I am getting birds out from the trap. I would put the birds in little pillow cases as I carried them from the trap to the truck. I also used the pillow cases to weigh them.
Weighing a bird
Putting a radio collar on
This is the yagi antenna that I would use to find the birds after I released them.
This is a female (notice the tannish color on her head). When we gave her the little "shake" she just flew to the mirror and stayed there for a few minutes.
One of my birds sitting in a tree
Birds in the trap. You can see the female with a collar on. I would retrap birds all the time.
This is a nest from one of the birds I tracked down.
This bird looks a little rough because its feathers are a little ruffled.
This is Kellie's favorite picture because the bird looks like one of the penguins from Madagascar!
As I mentioned early, I had to stay in the bunkhouse on the ranch. This thing is supper nasty. It is super old - I think it was built in the early 1900s. It is falling apart. While there I had several unpleasant experiences that helped me despise it even more!
This is one of the scorpions we found. This one I found in the room I slept in. Despite what it may seem, smaller scorpions are actually more dangerous. Bailey found one that was on the ceiling right above his bed. We were convinced that it was waiting for Bailey to go to sleep so it could drop down and attack!
One of the many tarantulas. During a couple weeks in mid summer, these things would come out on the road in droves. It was nasty.
I picked up a rock to put on one of my traps and found this little guy. At one point the bunkhouse was infested with these guys but we went around and sprayed it with bug killer. I pretty much reapplied the bug spray every week just to be safe.
This picture doesn't do it justice, but there were turkey vultures EVERYWHERE! In this picture I think there was a dead deer near by. There literally were hundreds of turkey vultures flying around this area. They were lining the fences, in the sky and on the ground. As we drove by they would explode from out of the grass.
This is the room I slept in. Each room had 2 beds with bedding already on them. The first time I went to the bunkhouse I saw mouse turds all over the sheets so I went right out and got a cot! Thats whats folded up in-between the beds. Best purchase I have ever made!
Standing outside the door of my room looking down the hall.
This is the shower that I had to shower in. It was GROSS! The water smelled like sulfur and so I smelled like sulfur after each shower.
MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN!!! I got Kellie to come out in the field with me several times! She actually even stayed the night, once! (She of course slept in the cot and I managed through the night in one of the turd infested beds). Worth it!
Here I am helping her put on her snake chaps!
The first week I had to trap by myself (we hadn't hired Bailey yet). I came up with this little technique to try and control the birds by myself. I needed both hands to put on the radio collars so I needed to find a way to keep the birds contained so they wouldn't escape. It worked, ok. This year I will have to trap by myself for a little while as well. I'm in the process of coming up with a new technique for controlling my birds.
Here's to field season 2015!
