Day 5

So today was our first day of sampling. When I say sampling, I mean we go to points that I have selected previously because of their cover type or age, and we look and listen for birds. The hardest part is moving between sites (and of course remembering all the bird songs!). So overall, today went pretty well. We were all dragging when we woke up this morning. It's certainly hard to be functional at 5am! We saw quite a few birds and were only unable to identify a few. We also saw some huge bear poop! Hope we don't run into that guy any time soon. This afternoon we did some vegetation data collection on some plots in the areas we sampled. We see what kinds of trees and shrubs are there and what the cover is like on each site. It takes some time to get good at it, but we did pretty well.

So tomorrow we'll go out for birds again tomorrow. Then we need to head back to Blacksburg and pick up some coverboards that weren't ready when I left last week. Coverboards are rough-sawn pieces of wood that provide artifical cover for salamanders (and typically make them a bit easier to find).

More to come later!