Anyways, while I was doing nothing yesterday, the rest of the team was hard at work. They settled on two maize fields in Tloma to trap on (we can’t trap their accompanying forest sites because we don’t have the NCAA [Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority] permit. The hope is that the permit will come through in the next day or two so that the forest sites can be trapped ASAP, to control-ish for time) and painstakingly set up a 100m x 100m transect, putting labeled flags and hidden, baited traps every ten meters. Evidently the little kids that live on the shambas stole several of the flags for toys (they are excitingly neon colored). I think as long as none of the Sherman traps that we use to catch the mice go missing, all is well.
One of the maize fields, image taken by Annie
Doug, Halidi, Rama, Annie, and I started off the morning by returning to the maize fields. Each of us took two transect lines (per field) and walked the transect, picking up and folding the traps that remained open (which means they hadn’t caught anything), and putting the closed traps into our bags. Since there were presumably mice in these traps (although sometimes the traps get tripped by wandering gusts of wind or falling maize), I was ridiculously careful in picking them up and refused to put them in the carrying bag and instead cradled them in my arms. I wanted to peek at the animals in the traps but I was scared that I’d accidentally liberate the mice. Anyway, this carrying method works well for the first trap or two, but after that it becomes pretty difficult to carry them. At one point I think my gentleness was undone because, since I had carefully stacked so many traps in my arms, I couldn’t see the ground and I tripped on a piece of maize and face planted. Sorry mice. Between that and the dirty wetness of the traps (they’d been sitting out all night) and maize, by the time I was done, I was a hot mess of red-brown dirt.
In case you were at all confused, the traps we use (called Sherman traps) are designed to catch, not kill, mice. Sherman traps are rectangular cubes with one side that can open. We bait the traps with oats and peanut butter (meaning the mice eat better than we do!), and when anything crawls in and steps on a latch, the trap’s door closes. Here’s a photo that Annie took of a baited trap:
I met back up with the others (who had prudently chucked all their traps, including ones with mice, into their bags). All my care was further undone as Halidi and Rama took my traps from me and shook them vigorously to make sure the mouse was at the bottom of the trap before they opened the top to look in. One of my traps had a seriously adorable zebra mouse in it. :) I didn’t think to take a photo (story of my life in Africa), but it was a little light brown guy with dark stripes and good sized ears. Cute!
Next up is processing the mice. This involves determining the species of the mice (Halidi and Rama are amazing at this), sexing it (Halidi and Rama are amazing at this, too), weighing the mice, combing the mice for fleas and mites (this is the mice’s least favorite part), taking blood samples (this is my least favorite part), and ear tagging the mice so we know if we recapture them later. After this undoubtedly traumatizing experience, we put the mice back in their traps. Later in the day, we release the mice back at the exact place they were captured (this is the farmers’ least favorite part).
Processing the mice takes a ton of time, but when we finished there was still time before we had to reset and bait all the traps in the two maize fields. Thus, we took the opportunity to do vegetation surveys and dung surveys of one of the fields we were working in. Having this information is important but man are veg surveys extremely boring and time-consuming.
In the late afternoon/early evening, we reset the fields, putting 100 baited traps in each maize field (and making sure the traps were well hidden to prevent theft). And that was my first real day of fieldwork!
I also should note that Halidi and Rama are both hilarious. As we were processing mice, Halidi kept giving us jaded love advice (“sweetyfriends” are acceptable, but getting married will just ruin your life) and Rama kept dozing off (but would deny it). They’ve both been teaching us a little Swahili, and we have a super unusual vocabulary (I can say “hello,” “I do not like onions,” “how are you,” “ticks,” “rats,” “fleas,” etc.). On our drive back at the end of the day, Halidi told me and Annie something like “napenda panya, sipendi watoto.” That roughly translates to “I like mice/rats. I do not like babies/children.” Good to have that phrase on hand!
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