Off to Trap!

Since I don’t have a way of uploading pictures, I’m just going to post without them, which is a bit of a shame but might mean I actually post more often, so that’ll be good.

I’m leaving on Sunday to spend 2 weeks trapping mammals at the Mitchell Plateau (which the Australians pronounce “PLAT-eau,” just to be confusing and anti-French-speak), which is supposed to be amazingly awesome and cool. I saw some field guides of the kinds of animals that might turn up in the traps, and they’re super cute and have names like “monjon,” “nabarlick,” “quoll (I’d heard of that one before, and apparently they’re feisty and have sharp teeth, so I have to be careful),” and “euro (which is a “large wallaroo”).” We loaded the traps onto the trailer yesterday, although I didn’t learn how to use them yet. Some of them are like the squirrel traps we used in Canada (a mesh cage with a trap lever), but giant-sized and really really heavy. The others are smaller, metal, and fully enclosed, so we won’t know what’s in it until we peek inside (apparently we occasionally catch snakes, so if the weight in the trap sort of slides when you tip it, be extra careful opening the door to make sure that there’s not a venomous serpent about to burst out!).

I still don’t know much else about how the trapping works and where the sites are, but I know we set them up before the evening (most of the critters are nocturnal) and then check traps and process the animals in the [very early] morning. We have several different types of scales to weigh animals from <50g to up to 5kg, and this microchipping tool and scanner, which I found out is so that we know when we have a recaptured animal, like a more permanent and technologically advanced ear-tag. Should be fun, and I’m really excited to see all of them!

In other news I went to karaoke on Wednesday night, which was fairly riotous by the end and lots of people were dancing to the songs. They had a really weird music selection, though, with only a few songs by artists I knew and lots and lots of Aussie artists I’d never heard of. I sang “Twist and Shout” with Tess, one of the German girls I had met the week before, and then did Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” because most of the only songs I knew were in the recent hits section, and it did seem appropriate for the tone of the evening, haha. Next time I may have to sing Lady Gaga or something, there really wasn’t a lot of other artists to choose from.

It rained Thursday evening/night which was very unexpected (the average rainfall for these months is like 5mm, so rain is definitely a surprise) but kind of nice and comforting, since it was still so warm. Hopefully it won’t rain when we’re out camping, though…