Distracted Observations: Day 10: Long Island, a mouse and some scat

Again, sorry for the delay in writing, I was down on Long Island this week for a conference and didn't have much of a chance to write/get out and see stuff. This is not totally true, however. On the way down, I spotted a number (>5) woodchucks along the NYS Thruway. It seemed to me that as I went south they woodchucks got redder and redder in color, ranging from a dark brown up in Ulster Co. to a nice reddish-chestnut color down in Rockland Co. I also had the distinct pleasure of visiting a colleague of mine who teaches Geology at Hofstra University. He very kindly invited me over to his house and the family has a nice little pond/waterfall set-up with three turtles (two Red Eared Sliders and a Chicken Turtle, a southern species they got from the Herpetologist on campus), a number of koi, Sunfish, and Largemouth Bass, and some Green Frogs. After some fun games with the kids and a wonderful dinner, I got to meet the pet Corn Snake, Ella, and the pet Guinea Pig as well. My friend then took me back to the hotel where I fell asleep by 10:30pm; the earliest I've gone to bed in months.

Last night Toph (see Day 5) and I visited another colleague of mine from New Paltz and searched for stuff in the woods behind her house. Supposedly there had been a stream down behind her house a few days ago and she had heard some frogs down here, but it seems that it had dried up by the time Toph and I got there. Immediately upon exiting the car, we saw a White Tailed Deer run across the road and down into my friend's neighbor's yard. We eventually made our way down into the woods and found a number of dark, almost black colored slugs crawling in the now mostly dry stream-bed. Additionally, we found another terrestrial flatworm, these guys seem to be EVERYWHERE in our area. Finally, we made our way back up to the house and perhaps the best thing we saw all night was Tex the Cat. Tex has a nice little Tuxedo-like coat and was quite interested in why two random guys were under his porch at 12:30am on a Wednesday night...obviously Tex doesn't know me very well yet.

Tonight I went out by the pond at my place again and I was rewarded with some new sights and sounds. First off I saw a couple of biggish Sunfish in about 1' of water along the edge of the pond.

While I was watching them something darted past my peripheral vision and I turned to find a cute brown-gray mouse with dark little eyes running into the grass. I followed the mouse around a bit and snapped several good pictures. At one point the mouse ran right into the water and swam for a few feet along the edge of the shore, too cute! It was also a bit of a windy night and the big Willow tree next to our pond was making some nice creaking noises. Tonight was a great night to listen to the wind in the reeds/trees/grass... very soothing and a good lesson in being quiet to hear everything you can. Oh, and I saw what I think was a little Box Turtle near the outlet of the pond.

Eventually I made my way out to the main stream and found some fresh evidence of beavers along the banks. There were lots of gnawed twigs and branches along with some nice little 'canals' off of the main stream the beavers are making to access the trees that lie some distance away from the stream. Beavers are known to enter and exit the stream at the same spot each time and often dig little lateral canals to ease bringing tasty branches back to their dens. Finally, I spotted some nice scat along a log going down into the creek. After trying to figure out just what animal had happened by here, I have come to the conclusion from the picture that there were probably 3 animals here, at least one was a Raccoon, another was probably either another Raccoon or a Skunk maybe, and the third was maybe a Mink. I am totally not sure of this but I'm trying to do my best here. In closing I would like to thank the student who asked me in the hallway today if I was going to post something new on my blog soon, it's nice to know someone reads this stuff!