February 13th, 2021 - north side

Saturday 8:00-12:00 pm: countless dead newts found, including many juveniles, some very tiny. no live newts :( I will update the numbers as soon as I finish going over my 880 photos... I walked with Cynthia R. and we did the survey and also ended the experiment, collecting all the flags. Flagged individuals won't be included in this project, as they were already included in the regular survey on Wednesday.
Weather - cloudy, a bit cold, light rain during the first half. We got some good rain Thursday afternoon and night. Rain MTD 0.73 in, YTD 9.7 in per http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php
We documented 379 dead newts. Most newts were fresh, some of them were very small.
315 of the newts didn't have flags, meaning that they weren't documented on the Wednesday survey and therefore entered into this project. 59 flags still had a newt next to them, possibly the original one from Wednesday morning. Not sure what happened with the other 5...
Other roadkills: many millipedes, a few moths, Jerusalem cricket, a mouse.
Coverage: north part - from the parking lot to the second stop sign.
The light rain saved us from some of the cars - Traffic: 2 trucks, 83 cars (including County parks), 56 bike, 36 pedestrians, and 64 cars parked by the road and in the parking lots (6 in the farther lot).
Quite a few people asked us about the newts - hikers, drivers, runners. A few of them said how they like the newts, and that they help them cross trails or roads! Many of them thanked us for what we do :)
The HTH team said that they've been seeing females coming up from the lake. I wish they would share their data with us, as all we get are hundreds of dead newts, and it would have been nice to hear this kind of thing. We found 1 newt near Array #3 after they already checked it. It was a small one, have been there for a while.
A link to all 379 observations from the day:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?on=2021-02-13&place_id=any&subview=grid&user_id=merav&verifiable=any

Publicado el 13 de febrero de 2021 a las 09:10 PM por merav