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My wife is taking a terrestrial biology class right now and she has field trips on the weekend. They are usually Saturday mornings, but part of one was last night. Anyways I went to drop her off at her advisers house (the teacher and adviser are friends, both with PHD's) and they asked me if I wanted to join them. I was up for trying something new. After we waited for it to stop pouring we went and set these traps to catch (not kill) small animals. We were using oatmeal and PB rolled together as bait and set these traps all over the woods. The goal was to capture all these animals about the size of a mouse, chipmunk and other mammals. As we are walking around setting the traps, recording the location with a GPS and flagging them, the teacher would test them on the names of all the plants. Between these two guys they knew all the plants, birds and frogs we saw or heard. I couldn't believe how much of the terrestrial stuff was in their brains. We also set some by this river which was pretty high and making our path like a swamp to walk through. We also saw a couple kids rafting down the river like a couple of rednecks :). Then we went back, cooked hamburgers and hot dogs and drank beers. We went back out and trek through the same area to see if we caught anything. Unfortunately we didn't, but the teacher was saying that with in the 50 traps we set it would be average to catch 2 animals over the whole catching period (some students went this morning to re-check and pick up the traps). It's amazing how the simplest stuff can be so enjoyable when trying something completely new.
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