My summer with the Friends of Blackwater: July 3rd -- New Bait Testin'/More Water Monitoring Day!

Today started off a little slow and I soon noticed that a package had arrived for me -- the new bait!! I was so excited and couldn't wait to get out in the field to test it out! I placed some at Yellow Birch since we know there are squirrels there just to see if they like it or not. I also wanted to place some at out heavy bear site to see how the bears will react to it because it smells like the filling in fig newtons! I decided that I did not want to go alone to the bear area since I wasn't sure how the bears would react to it and I feel like they could definitely smell it from a mile away, so I recruited Lon to help assist me and in return I would help him collect his water flow measurements!

Thankfully we did not run into any bears and I pulled the SD card from the camera in that area and discovered a mom and a cub had visited that site! That makes me a little more nervous just because female bears are extremely protective of their cubes -- YIKES!

After Lon and I ate, we headed out to collect his flow measurements, only this time we did not use a flow meter like I did with Martin because we were trying to see how much water is coming out of some culvert pipes. Lon engineered these boxes and windows to fit into the pipes so we could "control" the movement of the water to then see how long it took to fill up a gallon bucket. There are then calculations to figure out the rate of flow. It was pretty fun, and I got completely soaked when one of the boards busted loose and I had to jump in there to keep it from cracking under the pressure of the water flow! That water was so COLD!!

TONS of pictures today, I hope you all enjoy them!! :)