The Lawson Trek
  • Home
    • About
    • Interactive Map
    • The Trek
  • Along the Path: Blog
  • John Lawson
    • "A New Voyage to Carolina"
    • The Carolina Colony
  • Talk to us!
  • Store
  • Press

Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Smile for the Camera

11/6/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Uhhh ... anyway, hi you guys. Hi and everything. You know. Hi. Oh -- and, anyway, see ya.
The Lawson Trek's cameras have come down.

It's no biggie -- with the help of zoologist Roland Kays of the Biodiversity Lab at the the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (especially ace young scientist Troi Perkins) we put up a couple camera traps. One in Umstead Park, a state park in Raleigh, the other in Crabtree Creek Nature Park in Morrisville, NC. The Umstead Park one early on gave us a couple bucks in velvet (he stopped in periodically; that's him above, I think), and the Crabtree Creek one was keeping us updated on the activities of a raccoon that seemed to come by most nights.  The camera got it coming and going.
Picture
Come on: the reflections of its eyes in the water? How cool is that?
Picture
Raccoon butt.
Eventually the Crabtree one stopped working, which meant a day that I had to find its coordinates and slog my way back into the squish to retrieve it and figure out what was wrong. We figured it had probably drowned in a rain event -- the cameras do fine in the rain, but nothing electronic likes to be underwater, no matter how waterproof(ish) its casing. I'm told it's working again back in the lab, but that doesn't give us any information on how that raccoon spent the remainder of its summer.

The big buck at the top of the page is one of the last images we got from the other camera, which Troi went to gather back up last week. Enough was enough, and the camera wasn't catching too much, though I was glad to see the buck a last time or so before the camera was liberated. 

Kays's lab is part of the eMammal project, with the Smithsonian Institution, that uses camera traps to spot, track, and learn about mammals in the field. He's published research on camera trap use: last year this piece in Methods in Ecology and Evolution on using cameras to quantify levels of animal activity and just this fall this piece in Landscape Ecology about the use of volunteer-run cameras (like ours!) as distributed sensors. Now our cameras, however interesting they were as observation posts, were not part of any experiment. As Roland rightly pointed out, we put ours where we hoped we'd see animals. Actual science would have been putting many cameras randomly over an area to see where the wildlife showed up.

So farewell, cameras -- thanks for being our eyes in the forest, giving us a glimpse into the peregrinations of raccoons and bucks and a glimpse into how the big kids do science.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    January 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    African American
    Angie Clemmons
    Anthropocene
    Apothecary
    Appalachian
    Archaeologists
    Archaeology
    Army-navy
    Art
    Artifacts
    Atlanta
    Backpack
    Banking
    Barbecue
    Barry Beasley
    Bath
    Beaufort
    Beckee Garris
    Beetle
    Beginning
    Ben Franklin
    Berm
    Bill
    Birds
    Blister
    Book
    Bookstore
    Boston
    Botanical
    Boykin
    Breach
    Brent Burgin
    Brownlee
    Buck
    Buffer
    Cabelas
    Cambridge
    Camden
    Camera
    Canoe
    Canty
    Catawba
    Chain
    Charleston
    Charlotte
    Chelsea
    Chocolate
    Chris Judge
    Church
    Cincinnati
    City Of Raleigh Museum
    Civilization
    Coe
    Comment
    Community
    Concord
    Confederate
    Contentnea
    Cornwallis
    Country Music
    Couture
    Crawford
    Creek
    Croatoan
    Cutler
    Cypress
    Danger
    Davis
    Death
    Delightsome
    Delk's
    Denton
    Devices
    Drake
    Drawing
    Drunk
    Duck
    Durham
    Eagle
    Earnhardt
    Earth Day
    East
    Ecologist
    Effron
    Embankment
    End
    Error
    Evans
    Exhibit
    Expeditions
    Facebook
    Feather
    Fern
    Finish
    Fire
    Flag
    Flintlock
    Flood
    Francis
    French
    Gaillard
    Gander Mountain
    Garden
    Geology
    Gimpy
    GIS
    Google
    Great Wagon Road
    Green
    Greenville
    Grifton
    Guerry
    Gun
    Guns
    Haigler
    Hallenbeck
    Hampton
    Hanging
    Hannah Smith
    Harris
    Hartford
    Harvest
    Heat
    Hempton
    Highway
    Hillsborough
    Hips
    Historic Bath
    Hollow Rocks
    Home
    Homeness
    Hortus Siccus
    Hospitality
    Huguenots
    Huntley
    Indians
    Instagram
    Interstate
    Island
    Ivy
    Ivy Place
    Jamaica
    Jarvis
    Jennifer Landin
    Jered
    Jimmy White
    John Jeffries
    John White
    Journalism
    Kadaupau
    Kannapolis
    Katawba Valley Land Trust
    Katie Winsett
    Kayak
    Kershaw
    Keyauwee
    King
    Knife
    Lame
    Land
    Language
    Lawson
    Lawsonians
    Lecture
    Legacy
    Legare
    Legislators
    Leigh Swain
    Lenoir
    Lenoir Store
    Lenses
    Library
    Lichen
    Lies
    Loberger
    Locke
    London
    Longleaf
    Lost Colony
    Lynch
    Lynching
    Magnuson
    Mansplaining
    Maps
    Mass Shooting
    Match-coat
    Mathematical
    Meerkat
    Memorial
    Mental Floss
    Mill
    Millstone
    Miniature
    Monkeyshine
    Moonshine
    Museum
    Museum Day Live
    Musings
    Nancy
    Nascar
    Native American Studies Center
    Natural History Museum
    Nature
    Nesbit
    Netherton
    Neuse
    Newspaper
    Nonfiction
    Notebooks
    Occaneechi
    Orlando
    Pack's Landing
    Palmetto
    Pamlico
    Park
    Patent Leather
    Pedestrian
    Peggy Scott
    Periscope
    Petiver
    Photography
    Physic
    Pig
    Pig Man
    Pittsburgh
    Pocket
    Poinsett
    Polo
    Potsherd
    Pottery
    Preparation
    Presentation
    Press
    Process
    Proofreading
    Property
    Publishing
    Raccoon
    Racing
    Racism
    Racist
    Raleigh
    Rape
    Ray
    Readings
    Reconsideration
    Records
    Revolution
    Richard Smith
    Richardson
    Rights
    Riparian
    Rivulet
    Road
    Roadness
    Roanoke
    Robert Off
    Roland Kays
    Rolling Stone
    Roombox
    Rules
    Salisbury
    Santee
    Sapona
    Sassafras
    Scan
    Sconc
    Seneca
    Seth
    Shakespeare
    Sir Walter Raleigh
    Slavery
    Slime Mold
    Sloane
    Slope
    Small Town
    Smith
    Smithsonian
    Snow
    Sore
    Sounds
    Spanish Moss
    Specimens
    Speedway
    Spencer
    State Fair
    Steve Grant
    Stewart
    St. Mark's
    Suburban
    Sumter County
    Surveying
    Swamp
    Tar River
    Technology
    Textile
    Tide
    Tobacco
    Toms River
    Tool
    Towel
    Trade
    Trading Ford
    Trading Girls
    Trail
    Trap
    Traunter
    Tree
    Tree Farming
    Trek
    Trilobite
    Troi Perkins
    Truth
    Tryon
    Tupelo
    Turkey
    Tuscarora
    Twitter
    Ugly
    Unc
    Val
    Val Green
    Virginia
    Virginia Dare
    Virginia Historical Society
    Walking
    Washington
    Waxhaw
    Weather
    Website
    White
    Writing
    Wrong
    Yadkin
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly