December 16, 2020 - North side
December 16th, 2020 (Wednesday) 9:00 am -1:30 pm:
Weather: Mid 60s, partly cloudy
Rainfall: MTD 1.46in, YTD 2.39in (per http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php?year=2021)
Coverage: north part - the county park parking lot till the second stop sign.
@merav and me documented 168 dead newts (of which 30 were juveniles). A Handful of newts were really fresh since they had preserved their posture when being run over. The HTH team said they found 5 dead ones near their population study areas but we found there were at least 6 more dead ones that had been lying there for more than a day within the 50 ft of the pitfall traps.
Traffic: 6 trucks, 60 cars, 11 bikes, 6 pedestrians, and 22 cars parked by the road and in the parking lots.
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@karangattu, thanks for writing these field notes. It's alarming to me how many juveniles have been killed already this season!
@merav, @tyap, I'm very concerned that the Midpen/HTH team is not recording all the dead newts in the "hot zones" they've chosen for their study area. It is adversely affecting the total count for this migration season and will hamper our ability to compare this year with previous years. If you look at the mapped observations for this year, you can see "holes" where there fences are located and very few deaths have been reported.
@karangattu - thanks for posting! And thanks for recording everything...
I'd like to add the other roadkill data - we had one slender salamander, a Pacific Ringneck Snake, and many centipedes, millipedes, Jerusalem crickets, and a few beetles. It felt like we saw fewer arthropods at first, but then we found many more on the way back.
I am concerned about the fact that they are missing the dead newts. It will affect their results. I'm going to contact HTH and POST about that today.
and I forgot to add that HTH added pink flags, marking the 50 ft around the fences.
also, I'd like to include here all the observations we took within the HTH boundaries: I hope we'll replace these with their observations?
Karan's photos:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66684686
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66683997
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66683995
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66683994
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66683993
my photos:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66680785
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66680819
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66680820
@merav, @karangattu, could you please add text to the Notes field to this effect? Something like: "Found within the Midpen & HTH study boundary."
If Midpen/HTH submit duplicates of these observations, please just add their photos to the appropriate observation. Your photos are so much better and the observations now contain lots of metadata that I don't want to lose. Thanks!
This is going to be very messy trying to distinguish their study data from our observations. My only hope of tracking it is if "Midpen" is in the Notes field and/or we add all observations within their study boundaries to a separate project I created for their data:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pacific-newts-population-study-2020-2021-lexington-reservoir
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