On our last night on the river we set up camp on a warm sandy beach. It was immediately clear that our sandy campground was inhabited by a diversity of wildlife. Dozens of small mammal tracks were present throughout the area as well as signs of larger mammals. I found myself very eager to learn what creatures I would be spending the night with, so I decided to do some sampling. The sampling instantly became a team effort when I told Eva about my idea and she enthusiastically decided to help. Although we were limited by our gear but we managed to improvise some very simple pit fall traps. All we used were three five gallon buckets and some leftover table scraps. Our reasoning for including the food was to attract the animals so that they would hopefully stumble into our submerged buckets. Perhaps most importantly we made sure to set up the traps near vegetation so that they were less likely to trap any of our classmates. I definitely felt like a kid on Christmas morning when we woke up to check our traps. Out of the three traps we set up one was successful and it had two energetic little deer mice.
