Usually I am very excited to find mammals visiting our drift fences. We frequently deer mice and shrews in our pit fall traps and it's always fun to have something other than the expected amphibian. A few weeks ago we even had a flying squirrel in a bucket. Very cool. I also like finding mammal tracks in the area, having studied gray foxes and fox squirrels for several years I especially like getting to see those, or signs of those. But, unfortunately, the most common mammal experience we have at the drift fence is when we find toads and salamanders that have been killed by raccoons. I love and respect raccoons, but their behavior at the drift fence just drives me nuts. They go from bucket to bucket and bite the heads off of marbled salamanders, but don't eat them--presumably because their skins secretions make them distasteful. Same goes for southern toads, they puncture them and maybe take some eggs out if it's a gravid female, but for the most part they just kill them. I wouldn't mind so much (it is just part of the normalcy of nature) but they just don't seem to learn that they don't like the taste so they just keep killing a few per bucket. So when we find that we have a raccoon "running the fence" we set traps. Got a coon last week, and took some photos when we released it. We just take them away from our sites and let them go in suitable coon habitat. This one was fun to watch, it ran quickly then went right up a tree, almost to the top, and just watched us for a while. Then while leaving that area we came across a bunch of wild pigs so I'll share some photos of those next time.
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