Flamingo Bay-part 2

The most amazing thing at Flamingo Bay the other day was the the number of southern toad tadpoles.  All along the edges and at islands of vegetation it was just a river of toads.  Given the size of the bay the number of toads was pretty ridiculous.  We looked closely at one little area and figured there had to be 50,000 or so in the one little section.  I'll have to go back soon because in addition to the southern toad tadpoles there were huge amounts of spadefoot toad eggs.  By now they've also hatched so it must be even more impressive.  Guess it will be a good year for toads there.  The bay filled so late that there are next to no salamander larvae in there to be feasting away on toad tadpoles.  The pictures I took really didn't do it justice but hope the video I put on you tube will help give the sense of the  non-stop flow of tadpoles.  In the photo on top every single black speck is a tadpole then below it is zoomed in and you can see the spadefoot toad eggs---the grayish mass.

Flamingo Bay-part 1

We got quite a bit of rain last week, there actually wasn't a lot of amphibian movement because it was pretty cold, but it warmed back up this weekend and one bay in particular--Flamingo Bay-- just had a ton going on.  The number of toad tadpoles was absolutely unbelievable, I'll talk more about those later b/c I want to look at my photos/videos more.  There was a great combination of southern toad tadpoles, some very recently hatched and some that clearly hatched a couple of weeks ago.  There was a whole slew of spadefoot toad eggs, a new round of leopard frog eggs, leopard frogs were still calling, and spotted several snakes, one of last year's yellow bellied slider babies, and a green treefrog.  Definitely will be back to Flamingo this week.  Supposed to be 88 tomorrow and more storms coming so with some warm rainy nights it could get even better.  Here we've got a photo of the bay, sorry for the water droplets on my underwater casing, a cluster of leopard frog egg masses, a single mass and then a close-up of one.  These are fairly fresh, you can see the developing embryos are still very spherical.  I'll try to post more later as they develop.

Hogs: not the typical trap finding!

Last time I mentioned that while releasing the raccoon we came across some hogs.  Well here are some photos. It was quite surprising--not seeing the hogs--but seeing them in a very large trap.  We have a lot of wild hogs on the SRS and they've been studied quite a bit.  Before the SRS was established there were many farmers living in the towns that used to be there.  When the towns and the people were move off site some farmers left some hogs behind and there were also already some feral hogs in the area.  They reproduced like crazy and did so well that by the mid 1960's DOE started allowing controlled hunts on site--along with hunts of deer.  Any animals being hunted from the SRS need to be monitored for environmental contamination and for that reason and others, like being omnivores that can be a part of multiple trophic levels and get exposed to contaminants through numerous pathways, the wild hogs have been studied extensively.   There are still a lot of them and sometimes I have the fun of coming across a big group of them with lots of little piglets.  This was the first time I'd seen them in a trap--turns out some folks are radio-collaring and tagging some to further study their movements and group behavior.  You can see the lead hog has a radio collar, but monitoring her they can keep track of the group which is likely a group of females and their offspring.  It was fun to watch their behavior, they all turned toward us immediately, backed up, the dominant female stayed in front of the rest and the piglets all took off.  They could fit through the fence so they ran away, I'm sure they came right back when we left.  Most often I just get to see the wallows of hogs or see a group running away so it really was fun to get to watch them for a bit when they couldn't run.