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29 October 2009

Instant Habitat

Back in September, I was at one of my mitigation wetlands in northcentral Indiana when I noticed that a 5-foot section of PVC that we had previously installed to mark a sampling transect was inhabited by an Eastern Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor).


Who knew that creating wildlife habitat could be so easy?
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8 comments:

  1. Justin R. ThomasOctober 30, 2009 at 12:38 AM

    Good stuff! Can I borrow that picture? No need to email it. I'll just gank it of the web.

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  2. Scott NamestnikOctober 30, 2009 at 12:52 AM

    Have at it.

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  3. Tom ArbourNovember 3, 2009 at 9:03 PM

    This is great. I'm a tree frog fanatic, but haven't run into a gray tree frog in years. Hear them, yes, see them, no!

    Tom

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  4. Scott NamestnikNovember 3, 2009 at 11:23 PM

    Lindsay's parents, who live next door, often find gray treefrogs on their house in the spring. Pretty neat to see.

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  5. Travis MohrmanDecember 3, 2009 at 10:08 AM

    Howdy, just foound your blog through a blog of a friend. watch those tubes because flying squirrels will climb in them and get stuck (and die). not sure if you have flying squirrels there though. around here (st. louis) all of our treefrog research tubes have little pieces of string on them that the flyers can use to climb out. moot point if you don't have flying squirrels though and i guess they don't really like wetlands much anyway. still, a dead flying squirrel is a heart wrenching site.

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  6. Scott NamestnikDecember 3, 2009 at 10:52 PM

    Hi Travis. Thanks for visiting. So... do you actually use PVC tubes for treefrog research? Interesting. We are just using the PVC to mark our vegetation sampling transects. We do in fact have flying squirrels around here, and I hope I never find a dead one in one of our transect posts. Can you provide me with more details about how you arrange the string?

    Thanks for the heads up!

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  7. Travis MohrmanDecember 18, 2009 at 12:20 PM

    we use the traps to monitor treefrog populations around some of our man-made ponds. you just hang them about 5-10 feet off the sides of trees around ponds. the Hyla just load up in there! it is part of a graduate students phd work. anyway, it is really easy to make a lifeline for the little squirrels.
    just take a piece of kite string or some similar (synthetic, so it lasts longer) string and drill a small hole in the top of the pipe. put the string through, tie a few knots, so the string won't slip back through the hole, and you're done. just gives them something to grip because the pvc is slippery.

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  8. Scott NamestnikDecember 20, 2009 at 8:39 PM

    Interesting. Thanks Travis.

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