Hopland Research Extension Center: A Helpful Staff to the Rescue

After our awesome time herping in Humboldt County, we ventured south to the Hopland Research Extension Center, another amazing facility in the University of California system. We settled into the bunkhouse with “The Aphid Crew” (Mitch, Alex, Kira, Drew, and Maggie), a group much like ourselves. They came from all parts of the U.S. and all walks of life to take part in an interesting PhD study based out of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. They also accompanied us during a number of campfires for s’mores and PBR (Tecate for Kira).

The Bunkhouse: home to a bunch of smelly biologists.

After settling in at the bunk house, we met with Bob Keiffer, the superintendent of the Hopland Research Extension Center. He provided us with excellent maps and advice that allowed us to quickly locate ground squirrel colonies at a variety of locations throughout the property. Once our traps were sufficiently “seeded and buttered” we found rock outcrops and began looking for rattlesnakes. Though our start was a little slow, we received a call from an unlikely helper. Troy, a maintenance worker at Hopland, had found and captured a rattlesnake at the greenhouse. We high-tailed it to his location to meet our hopefully impressive ice breaking snake.

The staff at Hopland REC had this bucket made so that they could help us by collecting snakes they came across.

Though Troy’s snake wasn’t as notable as we had hoped, it was just the morale boost we needed to find our snake quota. As it would turn out, it wouldn’t be the last time Troy would help us. Despite our somewhat troublesome time finding snakes, the squirrels of Hopland REC were super active and hopped right into our traps. We found multiple active burrow sites and had multiple trapped squirrels at each location every time we checked our traps! Due to the overactive squirrel population and challenging snaking at this location, it was decided that the most effective strategy would be to divide and conquer. This meant that two techs got to take the truck and research gear to the different trapping sites and work-up squirrels while two others snaked the surrounding territory. This was an important milestone for the tech crew because it gave them the opportunity to work-up the squirrels independently. It also worked out famously because no valuable snaking time was lost while obtaining samples from ground squirrels.

View of Hopland facility.

We hiked many miles of Hopland looking for snakes. After these long tiring days it felt wonderful to return to our temporary home and be greeted by the smiling faces of our new friends, the "Aphid Crew". On one particularly long day, Drew, of the "Aphid Crew", was nice enough to share a little of his southern culinary expertise in the form of a delicious crockpot of Brunswick stew. In return for the amazing dinner that was so graciously shared with us, we offered to build a fire and provide all the required ingredients for a dessert of s’mores with everyone. The only catch was that everyone must stay up for a bit, have a few brews, and swap funny and interesting stories of past or current field work.

During one of our days in the field we pulled back into the bunkhouse parking lot for our lunch break and jumped out of the car to find a huge Gopher Snake cruising across the road. It was a beautiful animal and just what we had been hoping to come across so the techs could have the opportunity to learn proper snake handling techniques. With the instruction of Matt, each technician got to practice releasing the snake from a bag, tubing the snake, and then returning it to the bag for safe transport. All of us were successful thanks to the instruction of Jefe and our friend the Gopher Snake!

Tubing our first (gopher) snakes!

____________________________________________________________

 

Snake Tally

After many long days of trekking all over the beautiful location, we were finally done obtaining all of our necessary samples. The total number of snakes ended up being a tie between techs and Matt with 7 per group and our helper Troy found a total of 4!

And the winner of largest snake goes to….. TROY! As per the rules of the game he got to pick his favorite beer and we brought him back his large Budweiser.