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The Akodon And The Research Field – 10th September


Getting pretty used to the freezing mornings and boiling hot days now. The constant routine of wear as many layers as possible followed by the self questioning of why did I put so many layers has become part of daily life. The one thing that I have yet to get used to is the freezing cold showers! But never the less a busy day always lies ahead… something that I adore.

With the usual morning over and done with my small group set off once again to the canyon to collect out traps. The thought of actually catching something in the Sherman traps was all but too exciting. Once arrived we headed straight for our last placed camera trap and our first placed Sherman trap (if any mammal was caught we didn’t want it roasted alive under the ever increasing warmth of the sun).  We continued to work in this fashion until all the traps that we laid out were collected.  One after the other, the Sherman traps seemed to be empty. Yet with each new trap our hope never went down, the thought of actually catching something kept it up. It wasn’t until we got to trap number 14 (out of 15) that we finally had success. The trap had been set off. Whether there was something in it or not was a whole other question. To our luck, we had caught our first and only mammal. We quickly set about using a very small does of anesthetic to knock out the animal for 5 minutes just enough time to take all our needed measurements to use for our data. Once done, we waited till the mammal woke up (a mouse like creature known as an olive- coloured akodon, Abrothrix olivaceus) before releasing it in the same place where we caught it to make sure the mammal would not get disorientated. We then set about collecting all of our camera traps and luckily to our surprise 2 out of 3 camera traps set produced a multitude of data on various animal species in the canyon and much to our surprise a lot of information on the rare Atacama toad, Rhinella atacamensis. This lead to a few more questions between our group with the possible prospect of changing our project completely. This was something we left to be debated after lunch.

With lunch over and our minds made up – we changed our project. The amount and quality of data collected on bird species, reptiles, amphibians and mammals from the camera traps was too much to ignore, compared to our singular mammal it wasn’t much of an argument. We quickly set a main object of measuring the diversity at the open pond due to the high visitation by such a variety of species, a decision that I wont ever regret after all I was getting such a unique insight in to the vast array of diversity of such an ‘apparent’ barren place.


The evening yet again consisted of trap setting, this time however only camera traps were set around our desired locations that we had identified as hot spots for a range of species visitations.  The setting of traps in such locations however meant we discovered the true nature of the pesky horse flies as all of our group got covered in bites… the joys of fieldwork.


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