South/Aldercroft side - 12/07/2019
My first time patrolling and posting, so please let me know if I've missed anything. Oh, and please remind me where you get the rainfall amount from, so I can be consistent.
Today I walked the South side, from the stop sign to Aldercroft, 8:40am-10:50am. It rained here last night, was windy, today there are low clouds and it's close to rain but no rain, my car said 64F outside.
77 dead newts, 1 dead frog. There were 3 that I thought were salamanders, but @truthseqr says that they're actually newts whose outer skin has gone.
No live newts or other critters seen. 18 vehicles, 2 joggers and a bicyclist passed by. I swear the maples are significantly more vivid yellow this year.
Weather from http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php: 0.45 inches rainfall the previous day, 0.32 inches total today.
~ Stacie
Comments
Thanks so much, Stacie! I know it's not pleasant being out there in the wet/rain, wind & cold photographing dead creatures.
The observations you marked as salamander are all dead newts. I moved them from the "Other Roadkill" project to the 2019-2020 project. When the road conditions are very wet, the newt's epidermis often sluffs off, leaving a grayish/white carcass like the ones you photographed.
Here's the weather website I've been using: http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php?year=2019
Oh! Interesting that they're newts, I wouldn't have guessed that. Thanks for reorganizing, and it seems that some of the observations didn't get all of the tags I thought I assigned to them all at once while uploading, so thanks for adding those too. I'll get the hang of it.
I am curious about the weather information being from Santa Cruz. It's often quite different weather on the two sides of the hill.
You're doing a great job Stacie. Thanks!
Since there doesn't seem to be a weather station/ website specifically for the Lexington Reservoir area, I had the choice of Santa Cruz or San Jose. I like the format of the Santa Cruz website because it allows you to see an entire rainy season at one glance and it makes it easy to copy the values into an Excel spreadsheet. If you know of a better one, please let me know. All last year I used the one mentioned above.
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