North side - 2/26/2020
February 26, 2020 (Wednesday) 9:50 am – 10:50 am: 7 "fresh" dead newts, 0 alive.
The weather was nice and warm.
I documented 7 fresh dead newts.
I've only included fresh-looking newts. 1 of them was definitely killed very recently, the rest I think are quite recent as well. I tried to remove (kick to shoulder) all newts that weren't attached. The problem was that the ones that were easily detached were obviously very old. The fresher ones cannot be removed easily, so that's not very helpful. But still, I removed dozens of newts from the road. Also, there were many newts left on the road, that I didn't document this time, as they looked pretty old and dry. But I'm not sure that was a good decision, as I know nothing about their decomposition in these hot, dry conditions. Maybe they were killed a few days ago (after the last documentation a week ago), but appear very dry? Iwill copy these questions to our decomposition discussion, so please follow up here - https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/31011-pacific-newt-roadkill-how-to-identify-duplicate-observations
Other roadkills - 1 garter snake, 1 fence lizard, 1 other lizard, 1 cricket, 1 Jerusalem cricket, 1 millipede, 1 caterpillar.
Coverage: north part - the county park parking lot till the second stop sign.
Rainfall: (MTD: 0.02 in; YTD: 15.21 in), nice and warm (25C). Data from - http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php
Traffic: 15 trucks, 27 cars (including a maintenance tractor, 1 driving, the other carried on a bigger truck), 7 bikes, 23 pedestrians.
Comments
@merav, are we now doing these just once a week? I'll do the south half on Wed if so.
It seemed to me that that's the case, looking at the calendar. Also, the newts are not that active anymore, so that makes sense anyway.
@merav @truthseqr At what point do we decide to stop patrolling for the season? See what happens if/when the rains pick back up? Or when we just don't find any relatively fresh ones for a couple of weeks? How did you decide last year?
I was asking myself the same question today... I'm not sure. Anne, what do you say?
I did find a very fresh one today, and a few possibly fresh ones.
I'm thinking of continuing the survey of the north section into the end of spring/ summer, to follow on other roadkills. Today I found a big toad and a few arthropods. I think it would be interesting to continue. What do you think?
Hi @newtpatrol, @merav, @sea-kangaroo,
How long to continue the survey? I looked at the rainfall stats for previous seasons. In 2019 and 2018, we had rainfall through mid-April. If I were collecting data this year, I'd continue surveying until mid-April unless there's no more rainfall predicted and/or you aren't finding any more fresh newt roadkill. Last year we had a lot of rainfall in March (5.09 inches), and that month had almost as many roadkills as January (5.08 inches of rain).
well, it supposed to rain next week! we'll see about that...
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