Just as our summer crew in winding down and wrapping up the work on our existing study areas, a new crew of four people has arrived in camp to strat trapping the three new areas that we have established for the food addition experiment. Sarah and Zachary come from Washington, Ryan has come up from California, while Mireille hails from Vancouver, BC. Three graduate students (Mark, Adi and Quinn) are also continuing to work hard to take advantage of our first abundant spruce cone crop since 1998.

We are now quickly approaching the end of summer in Kluane and the squirrels know it. They have switched into high gear clipping spruce cones for the winter. As suspected, we had a cone mast on some of our grids but not others. On those grids with an abundance of cones, some trees can have over 7,000 cones alone (a squirrel needs an estimated 14,000 cones to survive the winter)! This cone abundance has allowed female squirrels who could not maintain their first litters on those grids to breed again, so the crew continues to do a few late nest entries. Most emerged juveniles are now looking for middens where they can settle for the winter. Given the cone mast and the opportunities it brings, several graduate students will stay late this year to collect additional data. We will also start trapping some new grid areas for future monitoring and the food addition experiment and begin a few camp renovations in preparation for an expansion next season.

Squirrel Crew 2005