"It was a race against nightfall. As he hurried across the sandy, bristling landscape of California's Carrizo Plain, ecologist Ian Axsom stopped every 10 yards to place an aluminum live trap on the ground, eventually distributing traps over an area the size of two baseball fields. Against the rolling playas and tawny mountains, the traps glinted with golden remnants of the September dusk."
"The trapping was part of the trust's ongoing effort to monitor kangaroo rats on the Carrizo Plain, located at the southwesternmost edge of the San Joaquin Valley, which stretches 250 miles from Stockton southeast to Bakersfield. The valley is a geographical palimpsest marked by urbanization, drilling and, most of all, agriculture. But the Carrizo Plain is still relatively undeveloped - a time capsule, a remnant of the ecosystem that predated European settlement."
An ecologist hurried across the sandy, bristling Carrizo Plain at dusk to place aluminum live traps every ten yards across an area the size of two baseball fields. Team members baited each trap with bird seed mix and set triggers to capture the nocturnal giant kangaroo rat, a keystone species of the plain. Routine trapping and surveys provide baseline data to measure effects of development, including two solar farms, on the species and its habitat. The Carrizo Plain, at the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley, remains relatively undeveloped and preserves a remnant of the pre-European ecosystem.
Read at High Country News
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