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Western Gray Squirrel News and Updates
Celebrate gray squirrels!
Volunteers had an end of year get-together at the Pacific Biodiversity Institute on Thursday, December 1, to celebrate the 2011 western gray squirrel research season. Volunteers had a chance to share each other’s field experiences. View a gallery of the year's events here..
Experiment to test tube design
In 2011, we designed to test the difference between different sizes of tubes. Part of this experiment involved filming the squirrels on remote cameras to find out more about their behavior. Click the link below to see some of the videos of western gray squirrels.
Western gray squirrel videos are posted here
On June 4, Pacific Biodiversity Institute began our third season studying western gray squirrels with a citizen science volunteer workshop and field trip to an active western gray squirrel hot spot in the forests of the Chewuch River Valley. We were all rewarded by finding a perfect example of a nest in a big, old ponderosa pine.
Hannah Edwards of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has come here to do her internship studies on the western gray squirrel. Hannah has traveled extensively and studied many species, and she hopes to learn more about mammals from this internship.
The workshop acquainted returning and new volunteers with the use of non-invasive hair sampling tubes used for confirming locations of western gray squirrels. Volunteers visited an area on the Chewuch River where western gray squirrel hairs were found in last year's sample tubes. As we walked into the area, we found numerous ground caches, some with pine cones still in them. Then we found a perfect example of a western gray squirrel nest. It was a round basket-ball of interwoven grass and pine needles 30 feet above the ground in a giant old pine. We set up a hair sampling tube at the site and have already obtained positive hairs from western gray squirrels from those tubes.
The sampling protocol is similar to that of 2010. This year's sampling sites will be located primarily where there were no previous records of western gray squirrels. This year there will also be more emphasis on locating squirrel nests. Another change in procedure is that tubes will remain in place even after hair is recovered in order to determine whether animals are residents or dispersing animals.
A report describing our 2010 research results is online and can be downloaded from this website: Citizen Science Research Report on Western Gray Squirrel Distribution in the Upper Methow Valley, by Asako Yamamuro, Kim Romain-Bondi, and Peter Morrison.
More information about the western gray squirrel project is available here:
- Western gray squirrel background information
- Forms for volunteer sampling
- Western gray squirrel volunteer information
This is a partnership project with Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife.
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