Tuesday 12/1/2020
December 1st, 2020 (Tuesday) 9:10-11:50 pm: 15 dead newts found, no live newts
Weather was nice, foggy earlier in the morning. No real rain in the past couple of weeks, after the initial rain. Rainfall: (MTD: 0 in; YTD: 0.93 in). Data from - http://www.weathercat.net/wxraindetail.php
@tyap and me documented 15 dead newts, 3 of them juveniles. Only one of the newts was freshly killed. It was found right in front of population study #1. I didn't include it in our project yet, I'd like to wait and see if we get a photo of it from the survey team. The rest of the newts were very dry, and were probably there for a while.
Other roadkills: 1 slender salamander, 2 unidentified vertebrates, a caterpillar, 3 Jerusalem Crickets, 1 cricket, 5 soil centipedes.
Coverage: north part - the county park parking lot till the second stop sign.
Traffic: 2 trucks, 34 cars, 2 motorcycles, 4 bikes, 9 pedestrians, and 17 cars parked by the road and in the parking lots. Some of the cars were county roads pickups.
We met the Midpen population study a few times. They haven't seen any live newts since the last rain.
The rowing club was open. All county park parking lots were open.
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@merav, I'm not surprised there weren't as many dead newts this week. In addition to no rainfall, it's been very cold. One of the published studies noted that newts stop migrating when the overnight temperature drops below 43 degrees (if I remember right). Our data confirm this: many fewer newts on cold nights.
That makes sense. I was expecting even fewer newts than what we found.
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