adventures

I am interning at Santa Monica National Recreation Area, and live in park housing off of Mulholland Drive. It's the white house left of the pond.

We live in a small pocket of land owned by the park, because although most of the land between Hwy 101 and the coast here is part of the Recreation Area, a fair amount is held by private owners.

For my first two weeks I am helping trap bobcats. This involves getting up at five a.m. to be at the traps by six so we can feed the doves we use as live bait. Don't worry, they're in a cage-within-a-cage so the bobcats can't actually get them.

There are few trees here, mostly the land is open fields, thick sage scrub, and mustard thickets.

The bobcat traps are in small patches of undeveloped land between housing developments, freeways, malls, and shopping centers. I've discovered there's no "downtown" here.

It rained shortly before I arrived, so all the dirt turned to thick, cakey mud.

So thick and sticky, in fact, that the other intern and I wound up off the road one morning. That was a pricey tow job.

Yesterday morning we finally caught a cat in one of the traps! I recorded while the biologists and Adia (the carnivore intern and my roommate) measured the cat, took its blood, and collared it.

All the cats caught are collared so that we can track their movements to see where they live and how much time they spend in urban areas.

The collars emit a signal that we pick up with a handheld directional antenna. Determining the source of the strongest signal can be really challenging, particularly in the hill-and-canyon landscape here that either block or bounce the signal.