Where have all the red voles gone? Teacher studies effects of climate change on Nova Scotian rodents BY JESSICA ALFREY Correspondent METUCHEN - Picking ticks off strangers and sharing a "bathroom" with the bears is not the average person's idea of a three-week trip to Canada. Unless you are Patricia Donahue. Donahue, an eighth-grade earth science teacher at Churchill Junior High School in East Brunswick, spent July 8-21 in the southeast section of Nova Scotia with the Mammals of Nova Scotia expedition, run by Earthwatch. The main goal of the expedition was to study the effects of climate change on small mammals in the area, such as mice, red-backed voles and chipmunks. The expedition consisted of 12 volunteers from all over the world, two professors with the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit of Oxford University, and a graduate student who worked as the professors' assistant. In order to collect data, the team set out 100 traps in a test area that had to be checked twice a day for four days straight. If a trap contained an animal, its information such as sex and age were recorded, and a small piece of fur on the hip was also clipped to show that the animal had been captured. While she had not been not familiar with this work prior to being set loose in the woods of Nova Scotia, Donahue said the group had a half-day of training in safety, the correct use and placement of traps, how to handle the animals, tree identification, and a little bit about animal droppings. Once the trapping phase was finished, the group would use equations to evaluate how large the population of that mammal was, based on that small test area. From this data, the researchers were able to learn some interesting facts. "The huge issue is that in two weeks, we only trapped one mouse," said Donahue. "The mice are kind of like the indicator species for what's going on in the environment. The researchers are very concerned because they can't explain what happened to the mice." Another species of concern is the red-backed vole. "The density of the red-backed voles is very low," said Donahue. She explained that voles store food in preparation for the winter. "What the researchers suspect might be happening is that because spring was late, the voles ran out of food and many of them may have died," she said. The team also had lecture time where they would talk about other issues and do the mathematical calculations. They sectioned off a part of land as a sample area and searched for droppings of the snowshoe hares to estimate their population. During their lecture time, the group talked about their concern over the snowshoe hare and its ability to camouflage itself. As Donahue explained, the snowshoe hare is white in the winter and brown the rest of the year, to make it harder for predators to find them. The color is determined by the amount of daylight. "What's happening," she said, "is that because of the climate change, the change of seasons is not matching the change of daylight, so hares are sometimes the wrong color, making it easier for predators to see them." According to Donahue, who has been teaching at Churchill for 10 years, it will be a unique challenge to bring the life science she learned about in Nova Scotia back to the students in her earth science class, but she has several ideas on how to accomplish it. "There are a few things I plan to do, using some of the results of this research as an example of what's happening in the environment itself," said Donahue, who already talks about global warming and climate change in her classes. Donahue, who also works with the Science Olympiad team, plans to use a global positioning system to map areas, just as field researchers do. She is working on lesson plans that she will make available to other schools as well, which will teach students the same concept of transsecting that she and the group used, to show students how to identify trees and search for animal droppings. In the midst of clipping fur and searching for droppings, the team also made the time to build an outhouse for future research teams so that they will not have to endure the same fate of "doing it in the woods with the bears," said Donahue. A much larger mammal that is not a typical find in the woods of Nova Scotia was also being studied: humans. Donahue explained that the researchers themselves were being observed to see if volunteers doing this kind of work were effective. The results, according to Donahue, were that age, sex, educational level, etc., did not matter when it came to making a good volunteer. The only thing that did matter was physical fitness. In addition to being a teacher and married mother of three, Donahue has spent the past 15 years on the borough of Metuchen's Environmental Commission, helping to find ways for residents to be a little more "green" and climate friendly. Donahue will share her newfound knowledge with the commission and hopes to put together a presentation at the local library to give information to the general public. "Most people when they think of climate change, they think of weather and the temperature," said Donahue. "You actually see the changes of creatures in the environment. Mice and voles are at the bottom of the food chain. It's a snowball effect." While the trip was not leisurely by any means, Donahue said it was rewarding. "It was a lot of work. It was hot and humid; we picked ticks off each other. [We] had to wear rubber boots. This was work - work, but it was a fascinating experience to be on the front lines of research. It's a very different front line than someone who's looking in a petri dish through a microscope; that's still research, but this is field research." The trip also gave Donahue a greater awareness of New Jersey's wildlife. "There's so little [wildlife left] in New Jersey," she said, "we need to safeguard."