Desert 1 is along a highway and has huge soft sand dunes with plants and harder ground in between the dunes. Apparently there are lots of 3 toed jerboas on the top of the dunes and 5 toed jerboas in between with gerbils and jirds (shashu) everywhere.
Desert 2 is a tilled and abandoned field. It had really hard ground and small shrubs everywhere.
Desert 3 is a flat field where there are supposed to be a lot of 5-toed.
Desert 4 is a place with a lot of small dunes out behind the large forestry station.
Desert 5 is the field near our field station. It's very flat and hard and has a few intermittent bushes. We set traps there and only expect to get gerbils and perhaps a 5-toed. We will probably set up an enclosure there.
After a small nap, we went out to a place with small dunes to look at jerboas and gerbils. The location we went to was supposed to have a whole bunch of 3 and 5 toed jerboas, but we only saw a handful with lots of gerbils. Sarah spotted one and kept it in her light while Yang Chiang and I ran after it. Yang Chiang is really really good at netting jerboas. When our driver saw what we were doing he turned on his headlights to illuminate the field in front of us. After another hour of no captures we decided to start home. Along the way we saw a whole bunch of jerboas along the road! So Yang Chiang took a net and walked along outside the car while we rode behind and watched as he caught so many 5-toed jerboas! The driver was even weaving back and forth along the road so we could see off to the sides of the road. I think now that we have a few 5, 3, and gerbils, I want to set up an enclosure in the field and do some day vs night performance studies.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to fix one of my cameras that got sand in the workings of the lens while we were exploring desert 1 yesterday. It's a good thing my professor told me to bring 3 cameras instead of 2.
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