Gopher it: Uncovering the unique ecology of the plains pocket gopher

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:09

Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Environment podcast where we explore the environment we see every day. I'm your host, Amy Lefringhouse.

Darci Webber: 00:17

And I'm your cohost, Darci Webber.

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:20

And today we are here with Nathan Alexander. He is a postdoctoral research associate with the Illinois Natural History Survey. And he's gonna talk to us about the Plains Pocket Gopher, which is kinda cool and different. So welcome, Nathan. Thank you for being here today.

Nathan Alexander: 00:41

Thank you for having me.

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:43

Well, let's start right off the bat just getting to know you a little bit more, Nathan. Can you just tell us about the work that you do there at the history survey?

Nathan Alexander: 00:56

Sure. So I've kind of taken a career shift from the small mammal world and working with all the rodents where currently I'm working on waterbird disease up in Green Bay. The project is really trying to understand how bird communities and exposure to disease risk kind of impact each other and how managers in the area can better prevent botulism outbreaks, avian flu outbreaks, or understand where the disease will progress going forward. This is really in regards to piping plover populations, which are very cute Yeah. Shorebirds.

Amy Lefringhouse: 01:35

I have I was in what is the bird sanctuary there in Chicago where they have they're there. Right? What is it called there?

Nathan Alexander: 01:43

I think it's Montrose.

Amy Lefringhouse: 01:45

Yes. Montrose. So my sister and I are just like bebopping around out there. We're like trying to find these little trails, know, in amongst the city life. And we see all these people gathered around, you know, this little area that was fenced off.

Amy Lefringhouse: 01:58

And I was like, oh my gosh, what's happening there? And then we've then we figured it out. So the piping plover was there. They were they're nesting there. Is that correct?

Nathan Alexander: 02:07

I believe that's true. Okay. Most of my work is up in the Green Bay area, but I do believe that there are some nesting around the Chicago area.

Amy Lefringhouse: 02:14

Yeah. Cool. Cool. Well, today you're not here to talk about that type of stuff, that topic that you're working on. You're here to talk about a different animal.

Amy Lefringhouse: 02:24

And like I said before, it's called the plains pocket gopher. So how did you get to know so much or want to, you know, study a little bit more that gopher species?

Nathan Alexander: 02:39

Yeah. So my background is largely in small mammal work. I'm originally from Southern Illinois, just outside of Carbondale area. Mhmm. And I did my masters out in Northern California working on kangaroo rats, and I've done some other fieldwork on flying squirrels, so kind of this bounty of rodent research.

Nathan Alexander: 03:02

And so for the gophers, I applied to do a doctoral study under doctor Schooley in the NRES department here, and so I did my dissertation on the plains pocket gophers in Illinois and kind of across their entire range as well. And a lot of this was started by IDNR, Illinois Department of Natural Resources, to really get an assessment of where are gophers now. Is there anything that is particularly threatening them or interacting with them? And just what is the status?

Amy Lefringhouse: 03:35

Sure. Sure.

Darci Webber: 03:37

Could you provide us an overview of the pocket gophers and like why they're significant in Illinois?

Nathan Alexander: 03:43

Yeah. Pocket gophers are a tall grass prairie and Illinois plain species, and Illinois has suffered a lot of prairie reduction over the years. We're down to less than 1% of our tall grass prairies. We have these fragmented populations of prairies throughout the state. But understanding how some of these prairie species have responded to this habitat alteration and in some cases destruction is still kind of an unknown for a lot of these species.

Nathan Alexander: 04:17

So we really started this project looking at habitat associations and the type of habitats where we would find gophers and try to understand the where and why of gophers, so to say.

Amy Lefringhouse: 04:31

Mhmm. Talk a lot about in our Master Naturalist program about the natural divisions of Illinois. Is that like did you kind of look at that and figure out where you're gonna go find them? Or were you just like had you had you heard of different instances of where populations may have been? Or how did you how did you know where to go in Illinois to find them?

Nathan Alexander: 04:55

Yeah. There have been papers published in Illinois on gophers previously, but the most recent one is about 1935 by an author named Moore. And in some of these papers, we get an idea of where the gophers are, but whether or not they surveyed the entire state or were able to identify all the populations is sometimes limited.

Amy Lefringhouse: 05:18

Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 05:19

But there's a range map for gophers where they tend to persist south of the Illinois River. Rivers are presumed to be a barrier for gophers

Nathan Alexander: 05:30

And tend to inhabit sandier soils due to kind of the glacial recessions within Illinois. So there's these soil types that are associated with them Okay. And as well as historic papers, there's also specimens from like the nineteen fifties and the nineteen thirties, which I used in some of my research to look at what the habitat associations were in the nineteen fifties compared to now.

Amy Lefringhouse: 05:57

Okay. Okay. So what are they doing on a like, what's their typical behavior? Like, what do they do every day?

Nathan Alexander: 06:07

Yeah. That's a hard question. Gophers spend about 95% of their life underground. So it's really difficult to understand some of these behaviors that gophers have. They form these extensive and complex burrow systems.

Nathan Alexander: 06:29

They tend to be territorial where they don't really share burrows with one another, and mom will kick the kids out eventually. But recently there have been some studies on gophers talking about root growth in their tunnels and burrows because they feed primarily on the root systems of plants. If you can burrow to your food, it prevents exposure to predators on ground. And this recent study found that they were actually kind of potentially farming the root systems within the burrows where if you excluded a gopher from the burrow, more roots would grow in than elsewhere. So, you know, they're they're kind of our own local farmers as well.

Darci Webber: 07:15

That's so fun.

Amy Lefringhouse: 07:18

Yeah. That's crazy. So they're are they like say rotational grazing? Like, they're like in this area, they eat it all, then they go back over here to this area, and they know there's more root growth over here, and then they kind of rotate back and forth? Are they do you think?

Amy Lefringhouse: 07:33

I guess is that kind of a hypothesis?

Nathan Alexander: 07:35

Yeah. It would be interesting to explore it further. This this other study was down in the Southeast in the I believe it was in the longleaf pine forests in the Florida areas because there's a gopher species there. But for ours, it's kind of still an unknown, which is a very exciting thing too. Rare in this day and age to be encounter an unknown, and that's what really gets researchers excited because it's potential studies and potential ways to figure out more information.

Darci Webber: 08:07

Yeah. So you mentioned you had studied a variety of different rodents. So from your experience, what are some differences of characteristics that help distinguish gophers from other rodents?

Nathan Alexander: 08:20

My background has really it it seems to be very focused on rodents that have weird ways of moving.

Nathan Alexander: 08:29

So my master's was on kangaroo rats which hop their on their hind legs. And in their systems, they travel above ground but are still burrowing rodents. With that, they're facing different concerns to population connectivity such as different grass species and being able to move easily through it. Whereas gophers are so fossorial that there's not even that much information on their dispersal. Sometimes these individuals can disperse above ground, sometimes they kind of bud out of their burrow systems and create burrows that just continue on and close-up the burrow behind them.

Nathan Alexander: 09:10

Mhmm. So the concept of how these animals move is what really kind of makes me interested in these systems, And understanding how the landscape and how the current practices might impact that movement and connectivity is part of my particular interests.

Amy Lefringhouse: 09:28

Mhmm. Now tell me because I I did a very minimal amount of research before I got on here, Nathan, but they're called pocket gophers because of like some kind of characteristic on their maybe their faces or their cheeks or something like that? Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. I'm curious.

Nathan Alexander: 09:52

Yeah. They're very interesting morphologically because of these unique characteristics as well. So they have fur lined cheek pouches where they can hold food, carry food, but also those cheeks can close behind their incisors so they can use their teeth to burrow through certain things without the soil getting in their mouth. So it's a very interesting organism and and animal. You know I I always describe them as kind of angry potatoes because they're underground, they're furry, they just look like an oblong because to move through the soil, you don't want a bunch of different parts of your body sticking out to catch on the walls.

Nathan Alexander: 10:38

But they're they're very cute in their own way.

Amy Lefringhouse: 10:41

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's crazy. So they have like a fur lined cheek pouch and then they can close it off, but they so they can still go through their tunnels.

Amy Lefringhouse: 10:51

When I heard Plains Pocket Gopher, I thought, oh, it must be like small enough to put into your pocket. So like how how big are these animals?

Nathan Alexander: 11:01

They're they're a good baked potato size.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:03

Okay. Baked potato it is.

Nathan Alexander: 11:07

Slightly slightly bigger maybe, but much smaller than your average groundhog. But maybe kind of small guinea pig size that might be a familiar size.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:20

Yeah. I get you. I get you. And do you ever see them like out and about? Like would a normal person ever see them?

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:29

Are they almost 100% underground burrowing around?

Nathan Alexander: 11:35

It really varies depending on what you catch the gopher doing. So their mounds are very apparent, and you can tell them apart from mole mounds because the entrance tends to be on one side of the mound rather than in the middle of it.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:51

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 11:52

So there's kind of this crescent shaped fan of soil around it.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:56

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 11:57

And you can sometimes see them around these as they're pushing the soil out, and this is one of the great things that they do for our soil health is they pull soil up from the depths and push it out on the surface and it creates a lot of nutrient rotation. I I've been sent a few videos of gophers doing that, or a few photos of gophers in the process of pushing the dirt out, But during my work, we rarely saw them unless we were had them in a trap that we were processing, a a live trap.

Amy Lefringhouse: 12:30

Sure. Sure.

Darci Webber: 12:32

Are there other environmental benefits that gophers do for us?

Nathan Alexander: 12:37

Yeah. So back in 2002, there was a paper that classified them as an ecosystem engineer. And the typical ecosystem engineer that you think about when you hear this phrase is like beavers. A beaver. Yeah.

Nathan Alexander: 12:51

Where they can fundamentally alter the ecosystem. Gophers tend to do this because they create these tunnel networks, and a lot of these burrowing rodents create these tunnel networks that not only improve soil health, provides nutrient cycling, having that aeration can increase root growth. They might eat the roots, but you know, depending on whether or not a burrow is occupied over time it can create these benefits. Mhmm. It also provides a lot of habitat for other animals.

Nathan Alexander: 13:23

So a lot of animals will use abandoned burrows or other spaces to inhabit that and either seek refuge from the sun, refuge from predators, and various things.

Amy Lefringhouse: 13:37

Well you talked about some of the really cool and interesting and fascinating things about pocket gophers. Why did you start studying them and and what what are some of those interesting findings that you've had while studying them?

Nathan Alexander: 13:52

The first question I was really interested in was how has agriculture really impacted this species distribution and its response? Mhmm. This kind of requires knowing about Illinois agriculture as well, where since the nineteen fifties, we've had farm size increases, not necessarily more farmland being put in production, but the average farm size has increased. We have shifted our crops from in the nineteen fifties, we had some alfalfa particularly in Central Illinois. And we've gone much more towards soy, which really didn't kick up till after World War two.

Nathan Alexander: 14:33

So understanding these changes in farming practices and how that impacts gopher distributions was of really an of a strong interest for me. One of the benefits of this work is we found out that gophers are probably much more resilient to different habitat types than just Tallgrass Prairie. So we were able to find them along roadways, people's backyards.

Amy Lefringhouse: 14:58

Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Alexander: 14:59

It it was interesting because since the nineteen fifties to now, we saw a reduction in the association with farmland, likely due to larger focus on crops that have above ground production. So we're no longer looking at root systems that are too expansive Yeah. Or too involved, but which is no longer necessarily suitable habitat for gophers. So hopefully, there's some decrease in agriculture and gopher conflict, but it it was exciting to be able to see them across these different habitat types as well. All grasses, all open areas, all sandy soils with some loam, But that was kind of our first interest.

Nathan Alexander: 15:44

The next interests are kind of more along whether or not they are their own species. Because the rest

Amy Lefringhouse: 15:52

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 15:52

The Illinois Plains pocket gopher is a subspecies of the plains pocket gopher.

Amy Lefringhouse: 15:57

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 15:59

But they're separated from the rest of the plains pocket gopher by the Mississippi River.

Amy Lefringhouse: 16:05

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 16:05

Gophers are not the best swimmers, so we wanted to know

Amy Lefringhouse: 16:10

I I'm like trying to imagine a potato swimming right now. I don't it probably doesn't work out so great.

Nathan Alexander: 16:16

And and they don't particularly float either. So so we use some genetic analyses to try to understand where they were phylogenetically with the rest of the subspecies, as well as how well these populations were connected to one another based off of different environmental factors and over time.

Amy Lefringhouse: 16:39

Okay. Anything East Of The Mississippi River is usually clumped together. Right? Did you find that these were connected to some of the western species that would have been on the West Side Of The Mississippi River or there's maybe a connection or maybe a DNA connection or am I wrong about that?

Nathan Alexander: 16:58

Our gophers were always grouped with the Western Side because we're kind of the only ones with the eastern populations of gophers except for down in Florida and then up in the Wisconsin area.

Amy Lefringhouse: 17:11

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 17:12

But our gophers are pretty restricted to Illinois by the Illinois River. And there's a little bit into Indiana up in the sand dunes region. But it's interesting to think about species and their connections outside of the state as well. So there's a lot of species, and this is an ongoing discovery Mhmm. Where as we're looking at the genetics of species, they are clustering with populations West Of The Mississippi rather than East.

Nathan Alexander: 17:44

Recently, the rice rat down in Southern Illinois was just found to be genetically from the western lineages rather than the eastern ones.

Amy Lefringhouse: 17:54

Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 17:55

And then chorus frogs kind of had the same distribution and the ones in Illinois came from West Of The Mississippi. So we see this across taxa of Illinois species being relatively unique because they're connected to populations West Of The Mississippi rather than East.

Amy Lefringhouse: 18:14

Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 18:15

For the gophers it was really interesting because so much of their habitat association is soil based. And as I was getting into this research, it got me all the way back to the Pleistocene where before the Mississippi had connected and became such a large river, there was actually a grassland peninsula, that's what they called it, that extended into Illinois and Indiana from West Of The Mississippi. And a lot of these grassland associated species came to our state through this peninsula during the Pleistocene and has since been isolated by the expansion of the Mississippi since.

Amy Lefringhouse: 18:55

That's interesting. That's really cool.

Nathan Alexander: 18:59

Yeah. We we should be proud of all of our species in Illinois because they're all kind of unique and interesting.

Amy Lefringhouse: 19:07

Yeah. We can go either way. Right? It's kinda neat our spatial position that we have here in The United States and the glacier activity, the river valley movements and things like that. That's just kinda neat.

Darci Webber: 19:22

I think of our state specifically, like, up north, we have Chicagoland and then south is more field agriculture land. What do you know about how gophers navigate living in different environments, dealing with urbanization, and then like even going into climate change. How how will that impact them?

Nathan Alexander: 19:40

So the gophers don't get too far north into Chicagoland area just with the River Barrier. But they were historically around Bloomington normal and all of those areas and they're they're still there, although in slightly different places than they were collected back in the nineteen fifties. The gophers, one of the things we found was that Gophers tend to be relatively okay with low intensity development. So this is kind of the right of ways outside of parking lots. Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 20:16

I spent a lot of time driving through Central Illinois from Havana, Beardstown Yeah. All the way down to the Cahokia Mounds because there's a population down there in

Amy Lefringhouse: 20:27

Those the Sandy Counties.

Nathan Alexander: 20:29

Yeah.

Amy Lefringhouse: 20:30

Where they grow melons.

Nathan Alexander: 20:33

And and all the way up to Kankakee and Pembroke and all those areas. So there's interactions that I kind of observed as well as we found statistically supported

Nathan Alexander: 20:47

Where there was more gopher activity in these low development areas. And whether or not that suitable habitat versus not, our models were essentially just saying you're more likely to find them here, and they seem to be persisting there. But the climate change question is also really interesting because Illinois is having increased precipitation regimes since the nineteen fifties. We're having more variation in our precipitation regimes. And with the land use, there's also kind of more expansion into the better soil areas for agriculture.

Nathan Alexander: 21:26

This means that the gophers kind of have this interaction of selecting for sandier soils than they used to being at lower elevations I believe. And all of this feels very much like it comes together in this concept of flooding risk. Like how well drained are the soils? How well can gophers persist in an area with these increasing weather patterns? Temperature is probably not a huge one except for how it affects grasses and plant productivity.

Amy Lefringhouse: 21:59

Sure.

Nathan Alexander: 22:00

Because one of the advantages of being in the ground is that there's more temperature regulation and you can kind of acclimate better. But the precipitation question is interesting one.

Darci Webber: 22:14

So when you are finding these communities of pocket gophers, like how many are in that population before they move to another home?

Nathan Alexander: 22:23

This question was the bane of part of my research. We found that our gophers were very dispersed across the landscape. So it when I'm talking about a population of pocket gophers, it might be several counties. We kind of identified three to four main areas with some gaps between them. So there's kind of the East Saint Louis, Cahokia Mounds region.

Nathan Alexander: 22:47

There's the Havana region, the Bloomington, and up along the roadways up there up to the Illinois River, and then some out in Pembroke, the Kankakee area. But they were never in very high densities. If you go out West or look at some of the other species of gophers, we have a Geomys gopher here and out West like in California they have a Thomomys. You know, the first year of this project I remember seeing one or two mounds per property with maybe like half a kilometer or a kilometer between them, and then going out to a friend's wedding on the West Coast and just seeing this giant patch filled with gophers and all of them coming up and you could see them all. And it was just at a park and it was just a completely different system from how our gophers in Illinois were on the landscape and existing on the landscape.

Amy Lefringhouse: 23:45

So what you called them those two different were those two different genus? Two different. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Amy Lefringhouse: 23:53

Yeah that's wild. You're like, oh my gosh.

Nathan Alexander: 23:56

Yeah. It made me question whether or not we should be looking at the other genus rather than ours.

Amy Lefringhouse: 24:04

Yeah. Wow. That's interesting. So do you have like a cool memorable story from when when you're out doing your field work, a funny one or, you know, something crazy that happened. There's always something crazy that happens when you're in the field.

Nathan Alexander: 24:26

Yeah. There there's always field stories.

Amy Lefringhouse: 24:30

I feel like we need the podcast just called Field Stories.

Nathan Alexander: 24:34

Yes. There wasn't too much that was that wild, but it was a lot of fun. And I I had a technician working with me part of the time, and to live trap a gopher, we were essentially putting a two gallon bucket into the dirt where it was below their burrow system, so we'd have to dig three to four feet down

Amy Lefringhouse: 24:57

Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 24:58

And and try to trick the gopher into falling into these buckets. Mhmm. And my field technician did a handstand in one of these holes and just had like the you know, the knees up protruding. So there was a lot of good fun field experience. Know, we had a lot of difficulty trapping gophers.

Nathan Alexander: 25:20

We were live trapping and then digging a bunch of those holes was great exercise, but also difficult to keep checking them and keep up high sampling. For our gophers, in the texts it pretty much says they match the soil color and they're darker than the other subspecies, but we found a wide array of color variation. So out in the Havana areas

Nathan Alexander: 25:45

We got almost these cinnamon colored gophers Mhmm. That matched the sandy soil there. In Kankakee, we were catching black gophers that matched the loamy soil there. Some had little white spots on their backs or around their paws. So just a lot of interesting color variation in our species.

Amy Lefringhouse: 26:06

Did you study these for multiple season field seasons?

Nathan Alexander: 26:10

Yeah. We did roadside surveys for their mounds for about a year or or summer, and then we were live trapping for a couple summers.

Amy Lefringhouse: 26:19

Okay. Okay. That's cool.

Nathan Alexander: 26:21

With very low success rates. But

Amy Lefringhouse: 26:26

So it was essentially like a pit like a pit fall type of Yeah. Contraption? Okay.

Nathan Alexander: 26:32

Yeah. It it was a pitfall that we mounted into their burrow system.

Amy Lefringhouse: 26:36

Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Nathan Alexander: 26:38

With like a PVC pipe that would connect into the burrow and so hopefully they'd go in the PVC pipe Yeah. Just drop down.

Amy Lefringhouse: 26:44

Yep. Yep. Interesting. That's like when you I feel like engineer field engineering too would be a fun thing to talk about with people because there's lots of different wildlife kind of like engineering that has to happen to study really in-depth some of these these organisms that we study. It's kind of we get really creative I think with with almost everyday items.

Nathan Alexander: 27:10

I was gonna say that you could have an entire podcast on the uses of duct tape in the field.

Amy Lefringhouse: 27:16

I was gonna say PVC, but yeah. That's fun.

Darci Webber: 27:22

So do you have any recommendations or insights onto how the public can contribute to the conservation of pocket gophers?

Nathan Alexander: 27:30

I I think that there's a push currently and has been for several years to introduce native plants back into people's yards, people's gardens. You know, whether or not you want a gopher in your yard might still be debatable, but if you're having a natural native prairie restoration, those roots can really develop and and support these populations. Furthermore, just more information on them is always useful. This was kind of the first time looking at them in-depth since the nineteen thirties, really.

Amy Lefringhouse: 28:05

Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 28:07

And there's so much more participant science opportunities. INaturalist is great. I I was as I was taking a GPS point, I was also taking an iNaturalist point for gophers, and we can actually use that data for a lot of the type of work I do where we can know the species present there, figure out habitat associations through some statistical models. Even if the species isn't there, we can use the presence of a different species to kind of be like, well there was an opportunity to observe in this area so we know it wasn't there. Yeah.

Nathan Alexander: 28:43

And using apps like iNaturalist really help out a lot.

Amy Lefringhouse: 28:49

That's cool that you brought that up is the way that we research, you know, now compared to if you can even if we can even imagine researching in the nineteen thirties, I mean, there's a lot of groundwork that you had to do to even you know figure out where to go. And now this community science and participatory sciences can help us do research that without having to spend a you know all that time looking and searching and I mean we'll still a little bit but at least gets us in gets us in areas where we didn't realize. I see that this is just like a tiny little correlation but or association but I see that even just when I do youth programs and we're just looking for you know whatever. We're in a creek or we're in a whatever and we're just looking for things and you walking around that creek are going to see just a few little things. Whereas every single time I do something the kids find things that I would have never imagined would have been in these places.

Amy Lefringhouse: 29:53

So the iNaturalist and that kind of like crowdsourcing and and the data that comes about is really helpful. So it was really cool to hear you say that even in this instance, researchers and scientists are using that information.

Nathan Alexander: 30:09

Yeah. And one particular fun story about this is I I was giving a talk before this project really took off down in Southern Illinois just about gophers in general, some of the preliminary modeling from the historic samples. And that weekend, that group of community members were going to Cahokia Mountains, they actually found gophers on the Cahokia Mountains and took videos of it and sent it to me. And I probably wouldn't have Sure. Known to go down there and survey for them without that

Amy Lefringhouse: 30:43

Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 30:43

Connection.

Amy Lefringhouse: 30:44

Mhmm.

Nathan Alexander: 30:45

As we continue to look at how can we all work together to better understand our natural world, there's great opportunities for people to contribute and collaborate even if you don't wanna get into the statistics of everything. But having your knowledge of your your own land and the species that are on there or the interactions that they have is really invaluable, particularly as some of these more modeling things are shifting to satellite and remote processes, having that on the ground expertise is is so helpful.

Amy Lefringhouse: 31:25

Well, think that's a great way to wrap this up is just, know, talking about the ways that people can can get involved and even on their own in their own individual ways. So we really thank you, Nathan, for being with us today and recording this podcast with us today and sharing your expertise on rodents and gophers. And yeah, it was just really interesting to hear everything. So we really thank you.

Nathan Alexander: 31:51

Thank you all for for the opportunity. And and I would be remiss if I didn't say thank you for letting me share my experiences about gophering it.

Amy Lefringhouse: 32:02

I like gopher it. That's awesome. Well, as always, during this podcast, we usually finish the episode with sharing our everyday observations. We were just talking about, you know, observing your your own landscapes, your own residential lawns, or your own larger farms. We want to share our own everyday observations where we highlight the mundane and normal of our environment that is actually really interesting.

Amy Lefringhouse: 32:30

So I'm gonna start with you Darci. What's your everyday observation?

Darci Webber: 32:35

Yeah. So this past fall, we were out at the woods with some kids looking at tracks of different animals and identifying what what animals we think were there and what we're seeing within the tracks and building some outdoor skills that way. And I was recently at the woods again, and I saw a fox. And it was like the coolest thing ever because it was the first time I'd seen a fox, like, in real life, not in the zoo or anything. Yeah.

Darci Webber: 33:00

And so it's a really just fun experience of, like, oh, I've seen the tracks. Now I've seen the animal. And so just being able to be outside and be with wildlife is really neat.

Amy Lefringhouse: 33:10

That's really cool. Kinda came full circle. You see the signs? Yes. And then you happen to be there in the right time to see the actual animal.

Amy Lefringhouse: 33:19

That's really cool. Nathan, what about you? What's your everyday observation?

Nathan Alexander: 33:23

Well, I'll I'll share one that I noticed right before jumping on the podcast, which is I believe I have some voles starting to form trails in my backyard. Oh, interesting. So, you know, maybe not the best thing, but it is still such an interesting thing to see how voles work in these networks and create these runways between the little burrows and really alter some of their habitat to make their movements between these burrows much more efficient. So, you know, if if you think about voles as a pest, it's not great to have them, but also in that space, we can still really appreciate at how effective they are at creating these pathways and getting around.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:11

Mhmm. Yeah. That's cool. I had a a neat experience when the snow melted. I could see paths.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:19

I don't know what little animal it was making these paths, field mice. I don't I don't know. They weren't really like tunnelers that were underground, but they were definitely making a little network underneath the snow. And it had matted down kind of the grass in these certain areas. That was kinda neat to see.

Nathan Alexander: 34:38

Might have been voles.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:39

Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe so. Well, thank you for sharing, Nathan, that everyday observation. I have one.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:49

It was over Christmas break. I did the Christmas bird count for the first time. And during that bird count, you know, you're in like major bird observation mode. Right? So we kept seeing over top of either the road that went alongside this creek or maybe even over the creek, we saw several different oriole nests like the little pocket hanging nests.

Amy Lefringhouse: 35:16

And just this last weekend, we're of course this we're recording this in the spring so it's like spring bird migration time and we saw an oriole, a Baltimore oriole, on our bird feeder which was really cool. And I'd seen them before. But again just like you Darci it was like saw the nest, now I see the real thing. I've seen them before but this one was like a really kind of it must have been a female because it was kind of yellowish orange. And at first we were like is that a finch?

Amy Lefringhouse: 35:49

You know because it was a feeder bird and we were like oh we see lots of finches but you know finches are just teensy tiny little things and this guy wasn't or this lady I guess wasn't, but we figured it out that it was it had to have been an an oriole. So that was really neat. And and they're of course, their nests are just so unique and different than than other bird nests that you see. So that's kinda cool. Again, full circle, like you said, Darci.

Amy Lefringhouse: 36:15

Well, thank you, what, guys, both for sharing that and being with us today. This has been another episode of the Everyday Environment Podcast. Join us next week where we talk to Brodie Dunn about why you should listen to Illinois wildlife.