An aggressive coyote bit a student walking along the sidewalk near the EcoPreserve this past week. This type of aggressive behavior towards adult humans is rare and the individual coyote may be rabid. The Ecopreserve is closed to access while the NJ Division of Fish & Wildlife attempts to trap the coyote.
If you’ve been out bushwhacking on the EcoPreserve, you might have come across a “trail camera” attached to a tree. The Ecopreserve is participating in Snapshot USA, a project coordinated by the Smithsonian Institution to get at least one location in all 50 states to monitor their wildlife populations through a network of motion detector “trail cameras” during the months of September and October, 2019. The EcoPreserve in NJ’s sole location. Students for the Principles of Natural Resource Management class…
Horse Patrols in the EcoPreserve If you’ve been seeing the horse hoofprints along the trails of the EcoPreserve you’ve not been mistaken. The Rutgers Horse Patrol has started to include the trails of the EcoPreserve as part of their regular patrol of the Livingston Campus. Bikers please yield to the horses as they pass by.
For the first time in Rutgers history, a formal survey of the bats inhabiting the Rutgers EcoPreserve is being conducted. On a weekly basis, members of the Maslo Lab (https://sites.rutgers.edu/brooke-maslo/) trek into the Preserve after dark to catch and catalog bat species. Bats are caught using mist nets, which are fine mesh nets mounted to metal poles extending up to 30 feet in the air and suspended across trails or streams (think backyard badminton!). Captured bats are removed from the…