Hi everyone! We hope youâre having a great start to the spring season so far! There are a few things we need to do to get ready for this season but weâll get into that down below!
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Here are some updates on what weâve been up to:
Back in early March, we went to the Strengthening Your Participatory Science Workshop at the Barbara C Harris Conference Center in New Hampshire. Here we got to learn how to improve our participatory science project while also getting to meet other scientists trying to start up their own science projects. We had to give a three-minute pitch to everyone as if we were giving it to our next target demographic for the New England Flying Squirrel Network project, which would be K-12 teachers. We were given excellent feedback on the pitch. We were also introduced to a lot of resources for reaching out to teachers who are looking to incorporate different science projects in their classes. In the next year, weâre hoping to get more schools involved in the project so we were able to get a lot of helpful information on how to do that from this workshop!
 Weâve received some of your flying squirrel hair samples and are actively looking at the samples under a microscope to identify if there were any hairs. So far weâve gotten some decent samples. Itâs interesting to see the variety of flying squirrel hairs that participants are sending in. Weâre starting to get into the DNA analysis phase for all of the samples with the help of our interns from Endicott College. Weâll send out an update once your samples have been checked!
Weâre currently trying to finalize how we want participants to send in their flying squirrel nests from their nest boxes so we can pick through them for hairs. Weâre getting ready to send out nest collection kits to participants with nesting material in their boxes next week. We are sending out emails to participants who have reported a nest to let them know they have a kit coming. Shalissa might also reach out to get your mailing address if we donât already have it so please be on the lookout for some incoming emails!
If you have any older nests that arenât flying squirrel nests and youâre certain no animals are actively using the nests then you may now clean out your nest box.
Here are some updates on what youâve been up to:
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We wanted to update you all with a summary of the data collected from the submissions youâve been making on our app. The picture seen above shows where participants have boxes up with each green pin representing the post office of each town we have submissions from. The red pins represent flying squirrel activity such as nests, feeding stations, or latrines in participant boxes. The yellow pins represent flying squirrels that were found in the box at time of check.
We just wanted to give you a visual of how the participant side of this project is going in terms of what flying squirrel activity you all are getting so far. This will only increase as time passes and weâll keep updating this map every so often as you all get more activity or squirrels in your boxes!
While on the topic of participant submissions, we want to remind everyone to keep trying to do their monthly box checks and submitting data. Itâs okay if your box is still empty, weâd greatly appreciate your submissions so we can track how each box is doing. At the current moment, we only have about 12 to 15 participants consistently turning in data. We would like to increase this number this year.Â