Vascular Plant and Vertebrate Inventory of Saguaro ... - USGS

Table 6.4. Results of netting for bats, by elevation strata, site, and visit, Saguaro National Park, Rincon
Mountain District, 2001 and 2002.
Low Middle High
Chimenea
Wild Horse Deer
Devil’s
Creek Lower Rincon Creek
Canyon Creek Manning Camp Pond Bathtub
1 2 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 4 5 1
Mexican long‑tongued bat 1
unknown myotis 1 1
southwestern myotis 2 1 1
cave myotis 1 1 1
fringed myotis 1 1
long‑legged myotis 1 2
California myotis 2 1 1 3 1
silver‑haired bat 1 2 1
big brown bat 4 4 2 2 2 2 5 10 19 4 1
western red bat 1
hoary bat 1 2 2 1 1
Townsend’s big‑eared bat 1
pallid bat 1
Brazilian free‑tailed bat 8 2 1 1 3 1
pocketed free‑tailed bat 1 1
total detections by visit 2 4 16 4 0 8 9 0 1 0 7 1 12 17 21 5 3
total detections by site 6 37 1 7 56 3
percent netting success 3.4 7.1 0.4 7.4 19.1 11.1
species richness by site 2 12 1 3 7 3
Even the cave myotis, for which we found a roost
of >500 individuals, was represented by only a
few individuals captured by netting.
Medium and Large Mammals
In 3,895 estimated camera nights, 2,939
photographs captured at least one mammal (not
including nocturnal rodents, people, and horses
with riders) and a total of 3,407 individual
mammals that could be identified to genus. We
photographed 27 species, including two nonnative
species, domestic dog and cattle (Table
6.5, Appendix D). We documented one species
(Virginia opossum) not previously reported
for the district and a large number of species
for which there had previously been only
observational records.
The largest number of photographs
was of the gray fox (1018 photos), followed
by collared peccary (588 photos), and ringtail
(229 photos). Species richness among elevation
strata was highest in the low elevation (n = 24)
and progressively lower through the elevation
strata (n = 15, 13 at medium- and high-elevation
stratum, respectively; Table 6.5), though effort
80
was disproportionate in the low-elevation stratum
(Table 6.2). After accounting for camera effort,
there was no difference in species richness among
strata (F 2,170 = 2.0, P = 0.13, one-way ANOVA
on log-transformed data), but random cameras
did have slightly higher species richness than
non-random camera sites (t 173 = 3.0, P = 0.003,
two-tailed t-test). Among random sites where we
placed three cameras, there were no differences
in species richness among strata (F 2,67 = 1.5, P =
0.23, one-way ANOVA on log-transformed data),
and within these sites there were no differences
among the type of camera placement (at the
focal-point transects; F 2,67 = 1.1, P = 0.34, oneway
ANOVA on log-transformed data).
Pitfall Trapping
We trapped eight animals in pitfall traps: six
desert shrews at the North Slope site, one western
harvest mouse, and one Botta’s pocket gopher
at Italian Spring. We trapped no animals at
Spud Rock Spring. In this report we assume
the desert shrews we captured during this study
are Crawford’s desert shrew, but further genetic
work would be necessary to confirm that it is this