Winter Survival Champions “It’s amazing. I can’t believe there’s
anything here,” exclaimed Dr. Joseph Merritt. Resident Director
of Powdermill Nature Reserve, the biological field station of
Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History and author of
Guide to the Mammals of Pennsylvania, Merritt is a specialist in
small mammals. To learn more about the lives of such creatures
as deer and white-footed mice, woodland jumping mice, southern
red-backed voles, southern flying squirrels, eastern chipmunks
and short-tailed shrews, Merritt has been live trapping them for
over sixteen years. On a cold afternoon in February, with two
inches of fresh snow on the ground, my husband Bruce and I were
accompanying him on his rounds. The January flood of 1996 had
occurred less that a month before our visit. A portion of
Merritt’s trapping site along Powdermill Run had been under
water and the traps and their protective chimneys had washed
away. Merritt had quickly replaced them and, to his amazement,
was finding new animal