I currently want to try to use pitfall trap for small mammals, especially shrews. In your experience and knowledge, what is the best way of set up a pitfall trap in the tropical rainforest?
With shrews, you should make sure to add some food (like mealworms) inside the pitfall trap. There are also a few articles and tips about setting up small mammals traps on the web, here there are a couple I found, I hope they are useful (if you can access them)
http://asmjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1644/05-MAMM-A-285R2.1
http://www.ilmb.gov.bc.ca/risc/pubs/tebiodiv/smallmammals/smamml20-03.htm
I used 5l buckets as pitfall traps for shrews. As I was catching shrews in Western Europe, I dug a whole to put the bucket below ground level into the ground, the put a second bucket, which had some (small holes drilled into the bottom) into the first bucket, so it would be flush with the soil. This way, the water would drain from the pitfall, should it rain. I also added mealworms (and sardines) as food into the traps. Dry cat food should also work.
I also added some wood shavings (i.e. hamsterbedding into the traps).
As shrews are active throughout the 24-hour period, and have a very high metabolic rate, traps should be visited every 2-4 hours to avoid unnecessary casualties.
Using collapsible cage traps are much effective rather than pitfall traps. Again, it is depends on your targeted study i.e sort of animals/species that you targeted such shrew or monkey-footed rat. I remember there was a publication on monkey-footed rat caught using the pitfall traps. As for me, there are numerous types of traps that can be used i.e Sherman trap. This trap is much useful to catch shrew or moles. Type of baits that being used must be factored in as well as ripped banana strong smells fruits like jack-fruit or mango are some possible baits that you can try but so far based on literature, banana is the best. You may want to put some bait inside your bucket for the pitfall traps and see the succession rate, with bait vs without bait.
How'd it go? I'm hoping to use pitfall traps to ID rodents in Manu National Park.
Daniel Lough Finally i did not use pitfall traps for my surveys. But during my field survey at mountain area, we use Sherman traps on high elevation areas and we did captured Suncus sp. and Crocidura sp. However, at the different mountain we did sampled using both Sherman and Haslinger traps but we did not caught any shrews. So, it might be depends on the distribution and abundance of the species within that habitat or other variables that can affect the successful rate of our trapping nights. Hope your trapping in your park is a success.
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