by Barbara Dixson
When a graduating co-leader handed off the gray squirrel project to Dan Meyers in 2018, the project—a long standing UWSP legacy project—was moribund. It had next to no funding, and it had no co-leaders lined up for the year ahead. Dan was looking for research experience, as his calling to work in ecology at a landscape level requires a research-based master’s degree. So the project caught his interest, but its location at the Sand Hill Wildlife Area, an hour southwest of Stevens Point, had proved its downfall. Needing to check the squirrel traps three times a day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through February and March, students couldn’t take whole weekends away from classwork to camp out in Wood County.
It happened that Dan was a student employee at Schmeeckle Reserve at the time. Clearly, he saw, not only was Schmeeckle the perfect location for a time-intensive project, but also it offered an abundance of squirrels. With the help of his mentors at the Reserve and in the TNR, Dan moved the project to Schmeeckle in 2018-19. After his first six months as the sole person involved, and the next semester, when another co-leader joined him, word got around. The Wildlife Society (TWS) sent out applications, a dozen people applied, and four new co-leaders came on board. In addition, Dan said, “we got a bunch of volunteers” who worked alongside the co-leaders.
That first year in the Reserve was amazing! The group made 94 individual squirrel captures, as well as 55 recaptures—and the project, in competition with 19 others, won TWS’s Project of the Year award.
As Dan told me, his work with the Gray Squirrel Project “worked out fantastically for where I am now.” It helped him to get a research position in landscape ecology at South Dakota State University. That led to a permanent position with the USDA in Mississippi, which lasted until Dan accepted a UWSP graduate position working on habitat management here in Central Wisconsin. Dan is finishing his master’s degree, writing his thesis on success criteria for habitat management, looking especially at Karner blue butterflies and neotropical songbirds. The Gray Squirrel Project, Dan says, “gave me the ability to build my career to where I am now.”