Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Parade of critters

We got a brand new fancy field camera and set it up a couple months ago.  It's on top a steep and rocky hill and it takes a good 15 minute hike and many breaks to get up to it.  I'm usually the one to go and it's my exercise for the day.  We set the camera up to take 3 shots once the motion detector goes off with a 1 second interval. At first, everything was great with a reasonable amount of shots to review each week.  We even put the old field camera up near it.  We've had a bunch of windy days and nights which resulted in at first hundreds of photos within a week, but the latest round has resulted in over 6,000 photos.  It's attached to a smaller tree that moves in the wind and there's an ample amount of branches and leaves into the field of view to set the camera off.  The top bear photo was enough to stop reviewing the photos in the field and quickly scramble back down the mountain. I just hope this big guy survived the imminent bear hunt.  The usually visitors are the squirrel, oppossum, and raccoon.  The coon and possum seem to play tag team and their photos are always close to each others.  The squirrel shot is what I called the sunbeam squirrel shot.  For now, we've taken the cameras down and will wait later winter for some new action.  In the meantime, I hope that we can solve the excessive photos because my eyes are not happy from reviewing them all.


 
We also had a mystery guest as shown on the photo below.  The camera is set pretty close to the ground.  By process of elimination, we said it was a red fox.  We think its' up on the camera going for a very very quick sniff because the photos before and after it, which are one second apart, show nothing.....unless someone else thinks otherwise.