Briefly, we had a group of Wildlife Society student members, and our trusty professor and wildlife buddy: John Van Niel to lead the field trip to our college's newly acquired field station, the East Hill Campus. The cameras were running for 2 weeks.
It's a gorgeous campus, and we're lucky to have the generosity of the man who donated the property! I don't have much to say this time, so I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves :)
Camera #1
A new species for me! Can you tell what it is?
A Ruffed Grouse doing his thang! Perhaps there was a lady Grouse on the other side of the snow fence...?
Raccoon
White-tailed deer. We poured a little "Toxi-Dog" scent down that pipe there to lure someone in, and as usual, it was the WTD!
Camera #2
Red fox
A curious WTD
That's a nice patch of fur off her shoulder, I wonder what happened?
And Nicki, the homeowners pet dog!
Camera #3
WTD
Red fox
Cooper! The neighbor's pooch.... a common occurrence on cameras I've put out over the past couple of years here!
Camera #4
Gray squirrel
WTD butt...
Camera #5
Raccoon
What could this be?! When we first found this site, we set a camera because we found several coils of weasel scat. Some people thought that this was a mink, but it's too thick and not the right habitat, although there is some water here. Just past the critter, there's a small pool of water that usually hangs around all year, but this year might just be vernal...
Well, there's the next best pic we got of our friend...
Red fox
And there, finally a great picture of a majestic animal: Marmota monax....or the woodchuck!
Camera #6
Gray squirrel
Gray squirrel
Camera #8
Haha, the only picture this camera took was of me standing in front of it while it was being hung :) That tree there has a flying squirrel box mounted on it about 10 feet above my head, which has been inhabited by flying squirrels in the recent past. We were hoping for one of them crawling down at night....but nope!
Camera #9
Can you pick out the WTD rear?
WTD
And finally...a WTD ear perhaps?
Those are the pics! We got some great variety, and some personal firsts on camera for me (Grouse and woodchuck). John (Backyard Beasts) was going to write about our results as well, but he let me take the pics and write. He's super swamped with grading and teaching (and I should be swamped with writing and learning...), so, here they are!
Whew, you are getting lots of action! Love the grouse. I saw a Blue Grouse today, doing his "thang" (as you say)! I also love the red foxes. They're gorgeous.
ReplyDeleteAll that you're lacking is a crazy guy pretending to be a bear marking a tree! (My husband did that in front of one of my cams the other day - but I'm not allowed to show it on my blog).
I'm looking forward to hearing about your results with lures... (I hope that I didn't miss it). I had some success with a lure this winter, for the first time ever. It was very stinky and drew the carnivores like crazy. At this time of year, I don't use any scents because I don't want to mess up the bears' behavior patterns.
KB! What does a Blue Grouse look like?!
DeleteYou haven't missed the end of the study, I'm just crunching data now and trying to figure it out. It's harder than I thought!
Oh, silly me. It's on your blog! Cool bird.
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