A Bluebird Saturday

A Bluebird Saturday walk with Addie

As of Friday, I began my spring break!

I’m not going anywhere totally glamorous with surf, sand, and cocktails, but I traveled back to the Finger Lakes to spend the week at my parents house. When I left Cobleskill, it was dumping snow. I think we had 6″ by 10am from overnight, which made for annoying packing and treacherous travel. I eventually drove out of it, and the further West I came, the nicer the weather.

Yesterday morning it was a balmy 45 degrees, and I took my pup for a walk. It was a truly Bluebird Day. Clear blue skies, and the sun felt like a spring sun.

I don’t want to quite divulge yet what kind of fun things I’m doing this week, and trust me- they are FUN!, so I’ll share yet another different camera trap setup I came up with for the week I’m out of town. I left a Cuddeback Attack camera set up in my yard in Schoharie, and I’ll be checking it when I come back next weekend.

My last creative setup yielded some great pictures of a fisher climbing a tree, although the set was short lived (Fisher destroyed it)! I wanted to come up with another “hanging” something or other to lure in the crittters. I don’t like throwing scraps on the ground for a few reasons: the Crows immediately come and steal them all, and then linger. My batteries get worn down, and I end up with hundreds of pictures of them. Also, sometimes the Crows carry off bits and pieces of whatever I throw down, and drop it elsewhere. I’ve pulled chunks of stuff out of my puppy’s mouth, and I don’t like that. My roommate also uses cameras, and threw down cooked chicken bones. I’ve always been cautioned to not let my dog have cooked bones (they can splinter) and that holds true for wild animals as well. Ok, so I didn’t have any scraps to put out, so instead I used just straight scent lure.

Fisher food lures

Scent lure is either is used to LURE in an animal, imagine that, but does not provide a reward, as bait does. Scent lures have different bases. They can be a food lure- something that a target animal would eat. For example, often bear lures are sweet in nature, or black licorice smelling. There are hormone driven lures, like deer urine used during the rut season. And then there’s another type: a curiosity lure. I guess the term “curiosity” lure can be applied to the first two I mentioned, but this one is usually REALLY stinky. It’s often ground up glands from certain animals. Like beaver castor, for example, are ground up beaver castor glands. Trappers will often use this to scent their traps and beavers will come in to check it out and defend their territory.

Ok so I used fisher food lure this time. They were from two different companies, but both local to New York. These lures smell DISGUSTING, as they’re made up of some kind of meat base. Fishers are carnivores, and they almost, if not completely, rely on meat as a food source.

Here’s how I set it up:

Supplies used for this set: aluminum wire, cotton pads, an old film canister.

I took about a 3 foot length of wire, and wound it around the cotton pads.

Then I threaded the wire through the film canister, so I could pull the cotton up into it. This will protect the cotton and scent from the weather.

Before I pulled the cotton into the canister, I slathered it with the scent lures.

Here's my 'scent capsule' hung up in a tree.

I'm hoping that the motion of this set and the smell of it will lure in fisher and MAYBE even a bobcat.

And that’s it! I hope that this works. I like the idea of hanging stuff up off the ground. The scent can carry further and like I said, animals can’t carry it off easily.