Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Winter camera-trapping

This is the camera I’m currently 
using: A Bushnell Trophy Cam HD.
If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that I LOVE using camera traps, or game/trail cameras. I love sticking them out in the woods and seeing who comes when I’m not looking. This set of pictures doesn’t contain anything too exciting, all common critters, but I got some multi-species pictures. I love it when that happens, I feel like I’ve totally breached the code of wildlife and am a secret agent spy. “HA! I KNEW you all hung out like in Disney movies!” Well, in this case, several members from different species hung out together, because I sprinkled a handful of black oil sunflower seeds on my favorite camera-trapping log.

Enjoy!

(BTW, I had around 1,500 pictures from 3 days. Once the seed was discovered, critters descended and burned up all my battery by December 20th! The camera was set until January 5th, but due to lots of action and/or frigid temps, the camera died.)

The normally EXTREMELY territorial red squirrel is shown here sharing the log with another red. They are known for caching food in an accessible hiding spot, and then defending it. If you’ve walked in a conifer stand, and heard someone “yelling” at you from the trees, it was probably a red. I’m assuming because it’s winter, these 2 were able to put aside their differences and munch amicably on the seed within feet of each other.

400 pictures “later” than the duo of squirrels, I caught many pics of these 4 American Crows together. Crows are often seen in groups, but what interests me now, is that they appear to be eating the seed! Crows are opportunists, so they WILL eat anything, but are not typically seen at a bird feeder eating bird seed. Well, I suppose in the winter I’d eat bird seed too, if I had to.

A handsome Blue Jay makes a brief appearance!

Here are two species eating in harmony! The red squirrel and a Mourning Dove.

Another multi-species picture. I see the American Goldfinches and Dark-eyed Juncos.


Here’s Red, looking guilty? Did he just chase off the birds?

  
And the last picture I found to be of interest, has 3 different species in it! Can you find them all? From the bottom of the picture up: Dark-eyed Junco, red squirrel, and a Black-capped Chickadee.



6 comments:

  1. Super series, and I was so glad for the clues for the last one, those photos are so good. You still have lots of snow, are you on holiday?? Cheers from Jean.

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    1. Jean, all that snow is from before Christmas! We've had exceptionally warm temps (40-50* F) the past few days and tons of rain....no more snow. I'm on break from college courses until next week!

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  2. Red squirrels are cute little buggers!

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  3. Nice shots, I have several Reconyx trail cams but use them for wildlife, never tries the birds or squirrels. ;-)

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  4. Great series of shots and lots of activity for sure. we are hoping to get our cameras out this weekend.

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  5. Do you like your HD? You seem to get good photos. I find that mine really underperforms. It's slow and photo/video quality is terrible. I suspected it was missing a lot so I put another cam pointed at the same scene from the same tree. The HD even missed a great big bear slowly lumbering through the scene. Unbelievable. Maybe I should try to find out if there's something wrong with it.

    I love your winter seed-eating birds and reds! You do have lots of snow.

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