The Camera Trap Tells the Story

One of my favorite parts of camera trapping is when the photos tell a story. I don't mean a single image that one can interpret, I mean a series of images that tell a tale from beginning to end. Today I pulled three SD cards and found such a series.

Chapter 1: The Coyote. I made this particular set over six weeks ago and in that time coyotes have shown up frequently. Other predators captured include red and gray fox and a neighbor's cat. But this particular coyote looks large and majestic.

Coyote's first appearance of the night

Coyote heads north, away from the camera

Chapter 2: Eastern Cottontail. About an hour later I captured this Eastern Cottontail. Rabbit captures have been common at this set, complimented by gray squirrel captures during the daylight.

Eastern Cottontail about an hour after the Coyote left

Chapter 3: The eyes have it. Look in the distance, in the direction the coyote was last heading. See the eye shine? Could it be the coyote?

Eastern Cottontail with a coyote in the distance

Here is the same photo cropped! I think that IS the coyote.

Eastern Cottontail with coyote eye shine in the background

Chapter 4: The End. A good story can still hold its own even when the action takes place off screen. Here we see that those were indeed the coyote's eyes in the distance. This particular rabbit met its end on this warmer than average morning. I kept the set active. Perhaps another story will emerge. Perhaps in that next story the rabbit will get away...

Coyote captures eastern cottontail

My milksnake brings all the fox to the yard...

In my last post, I wrote about a Reconyx set I made in hopes of capturing woodcock images. I had great success with this location last year, but this spring has been so wet that our hedgerow has been in almost continuous standing water since April. So while woodcock pictures have been rare, other animals have been picking up the slack. And the water has provided a certain artistic element to the photos that I had not anticipated. For example:

Doe and fawn 

Here the infrared flash gives them glowing eyes but the Reconyx delivers with a nice crisp image. Deer, and fawns in particular, have made almost-daily appearances to this set. A few of my favorites:

Cautious fawn

The image above is highly cropped. This fawn is right at the edge of the photo so I had little choices when it came to composition. Second only to the deer are the raccoon visitors. Two favorites:

and

I don't want to leave you with the impression that these are the ONLY visitors to this watery domain. Opossum, gray squirrel and various birds are commonly captured as well. Last week, we had another species as well:

Gray fox reflected

Above is the entire image. Below, I crop it down to Mr. Gray himself.

Gray fox

Even without color, this is unmistakably a gray fox. Note the short snout and the black line running down the dorsal surface of the tail. I always like my gray fox captures :) and this guy was only one of a pair

What really makes this such a great photo is the perceived size difference between these two animals. I have to admit my first reaction was surprise. I mean, that guy on the left looks HUGE compared to the other gray fox. But of course, it is closer to the camera AND it is standing on top of a mound. This is a great lesson in how careful one must be when comparing images. If you wish to compare the sizes of two animals, make sure they are exactly the same distance from the camera or it just won't be accurate.

The Reconyx is set to take a burst of three photos then almost immediately ready itself to take more photos if the animals are still triggering the sensor. I got several sets of photos of these fox, but here was the one that caught my eye (and inspired the title of this post):

Gray fox and milksnake

Wow! A photo of a gray fox is always a "win" for me, but one carrying food is even more special. I was so excited. But had the fox killed the snake or scavenged it? I scrolled back through the photos to find out. Stay with me now, as we are going to go backwards in time...
The photo previous to the one shown above didn't seem remarkable at all when I first glanced at it. But now under closer examination, I can clearly see the milksnake in the mouth of the fox:

Milksnakes are so distinctively patterned that on my property there really is no mistaking the identification. I continued to scroll backwards --

I need to crop and enlarge for you, but there IS a snake in the photo above. Thank goodness for the pattern on the milksnake or it would be invisible in this inrared photo.

A few inches below his nose and hidden by growing vegetation is the snake. At this point, I speculated that the snake was dead or it would have tried to escape. A quick scroll backwards through the photos confirmed that, but I am getting ahead of the story...

This photo on June 24th at 9:11 PM is the last image without a milksnake. I have zoomed in to the area in question and cannot make out any bit of a snake here:

A raccoon had triggered the above image and it continued over to this spot:

The coon drags up a dead snake. It is visible in the photo below just under the coon's snout.

But after another sniff, he leaves it behind.

I have only a partial answer. The gray fox did indeed scavenge the snake, but I still don't know how long it lay there before the fox found it. And why didn't the raccoon eat it? And as I looked back through all the photos, concentrating on the snake this time, I saw that another visitor had found it too. Remember that cute fawn peeking out from the edge of the photo above? Well, she too investigated the milksnake:

Finally, an image of the snake in color! :) Identification confirmed.

There is one more story I want to tell from these photos. The night after I captured the gray foxes, a coyote made an appearance. And lucky for me, he crossed in front of the camera in exactly the same spot as the gray fox did. This will allow us a direct comparison of size between the two species. But how best to convey that to my students? Since I do not own Photoshop, I had to get creative...

Here are the two images stacked for direct comparison. But I can do better. Besides, I will be using PowerPoint to show these to students...






I made a jpeg of a PowerPoint slide:

That works, but i still wasn't satisfied. So I tried enlarging them.

Better. But if I could combine the two images, that would be best. I am working with PowerPoint 2007 here at home and the best option I could find was to make most of the background transparent. Since this is a black and white image, it made the task a little harder...

There is the gray fox with most of the colors set to transparent and cropped as best as I could (is there a free form crop tool in ppt 2007? If so, I couldn't find it.) The last step was to lay this on to the coyote image. The best part of this is that the fox gets placed EXACTLY where he was in the original photo:

Comparing the size of a coyote to a gray fox

I am pretty pleased with the results. Not perfect and I assume I will get better as I try more of this.

Otter, otter everywhere plus a drop of mink

I have a new class this semester, CON 113: Wildlife Field Techniques. Today we visited a river otter latrine in hopes of collecting some scat (see project described here) and checking a camera for a grad student at SUNY ESF. It snowed last night and this morning, so I was certain that any scat we did find would be fresh.

We arrived at Hi Tor WMA in Naples, NY at 2:45 and hit the trail immediately. It was not to be a pleasant stroll but a march with a mission. Tracking was kept to a minimum so we could maximize our time at the site. Will and Micheal, mentioned in my previous otter post, had checked this site on Sunday and Monday with no fresh scat to be found. They were not entirely sure the site was even still in use. I was anxious to have a look myself and see what evidence the camera had recorded as well.

Main latrine site on January 13th

The pond held what looked like fresh slides and tracks at the main latrine site, the one on the beaver lodge. I say fresh, but everything was coated with snow from the morning. We all agreed that the recent wind would have wiped this slate clean over the weekend. So despite striking out on fresh scat, we felt the site was still in use. And the camera confirmed our suspicion.

Elaina had not checked her Reconyx camera trap since mid-January. I pulled the SD card and we previewed enough of the photos to determine that otters have indeed been using the site regularly. We also found evidence of other visitors. Let's have a look (Nearly all photos are uncropped so you can see the date stamps that help tell the story):

January 14th: Will and his Dad glitter old scat

January 15th: Will is back to check for new scat deposited overnight

Jan 16th: Our first otter photos. Although there are only two individuals in this photo, we have multiple images of three otters together. The Reconyx is set to take photos in a burst of three images. Notice the 1/3 on the top of this pic. That means it is the first of three in this series. The camera than takes another burst of three almost immediately. The result is a lot of images (over 1300 in this set) and what amounts to a poor man's video.

I LOVED that otter standing shot. I have never gotten one personally. There are about a dozen shots of otters standing in this data set. Here is just one more (because standing otters are like potato chips --- you can't have just one)

Jan 17: Red fox. And snow.

Jan 25: Wild turkey. In between, we had many more otter pics.

Jan 26: Mink. Like the otter, mink are in the weasel family and like water. Note the obvious size difference though.

If you are not convinced that the otters are much bigger than the mink, here is a composite image of an otter and mink that should do the trick:

Jan 29: Note the time that this coyote showed up to roll in the stinky otter scat.

Jan 30: It didn't take long for the otter to emerge and investigate the new smell themselves

Although most of the otter photos were at night, some were in the day. Since the night pics are shot with infrared, the only way to see color is in the natural light of daytime. This was my favorite daytime photo

Jan 31: "Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night shall keep these otters from their appointed rounds"

Feb 2: On Groundhog Day, these two coyotes made an appearance. We can assume they did not see their shadows in the IR flash...

Feb 5: The last otter photo taken before we checked the card at about 4pm on Feb 6th.

Clearly the otters are still using the site. So where are they deposting their scat? They don't HAVE to use the latrines, but why would they just stop? Or did they gradually stop and it only seems sudden? We were able to scrape away some snow to collect old scat for a simple diet analysis the class wanted to do as an outside project. Despite the lack of fresh scat, the trip was a success in my eyes. Field work is never a sure thing...

The trickster takes offense

Twice this week I have been thwarted by critters. Here is the first. Technically, I am incorrect when I say "this week" since the event I am about to share happened in February. In my defense, I just received these photos two days ago. We work with two educator/researchers in Massachusetts regarding black bear sign. I have written a few posts about Nick and Val but here is one entry discussing trail cameras specifically. It had been a year since Nick and Val had sent us any photos but I received a CD in the mail on Thursday. I unwrapped this early Christmas gift with much anticipation. Santa must have thought I was good this year.

One simple story to share is this one of a coyote being far to curious about the camera. I have never had this happen before. For perspective, here is a nice shot of a coyote as they normally act around the camera trap -- total disregard.

 

Eastern coyote
(Quabbin Reservoir, MA 2/12)

But in December of last year, a coyote came upon the camera, grabbed the strap and started at it.

Eastern coyote with camera trap
(Quabbin Reservoir, MA 12/11)

I spent a lot of time looking at this photo to make sure it isn;t a domestic dog. But I am convinced this is a coyote. Feel free to comment with other opinions.

And there the camera laid for weeks and weeks until Nick checked it and remounted it. Today I made a new set at our back pond and before I left I wrapped that strap around the tree until it was tight :)