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This blog is predominately about camera trapping in California. We camera trap to save our souls and to teach primary school students about biology and conservation. We will also touch on other camera trapping news and musings, sets from afar, mediocre herpetology, sucky birding, and other natural history discussions.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Howl Hill

Howl Hill.
Where one lets the landscape echo the primal yelp that resides within us all...

And a decent place to set a camera trap

We ascended through a patch of Doug Fir to a relatively barren, stony hilltop. The homebrew cam was locked around one particularly large boulder alongside a deer trail.
Pointing east.
I figured that this was the kids' set, so it was important to see why aiming in that direction was potentially (likely) a bad idea and I let it be.

The first results:

Fence Lizard heats up



LLAMA ATTACK*










Retrieving our first round of shots, we then reviewed the photos as a class. Were there any problems? Several students quickly pointed out the rock was in the shot and the object of focus by the camera. One student mentioned that the image was a bit bright, but others thought that it was not a big problem. We agreed to adjust the camera so that the rock was out of the shot. 


VELVETY!


1st turkey on camera trap. Worth something, I guess



Again, we reviewed the shots in the classroom and the question was presented: were there any problems with our set? A few more spoke up about the sun, which pleased me.

School was winding down at this point and for the next round, I was going to go out by myself. I switched out the homebrew for a new Bushie w/audio and flipped it 180 degrees.





My goodness.

Ten days later on the trap, we finally got a feline.


Not the Puma variety, but still very cool.
I'll be continuing to manage some cameras with Felidae over the summer and then when September comes around, the students of my new 8th grade classroom will be reintroduced to the wild...


*not a llama, obviously. durr

3 comments:

  1. Wow....that fence lizard shot is cool! Nice they got some stuff (espeically the 'cat). They must have been excited.

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  2. Those fawn videos are pretty adorable. Lick lick lick.

    Way to make the student learn on the job and not immediately fix it for them. Even if it took two rounds for them to figure out that pointing the camera at the sun was not a good idea, they figured it out. Hopefully they will remember that for their next set.

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  3. And despite not being in full frame that is a decent turkey picture. A nice male strutting his stuff.

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