Change of Campuses

GO OUTSIDE AND TAKE A F*CKING PICTURE OF THE STANFORD CAMPUS

That is the message to myself in the draft of this post ... sitting in my draft box since March and I still haven't done it.

Sorry for the lack of posting. CTC has switched campuses. No more views of Monterey Bay on the beautiful UCSC campus. I started a postdoc at Stanford University in February and haven't been able to get out in the field much, let alone write-up any posts for this almost defunct blog. Thank God Christian has kept us alive with a couple of posts.

The banner is going to have to wait a bit longer for a picture change. I hope to start posting a bit more often, if we have any readers left.

The good news is that I didn't have to move far and I can keep up with some of the local Bay Area camera trappers in real life. Maybe I can get my cameras back out in the field soon too. I certainly missed seeing everyone at the annual Codger Kids reunion during pre-class set-up a couple of weeks ago.

So keep checking in ...

A couple of photos of the Stanford campus from other people because every post needs a photo or two.


A Happy 4th to our American readers

Mojave Herp Holiday 2012

L to R: Ben, Randomtruth, Christian, John, JK. Not pictured Dave G.

We got back from our annual Mojave Desert trip a couple of weeks back, so hopefully if the grad school gods allow, we will be getting some posts up over the next month. I will try hard and not stretch them out for 51 weeks like I did last year.  Christian made it along this year, so you will be seeing truly collaborative posts.

On another note CTC now has a twitter feed, so if that is your thing follow us.  You can click the link here or the icon in the right hand side-bar. Items that used to go in the "Link Dump" will probably just end up in the twitter feed instead now.

Brew Blogging

I know Beer has little to do with camera trapping outside of being pretty much the best thing ever after a long day of trapping. That being said we are going to do a bit of brew blogging here at CTC if there are no objections.  If you really don't want to see non-camera trapping or wildlife posts let us know and we will consider moving it over to a separate blog, but I think many of our readers will enjoy the once a month or so brew post.

I have been doing some all-grain beer brewing so I will be writing about your more traditional West Coast homebrewing.

Christian is doing some hipster brewing (things you have probably never heard of) and will write a bit about that.

We won't turn this into a beer blog, just some posts on our own stuff.  I will be brewing a new batch on Saturday and kegging a modified recipe of what someone was calling a Mojave Red that we brewed about a month ago. Yeah I liked the name too.

Welcome to the Fermentation Zone

Book Reviews

This may not interest some of our readers, but we will be adding a book review feature to the blog.  We will try and keep the books relevant to Natural History, History and general adventures and misadventures, basically books that you might be interested in too, even if they do not deal with camera trapping. However, we reserve the right to write about Latin American authors that are not even tangentially linked to the outdoors because it may be one of my favorite styles of writing.  And they usually take place in the jungle, even if it is a brothel in the jungle, so that's close to the wilderness right?

I will have the first review coming in a couple of days.  These things are harder to write than one might think.

I also wanted to use this post to say that my autobiography of Mark Twain finally showed up in the mail today.  Twain is about as American as one can get and I look forward to reading about his adventures, especially the California ones.  

I will also point out that UC Press who published this book 100 years after Twain's death, as per his request, is a fantastic publisher.  They put out a wonderful line of Science books including the great California Natural History Series.  I encourage you to buy directly through UC Press so they can continue to support publication of works that might not otherwise see the typesetter.  Where else are you going to find a 624 page tome on the Greater Sage Grouse?

Introducing Christian

I am happy to announce that my good friend and fellow camera trapper, Christian, AKA ecov ottos, has joined Camera Trapping Campus and will hopefully be posting from his projects in Marin County with the Codger as well as other topics. Beyond wildlife photography, Christian has a great eye for urban photography and fun Holga shots. He was into Holgas before it became the thing all the cool kids wanted to do and continues with it even after the fad has ended and everyone uses their hipstamatic app instead.  The above picture is a Christian Holga from the Camera Trap Codger's Camera Trap Workshop in the Northern Sierra's that we both attended last year.

First Camera is out.

Put my first camera out today (10/17/10) on campus.  I will leave it up for about two weeks and then pull it down.  I will be moving my camera around a bit to keep the hippies from finding it and stealing it even if it means missing out on some of those species that don't like to visit the your trap until a month after it is set.  The camera I have up now is a ScoutGuard.  I still need to buy yeti boards and have RandomTruth help me hack some Sony S600s.

I scouted locations for a couple of weeks and ran into a coyote, well almost ran into.  I came up over a ridge and we were about 10 feet from each other by the time either of us realized the other was there.  I was not quick enough to get my DSLR up and photograph it.  It bailed quickly down the hill.  I tried circling around the ridge hoping to pop out at the top of the ridge and cut it off.  Almost made it, but there was a creek with steep banks that I was not expecting separating us.  Fired off a couple of long distance shots in very low light.  You can almost tell it is a coyote.