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.
I gotta admit we suck at birding. We spent a day arguing over a bird and trying to chase it down only to realize that it was two different birds and we were talking past each other the whole time. Maybe Mojave 2013 will require the presence of a real-life birder.
MacGillivray's Warbler, one of the birds in question
A couple of shots of a likely Crissal's Thrasher from a camera trap that was supposed to get ground squirrels, but only got this dang sunrise bird.
What's up?
Crop of above image: what looks like a light iris, white mustache, slightly more gray than brown.
Beauty of a morning
Thanks to Seagull Steve for suggesting the possibility of Crissal's, rather than LeConte's, but in no way hold him accountable if this is not a Crissal's. I sent him low-resolution images when getting his opinion and neglected to resend high-resolution images.
Occasionally, we were
able to identify a few feathered friends.
Red-tailed Hawk in nest.
And yet there were still
questions…
Gray Flycatcher? Migrating Hammond's? UPDATE: Or Neither Townsend's Solitaire
Cassin's or Western Kingbird. F! Update: Western it is
Because we suck at birding feel free to correct our IDs if needed. Birding by photography can be tough because you often don't have all the angles necessary to make a good ID later.
UPDATE: Some IDs fixed thanks to Seagull Steve in the comments
This is not a great capture but it is the only one I got of a new to us camera-trapped species. We were hoping for more interesting Ground Squirrels like the Mohave ground squirrel, Xerospermophilus mohavensis, or Round-tailed ground squirrels, Spermophilus tereticaudus, but all we got was this White-tailed antelope ground squirrel, Ammospermophilus leucurus.
If you are really into ground squirrels at least you can take solace in the fact that he is showing off his money maker.
While heading to town for ice, water, and to drop off garbage towards dusk we saw a kit fox, Vulpes macrotis, cross the road in front of us. It danced across the road like an awkward ballerina and we pulled over and immediately found sign of dens. Luckily I had a homebrew in the back of the car and Christian had a Bushnell set to video.
JK next a Kit Fox den entrance
We put the camera on the den and came back the next morning to what we thought would be dozens of kit fox images. We had seen the kit fox, we found a den and active sign, but no kit foxes on the camera. Just a bunch of its prey items, the kangaroo rat.
We changed the angle of the camera and left it up for another night. When we came back the next day on our way back to the Bay Area we picked up the cams. At the time I thought I had only gotten one crappy kit fox picture. After getting home I saw that there were two images and this first one was not as bad as I had originally thought. Too bad he didn't look at the camera, but at least it us in full frame. The den is in the lower left corner of the image and the camera is set-up behind the den, so as not to point right down into the den.
12:01 AM
And then the K-rats come out to dance with the devil, practically crawling into their predators den.
12:39AM
1:47AM
2:07AM
4:37AM
Then the fox comes back for one more image and one more sniff at the scent rock. I did not originally see the fox in this image while viewing on the camera.
4:04AM
The Bushnell cam was placed around a creosote bush about fifteen meters from the
burrow and cam one.
8:59PM
Here, he makes a quick appearance rolling around in the gravel and then comes by the camera to smell us humans.
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.
