The Great Highway

We return to Younger Lagoon for the last set before our current short break to dry cams and plan the next step.

For this last set, we leave behind the High Plateau and the marsh for a new location. Near one of the first set locations is a fence that encloses the reserve on the south and stretches to farmland that surrounds Younger to the east and north. This is also where we came upon a coyote late last year.

I call this location The Great Highway for during the 54 days in operation it featured 7 indentifiable species in transit and 1.7 positive camera trap triggers per day. Not amazing stats, but one must take into consideration the deluge of rain that pounded the Northern and Central California Coasts throughout the months of February and March.

The most common visitor was the Brush Rabbit, with 14 unique visits.


California Quail were also frequent travelers, often in a flock of at least 16 individuals.


Black-tailed Deer and Striped Skunk made several appearances, but the stars of this set were the Younger Lagoon resident family of bobcats.

'sup

Bobcats on the High Plateau

The camera on the High Plateau was running out of batteries.  As the batteries got really low the picture quality went down with them, but just before it completely died we got a bobcat walking across the set.

On the hunt

Thirty minutes later it came back by the camera.  One less brush rabbit on the High Plateau.  Interestingly this is the only brush rabbit picture we got during daylight hours.  Maybe they knew what they were doing only showing themselves after dark.

Success!

I did not get a chance to look at this set in the field like I usually do.  I grabbed the camera, jumped in the car and headed out to Arnold, CA to meet Christian and some other folks at a cabin we had for the weekend.  Everyone made fun of us for being such nerds as we cracked open a beer and huddled around the computer with the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning to see what images we got.  When the second picture came on the screen, there was whooping and hollering and maybe a little victory dance as the other cabin mates wondered what the heck they just got themselves into.  "Do we really have to be stuck in a cabin with these two all weekend?"

We reset the camera with fresh batteries at the same spot a couple of weeks later and picked it up last week.  No additional predation shots but some higher quality images to share soon.

Brush Rabbits on the High Plateau

Well 20 feet above sea level or so.

Brush rabbits, Sylvilagus bachmani, are all over Santa Cruz County and in the habitat that we are placing our cameras.  Every time we go to place a camera or go to pick up a camera we see handfuls of brush rabbits without even trying.  They are all over the place as if they are breeding like, well, rabbits.  However, on our first three sets we never captured a brush rabbit, even though we had seen rabbits within 50 feet of camera locations.

Photo by ecov ottos

It took the fourth set and 31 total days of camera trapping to finally get our first brush rabbit.  They showed up 8 times in 22 days at this set. Not record breaking numbers but more than we had been getting at other sets.  As you can see this set is really open grassland with some interspersed brush.  Shockingly (at least to me) every single one of our Sylvilagus captures were on IR after the sun had gone down, but not too long after.  The rabbits were foraging on a moderately used game trail.

Here are a few of the visits ...

Passing through

Standing at attention

Laughing at the camera

Busy foraging