Blergh

11.2015 San Francisco Peninsula

this image sums up the feelings toward March 23rd, 2016

also RIP Phife Dawg

Trail of the (bobbed) Tail

The bobcats of Mt. Tam have never been shy to CTC and the Winter Solstice set found one of their favorite paths.

They visited the area 8 times and from them, I'm thinking we have two individuals.

First on the scene stops and listens.

Then lots of walking the trail... away from our eye on the creek.

Finally, one walks toward us… !

A closing treat that I had missed upon first couple viewings of the videos: A bobcat walking the trail, followed by a trotting fox seconds later.

The Magnificent Triple Take

"So there is a Mountain Lion going through my sister's backyard…"

I share a incredulous glance with teacher chum Ryan.

she continued, "It must be going after her chickens!"

The call was put out to place a camera trap in this particular San Anselmo backyard and our suspicions were confirmed with the appearance of a bobcat.

Of course the real treasure of this capture is the action in the diamond window of the chicken coop.

A great double take is a relatively common occurrence and with practice can be performed with excellence.

a master of the craft at work

However a triple take requires such an alarming event to take place for it to even truly be warranted, that it is a rare event to behold, especially so when its performer delivers it so beautifully, as this distressed chicken does.

A tip of the hat to this bird.

*This will hopefully be the end of the archive clean, with JK and I maintaining a couple of projects in the field currently and some recent adventures to detail.

Bobcats in the Mist

Its that time of year in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Our summer (takes place on the calendar in what most consider early fall) is officially over and our good friend, the fog, rolls back in. That means you get a lot of condensation on your camera trap lenses, especially at night.

Its something to think about when making your sets, but I've never found a great solution. Rain-X helps some, but not as much as one would like.

You can at least point your camera away from the great Pacific, but then you have to worry about the rising sun coming up in the East.

Mainly you just learn to live with less than perfect images, like these two of a bobcat who came by the Ghost Deer cam during a single visit.




This Bob has a pretty well endowed tail. We may come back to that at a later date.

Be Above It

The bird's eye view has been a set angle used before by CTC with relative success and failure.

While exploring a section of the Mt. Tam Watershed, I found a nice location, but due to large width of tree trunks and with other possibilities being to obvious for hikers to mess with, the bird's eye seemed to be the best option.

Plus I like climbing trees.

cautious bobcat

gray fox, as always

would be thief

Thankfully, they could not further mess with the camera and it was still present and working when I arrived to collect the data.

Weeks later, while in Oakland's Knowland Park, the view must have stuck in my mind, for I had a chaparral cam up far higher than the usual on-the-ground action.

it's a... gray fox

brush rabbit munching on monkey-flower

brush rabbit in glorious color

The angle certainly can provide an interesting viewpoint and occasionally insights into behavior or identification for markings, but it can't be recommended for frequent use. Ideal situations for deployment is something I will be exploring in future sets.

More of the Redwoods: Predators

Its been a busy month.

I am hoping February may give me a little more time for misadventures, but more likely it will be March.

So here are a few images for the Santa Cruz Mountains that I should have gotten up a few months ago. These are from the same set that got the raccoon family hijinks.







And I am going to go ahead and consider the loud-mouthed Steller's Jay a predator.

One more shot of a Steller's Jay, mostly to show off this beautiful redwood creek setting

Fox Frenzy / IN SEARCH OF

JK recently posted about finally joining the Aplodontia Club, and with some sweet captures, if I might add. For myself, I have fruitlessly been knocking on the door of the Marin Cougar Club -- and I am not talking about the wine bars of San Anselmo (I have already been).

One would think that it would not be a ridiculous task, but here I am again, with only bobcat and fox images. And the foxes are aplenty.

These shots are from the JENGA location in Mt. Tam Watershed, except I moved the camera to the other side of the trail fork with a ~45 degree angle rather than the 90 degree side view.

First!

Peeling out / Digging?

Coming in for a closer inspection.

Even closer.

Now a duo.

Closer look at this crew

Fox images totalled 40 out of 103 captures, with 14 unique visits over 38 days.


A few other non-Mountain Lions dropped by:

focused Bobcat

Almost sweet shot of Steller's Jay

Raccoon Fam

Western Gray creating  / accessing seed cache.

As much as it pains me, I might have to move from this location unless signs of the Shadow Cat become apparent.



Next post, I will be in my own backyard across in the East Bay for the first time with camera trap !
Will the foxes follow me?

JENGA

The scene when I went to check the camera

Rewind two weeks. The previous days of summer had seen camera trap sets that produced stirring images of blades of grass and posing hikers, but no critters.

I had been walking back from another epic failure when I noticed  an IMMENSE  pile of scat in the middle of the fire road/trail. Now this was a truly epic shitpile. Upon closer examination it appeared that each layer was from a different animal, and they delicately left their mark in a version of the classic game, Jenga.

I tucked the location away in the old memory (as well as GPS) and returned a week later with full supplies.

The Jenga game was still on as I searched the area around the trail. To one side was a gap among the bay trees, with a game trail shrouded in poison oak. I leapt down and discovered that the brush quickly cleared and a wide avenue lay before.

I ran from possible set location to set location like an uncaged border collie, finally settling on side view of the avenue, where it forked into a seasonal creek.

Two weeks later, we had a loser in the Jenga game and a few sweet images to get off the summer snide.

 

More to come from the exciting location...

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

Finally Comes Up Heads

Okay, so if you called heads instead of tails you had 1:12 odds of winning the toss. Not great odds at all, but better than I may have left you believing.  Yes one bobcat turned up heads. It came down the trail, stopped for a sniff, right about where I knelled down, but did nothing else, I swear.





After a sniff it turned around and found something good to check out. Maybe it was another bobcat's poop, maybe the skunk left something, or maybe it was just feeling a bit frisky.






And then it turned and hammed it up for the camera




I swear I did not use a ball of yarn above the camera as a lure.

This Bob' did not seem to be scared of the flash, but rather thought she was Angie on the Red Carpet.

The camera caught this silly kitty in good focus. Is that a tick on her ankle? Maybe she wanted us to remove it for her.

Overall, I am very happy I finally got a rufus to look into the eye of the homebrew.

Calling Tails

If my last camera trap sets were a coin flip.

Heads or Tails.

Call it Quick.

I hope to FSM that you chose tails. I have a streak going about as good as the NFC had in Super Bowl coin flips.

Oh bobcats.





I got enough bobcats to make Trailblazer jealous for weeks on end, but they were a bunch of tails. 24 of 65 images with critters in them were bobcats. That's 37% for you non-math majors. Quite a haul of bobs. But almost all tails.

Distinct tail pattern. Yin and yang of black and white. Slight U shape of the white tip. Analogous to a fingerprint or does every bob tail have this pattern?

Overall not a bad set. 55% of 119 total images had an animal in them. The wind got a huge chunk of images in one day that dragged that average down. The set was up for 13 days and we got 13 individual visits for a perfect 1 visit/day. The camera took 5 positive images a day, so quite a few of the critters hung around the camera for a bit

Over the 13 days we had 9 separate visits by Lynx rufus. As you will see by these pictures I think they were all the same individual, but I am not sure if tail pattern (see above) is a reliable way to discern individuals. Each and every time the bobcat was going up the ravine showing its tail to the camera.

Possible other individual. Look at the black unconnected bands above the tail tip. Inconclusive in my mind.

I will have to go back through the archives and see if we can pin this (these?) as bobcat mom, pop, or kitten from early 2011 or if the tail pattern is just a red herring.

Either way, I sure enjoy our coastal bobcats and still get excited every time they show up on the little LCD screen. I still need to see one in person in 2012.

Mammalian Critters

Like I said not a great set, but pickings have been slim. That whole graduate school thing getting in the way of fun.

Woodrat using the trees branches as a highway

Bobcat butt

Bobcat Shoulder

I just cannot seem to get the bobcats to look at the camera right now.  Going to have to try a new approach.

Sniff and Run

It has been a slow start to camera trapping in 2012 for both of us here at Camera Trapping Campus, so I thought it was time for a Sniff and Run to get back on track.

sniff and run   |snif and rən|
verb
a quick intake of something that intrigues the senses before continuing on

The first location that entered my mind for such an endeavor was Fox Nap Rock, Kent Lake. The possibilities for another set here seemed varied, interesting and guaranteed -- thus a return visit was made.
Over a span of nine days (two soaked by much needed rainfall), four species visited, with seven unique visits total.

The Participants:

Additional (Partially Obscured) non-Sniffer:

and this one just makes me laugh

The Sniff and Run did its job perfectly: providing a feeling of success along with an itch to unveil more.

As a teaser, excitement is brewing regarding planned or potential sets involving:

- urban visitor studies
- Put a Bird On It (raptor nests, Sapsuckers and the bird communities around them)
- a partnership in my classroom with Felidae Fund