West Marin Rambles Pt. 1

Over the summer I placed several cameras in the hills around San Geronimo. Some desired locations were denied due to tremendous poison oak growth, but interesting results were still attained.

Today's set places us inside a patch of chaparral scrub alongside a trio of urine stained boulders.

The first cam placed was a Bushie set to video. Its arrangement, indecisive -- between a rodent-focused set and medium-sized mammal chill-on-a-rock set.

wood rat

sonoma chipmunk

psychedelic morning chipmunk

really enjoy watching these chipmunks leap

gray fox, of course

The Bushnell was then swapped out for a quick overnight set with a homebrew in order to try to get a few nicer color shots.

kinda dig the angle of this raccoon

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.

Sprucing up the Midden

I stumbled across this midden a few 10s of meters from the Great Highway.  I had no idea it was there and had to tromp through some stinging nettle to get to it, but alas an easily accessible midden at Younger Lagoon.  Now it was time to get some close-ups of a Neotoma with the homebrew.







Christian and I met up a few days after I made this set and thank god for that.  As you can see something moved the camera and had it pointed all in the wrong direction. Luckily Christian and I were able to reset the camera without too many lost days and got some great Woodrat pictures.









The little one then brings in some fresh green branches to spruce up the midden being careful to place them oh so right.

Log Jammin'

There are many ways to deal with a log in the trail. You can jam over it. You can jam under it. You can jam around it. You can even jam across it. In this set we got a few species dealing with a log in the trail in just about every way imaginable.

The bobcat goes under it. Tight fit but he just manages to squeeze through.








Don Coyote or Sancho, we still have not decided, goes over it







The raccoon family goes over it, across it and probably under it.









The woodrat just seems to hang out on the margins of it.

Look at the length of that tail!

Rat Tales

Christian had promised that I would post more pictures from the marsh at YLR.

I am usually running behind, but those of you that know me personally, have seen that I have been extra bad and behind this past month.  The start of the quarter, taking a class for the first time in two years, on something I know almost nothing about (RNA bioinformatics), and trying to wrap up the last figure and a half for a manuscript has left little time for more fun pursuits.

So here are a couple of quick pictures of a rat from Santa Cruz. I assume it is a dusky-footed woodrat, rather than an invasive rat, but it is hard to see a lot of fur on the tail in these images. The crop in image #2 does look a little hairy on the tail, a there are brief glimpses of a lighter under-belly.  Assuming my call is correct, these are our first N. fuscipes pictures on the homebrew. Rodents weren't really a target species on this set, but I will take them!  A bit of exploring led us to a much more accessible hemlock midden, so we will have to actually target woodrats in the preserve in the future.

Posing on the branch in the rain/fog.

Crop of above image. Looks like it may be a male with that bulge under the base of the tail.

Hidden a bit behind the branch

Crop of above image. That is a looooong tail.

MIDDEN TAILS

Midden has become one of my favorite words since entering my vocabulary about six months ago. However, without supporting stories, it is a rather strange word to randomly throw around in conversation.

It was then with great joy that Jake, our friend Sean and I discovered several significant wood rat middens at the Marin County site. Which made it okay to bring up with random strangers, right???

master of the largest midden

A homebrew camera was set up at one of the smaller midden sites due to accessibility and perceived activity.

After 27 days we discovered several inhabitants and occasional visiting friends.

Dusky-footed wood rat

peromyscus duo

Western Spotted Skunk

The spotted skunk capture was significant. It had been a target species that had eluded cameras going back to the Codger's previous solo surveys of the preserve.

Nocturnal Visitors

I pulled the camera from our first set at YLR last Wednesday and finally got finished with tabulating the data and looking at the images carefully.  The last week of instruction at UCSC was stealing way more of my time than I would have liked.

Briefly, the camera was up for 14 days in a Willow thicket.  We recorded 3 species, plus an unidentified critter who barely got in the frame.  There were 9 separate visits (10 if you count two raccoons visiting the camera at the same time as separate visits) which equaled 0.66 visits/day.  The camera took 29 pictures, 26 of which had animals in them for a positive trigger rate of 89.7%  and 2.1 triggers/day or 1.9 positive triggers/day.  I will play with adding some of the this data in chart form in the future if people find it insightful at all.

Now to some pictures:

I struggled to get a good raccoon shot.  They were almost never in frame or way too close to the camera.  I even got a blurry belly shot as one raccoon came to check out the camera.  All raccoon images were in IR and they seemed to be most interested in the ground cover in front of the camera.  Raccoons visited three times and there were at least four individuals.  They visited on days 3, 11 and 12 between 23:30 and 23:55 each time (time stamp off by one hour).  The day 11 and day 12 visits were only 24 seconds off of being exactly 24 hours apart.  That masked bandit keeps a pretty regular schedule.

A Dusky-footed Woodrat was the first visitor to the camera coming by on the first night.  It reappeared on Day 2 and Day 8, when the above picture was taken.  This set was around 20 meters from the midden that I posted earlier, so maybe this rat lived there.  Of course I don't know if the three visits were the same rat or two or three different rats.  The woodrats appeared as early as 17:34 as you can see in the above image (time-stamp is off by one hour).

All images with Scoutguard SG550

A Midden and a Carcass

I set-up a camera this morning at the new location here in Santa Cruz.  It is a very interesting mix of habitat which should yield some good results.  Habitats includes salt marsh, riparian and chaparral.

On the hike I ran across a dusky-footed woodrat, Neotoma fuscipes, midden made of willow, cat-tail and what I think was dried hemlock stems.

I also found a dead raccoon, Procyon lotor, that was in the middle stages of decay.  Most of the fur was still left on the body, but the skull had been almost completely cleaned.  The carcass did not appear to be disturbed by scavengers.

I set the camera up about 20 meters from the dead raccoon on a game trail that looked to get moderate use.  There were also beds, probably deer, nearby along the trail and predator scat in the immediate area.  Here's hoping for some pictures of the wild cats and dogs.