Toss me some beads

Its a veritable Mardi Gras on the California coast, including here in Santa Cruz.

There are Boobies everywhere.

A full on invasion.

Well, maybe not everywhere, but certainly more than usual, which is almost never. So far they have all been juvenile Blue-footed Boobies. It took me two days and about five hours, but I finally got a quick glance at one this afternoon. My eyes were practically bleeding after looking at thousands of pelicans, cormorants, gulls, shearwaters, and terns trying to turn one of them into a Booby.

No Booby pics, but the marine mammals were also out in good force. Yesterday had a half a dozen or more humpback whales including a mother in calf near shore. I also saw a couple of sea otters. Today had only 1-2 humpbacks but over a dozen sea otters.

A few poor images of the marine mammals below.

No go out to the coast and look for boobies.



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Here is a link to some actual good Booby images from Santa Cruz. Link goes to a single photo, but poke around Alex's library for a few more.

Learning and Playing

Here are a few pictures of some raccoons, Procyon lotor, from the Santa Cruz Mountains that I got in the Fall. The main group of raccoons that came by the camera were a mother and her two offspring. They walked up and down the creek, faces up and paws dragging the bottom feeling for yummy critters to catch and eat.

Notice the "I am trying to concentrate" look on the young one's face.

Inspecting the camera

Cannonball!!!
This is one of my favorite images of the past year

Just to illustrate that sometimes the 8-legged critters find your camera a wonderful place to set-up shop. This usually leads to the camera trap blues.

I know that was a lot of raccoon pictures. More than most sane people would want to look at, but these are only a fraction of the ones I could have posted.

Young Bobcat is All Grown Up(?)

I think these images are all of the same bobcat. I also believe this is the young bobcat we photographed last Spring with its mom.

If so it appears to be on its own now as we only photographed it by itself, but it is also possible that it is the redder male we have also photographed and saw stalking through the mustard grass last spring.







 What we do know though is it is a male. 





 I e-mailed the Codger for confirmation that I was looking at what I thought I was looking at.

"High and tight, but still in sight"

Endangered Neighbors

Our friend Seabass has an art exhibit opening at the Santa Cruz National History Museum.  It will feature endangered animals right here in our backyard of Northern California.  The opening is on June 10th according to my calendar from 6-8PM.  Reservations for the opening may be necessary but I am not sure on that.

There are other events going on in conjunction with the exhibit including some photography lessons/ field trips. The exhibit will be open from June 11-September 10th so plan a beach day and hit up the exhibit at the same time.

And if you haven't already added Sebastian's blog to your RSS feed you should.  This recent entry on California Condors was amazing.  I am quite jealous.

Salmon Shark Washes Up

A salmon shark washed up at Cowell's Beach, a famous Northern California surf spot.  That is all.

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

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