Bobcats Week 1

When I saw the two bobcats while checking cams a couple of weeks back I wrote that it may have been a pair, but after seeing some new camera trap images and a comment by Aviva R. I am now leaning towards mother with a kitten from last year. Bobkittens (cubs?) may stay with their mother right up until the time that she is going to birth a new litter.

Do you guys have any thoughts on the pair vs. mom/kitten?

Here are two successive shots of two different bobcats the night I placed the camera.  You can tell they are different cats by their ear shapes and overall body sizes.  The little one lead the way.

Last years kitten?

Mom?

The IR flash is harsh, so I was hoping I got some day time photos of them too and was in luck when one of them walked by the camera again the next morning coming from the same direction that they did the previous night.

Four days later a bobcat made three separate appearances.  Once at 11:48, again at 16:34 and a third time at 18:03.  I am not sure if all images were of the came bobcat or whether they were multiple cats.  I had my camera set to take pictures every 30 seconds so it is conceivable that both cats were together and I just missed the second animal.  If the second animal passed the camera under 30 seconds after the first, no image would have been taken.  I adjusted the camera to take pictures more often in the future.

Sniff sniff

Stay tuned for more bobcats from week 2 at this set.

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