WMR Pt. 2: Friday Coyote Blogging

Here we are close to the previous set, on the edge of a ravine.

I had a devil of a time getting the proper angle -- and as the results show, it was not truly achieved.

The only captured visitor was The Trickster...

Dog Days of Summer

As CTC's fav club, the Athletics, face some struggles as of late, a check-in elsewhere in Oakland proves that these are indeed the Dog Days.

These videos are from Knowland Park and located in the area designated for the zoo's controversial proposed expansion. More on that at a later date.

annnd let's end on a stinker.

Friday Coyote Blogging

Knowland Park, Oakland   Jan 2013

Much like this 'yote, we at CTC have been lurking in the darkness lately... we hope to emerge soon.

Friday Coyote Blogging

UC Santa Cruz

Friday Coyote Blogging

This fine beast or beastress comes to you from the Santa Cruz Mountains and deserves a Haiku

Look at that hamstring 
I am going with Beastress
Fine bitch specimen 

Friday Coyote Blogging

oakland hills

november 2012

Friday Coyote Blogging

Nose to the ground. Mt. Tam Watershed

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...

Friday Coyote Blogging

Bolinas Ridge 6.7.12

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!

The Triumphant Return of Don Coyote

To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action when there is more reason to fear than to hope. 'Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.

I was getting worried that our old friend Don Coyote was no longer with us at Younger Lagoon.  He was in pretty bad shape with mange the last time we saw him eight months ago.




It seems, though, that he has returned.  Maybe he never went that far and we just kept missing him or maybe he has returned to the lagoon after a foray out of La Mancha. Or maybe this is his squire Sancho Panza who also suffers from the mange, but I like to think it is our old friend Don.





 

Is Don recovering from the mange and growing some of his tail hair back?  This coyote looks a little smaller and younger than the Don we saw months ago. However it is too hard to tell with certainty whether or not it is the same individual with such a gap in the time between sightings.

What do you think?  Is this old Don or is it Sancho?  All our old pictures of Don Coyote for comparison.  Either way he moves along, showing his tail for only a single visit in the two week set.

Stay tuned for a few more photos from this set.

'Yote Sighting

No pictures as I was in my car but saw a beautiful coyote this evening on the West side of campus off Empire Grade Rd just above the Arboretum.  It was standing in shoulder length grass with a sun setting over the Pacific Ocean behind him.  Beautiful sight even if it only lasted 4 seconds as I drove by.

Link dump

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I have a thesis committee meeting on Thursday.  Don't think only undergrads cram for exams, us grad-students do it in our own way too.  It is a race to finish three weeks of experiments in the one week before your committee meeting.  You know your committee is going to ask you to do said experiments so having some preliminary results to tell them about somehow makes you feel better.

Oh well ... on to matters pertinent to the blog.  The San Fransisco coyote invasion continues and Animal Control is trying to educate residents in order to minimize interactions.

I was also going to post about the California family who had their dinner party crashed by a dead Mountain Lion under their deck but the Codger beat me too it.

About a month ago there was a Mountain Lion shot in Redwood City in Randomtruth's neck of the woods.

Finally, I know I promised some book reviews many blog years ago, but I have tried to sit down and write them a couple of times and realized that I am horrible at writing book reviews.  I will give it one more try next week, but it may end up just being a list of books I have read recently and liked.  I don't have a future writing for the Old Gray Lady that is for sure.

UPDATE: A Mountain Lion was seen today in San Mateo County.  Plus a cool map of Mt. Lion sightings in San Mateo County in 2011.

UPDATE II: Via Bay Laurel Mountain Lion sightings in Marin County.  This is in the same neighborhood as three previous sightings.

The Life & Times of Don Coyote (an excerpt)

One of the recurring characters at Younger Lagoon Reserve is a character dubbed “Don Coyote” by Jake. This coyote is easily recognized with his ragged, mangy appearance, especially on the tail.

Don made an appearance in the Bushnell marsh set 005. The results from that set were promising, so we didn’t want to leave the marsh. Bobcat prints o’plenty were seen about 50 feet from set 005, thus a decision was made to move the cam to this area. It was placed in a tree looking down at an angle at the print-laden path.

Two days in Don gave his greetings, stopping at a fallen branch doused in Fox Frenzy.

Showing his biting tendencies

Leaving his mark

Bobcat visit

Don visiting his work the next day

Later, two bobcats came to play

About two weeks later, Don inspects the play area

and again left his mark

What lies in the future for the remarkable Don Coyote? I am guessing biting and peeing, but perhaps this canine will entertain us with even greater wonders!

Bonus goodness: Upon leaving, we observed a Bobcat cruising through the mustard fields outside the reserve!

Bite It

The forces of Camera Trapping Campus met up in late December, this time down south at Younger Lagoon. I was to set up a Bushnell Trophy cam, joining Jake's cam on the High Plateau.

The location of this set was a marshy area that was loaded with prints of raccoon, bobcat and deer.

One month later, a camera check. Upon entrance to the reserve, we were greeted by a fine CALIFORNIA THRASHER. We took this as a good omen.

Toxostoma redivivum

The camera appeared quite abused -- muddy from the winter storms and without the plastic covering for the IR flash. A quick search turned up the missing piece and its own damage.



The excitement was soaring, the files could not download fast enough!

Initial photos were full of raccoons and ghostly B/W blank shots.

146 photos in, it appeared.

the best shot of the culprit

What could have caused the coyote to maul the camera? Certainly not the flash, for that is infrared. Perhaps the overwhelming stimuli caused by a scent?

Later, our mangy friend stopped by for a noble portrait. Or was it his mugshot?

Trail of Plenty

The video cam at the Marin reserve continues to deliver interesting captures.

Coyote goes in for the deep rub (1.1.11)


Bobcat dance (1.15.11) *


Gray Fox quick stop (1.16.11)

* A favorite among my students

Bobcats Week 2

I previously posted some bobcats from the first week of a set in Santa Cruz County, CA.

The set was up for a total of 15 days and bobcats showed up during the second week too.

In two weeks we had 12 visits with 13 bobcats total.  One visit had two bobcats in the same visit.  In the 12 visits there are at least two individuals, but likely three.  I don't think there was any more than three bobcats captured at this set.  The time between visits ranged from 1.5 hours to 100 hours with a mean species visit interval of 33 hours.  I define a visit as >1 hour between images of the same species.  Visits were split roughly evenly between day and IR images.  This was a well lit set so IR correlated well with the sun being below the horizon.  Below is a graph of the visits binned into hour intervals for bobcats and coyotes for this set, with yellow being daylight hours and gray being night hours. Clicking on the graph will enlarge it.

Some data of interest for this set is as follows:

 

Data of Interest
# of pics	68
# not "test" pic	52
# of ID species	9
# of CT days	15
# of visits	26
# of misfires	5
# of test shots	16
# of triggers	52
Pos triggers	47
Pos trig %	90.4
Neg Trig %	9.6
visits/CT day	1.73
trigger/CT day	3.5
Pos trigger/day	3.1
IR images	24
Color Images	28
# of indiv	36
# of birds	15
# of mammals	32
# or small mammals	0
# of med mammals	31
# of lrg mammals	1

The number of birds, small mammals etc are the number of images not visits.  I still have to work out the complicated excel equation to get more precise visit data grouped by type of animal. Complicating the equation is if there is more than one animal in a visit, for example gangs of raccoons.  In that case, I think the total would be more informative as four "individual raccoons" rather than one "raccoon visit," but hopefully I will have that worked out shortly.

I did not ID all birds in this set hence the number of ID species being lower than it could be.  I will discuss the birds of this set once I finish IDing some of the Little Brown Birds.  With almost 2 visits a day and a positive trigger percentage over 90% I was quite please with this set despite the very heavy rain that occurred throughout most of it.  Bobcats were the most frequent visitors, followed by birds in general and then raccoons and coyotes.

The non-bird species list at this set was Bobcat, Coyote, Raccoon, BT deer and Striped Skunk.

The IR flash seems to be worse and blowout even more in wet conditions so this first photo is even worse than normal but shows two bobcats.  The previous photo in the series had the bobcat at the top of the slope in a crouched laying down position while the second one was just coming into frame at the bottom of the slope as if waiting in ambush.  I like to think it was the youngster getting ready to play attack mom.  I am going to have to do like the Codger and try and dim my IR flash a bit.  Maybe RandomTruth's upcoming post may have some more ideas on doing this.

Ambush Averted

Going on an afternoon hike

A Haggard Coyote

In 14 days at the same set where I got the bobcats there were three coyote visits.  In all three cases the coyote stood at the top of the bank and did not go up or down the trail that the bobcats were using.  This lead to less than optimal framing of the coyote which I had to live with as my primary goal was getting good images of the bobcats.  However all coyotes were looking straight at the camera so something about it caught their attention.

For some reason this coyote just makes me laugh.

Christian and I went to go move the camera to another set and not 3 minutes after we left the camera this slightly mangy coyote came wandering by the old set.

It stood there and watched us for a minutes or two then trotted off.  You can see it is having some mange issues especially in the tail.  I think this is the same coyote we camera trapped on the 5th of December.

I had gone by the camera and set it to video for a couple of days just to give that feature a try. I will post more on this at some point but the video seemed to have a much slower trigger speed than still images so we only got a coyote in this video for the first second or two, but it looks to be the same coyote as the one above.

Later we had an encounter with a smaller looking coyote in the same area as we saw the one above, but did not get pictures of it.

A Trail Of Two Cameras pt. 1

On the first visit to the Marin site, there was one spot that we knew was going to be a productive area.

Loads of coyote scat.
Several small side trails converging on to the main path.
A slight slope, offering kind camera angles.

One Bushnell Trophy Cam was attached to a Fir, looking up the trail in September. Over the following two months, the results were tantalizing.


The limitations of the camera were obvious, but we knew there was more to be seen from this spot. For all of the coyote scat, there was only one probable coyote capture in 53 days, despite physical evidence left by them.

My co-teacher, Ryan, was fervent in the belief that we use the Bushies for all that they could bring to the table. That we introduce an additional cam set to shoot video -- looking down the trail.
We did so during our class visit in early November.

Two weeks later, guess who showed up.

Bad Aim

One of the benefits of the cheaper off-the-shelf trailcams like the Scoutguard is its quick trigger speed.  The major downside is that it does not have an LCD display. You have to plug in a remote control with a postage stamp LCD screen which works fine for aiming the camera as long as you remember to bring it with you.  Alas, I forgot it when I set up this set on the UCSC Upper Campus Reserve.  I placed the camera in a thicket of brush that had a little canopy with a game trail going through it.  This lead to a well hidden camera but a very short distance between the camera and the trail.  As you can see, even though I thought I had the camera low enough on the tree it was a bit still high.  However, I was barely able to get shots of animals no more than 18" from the camera crossing directly in front of it.  Homebrews may have missed these shots.  Curve was used as scent for this set.  I don't think I will forget the LCD remote next time and hopefully get critters in frame.  FAIL