Posts Tagged ‘trail cam’
Trail Shots
That visible trail of wildlife traffic coming onto our property from the north that I thought might be a fox might have been used by a fox at one time, but that is not what is making the path so well established. I staged our trail camera to face the direction and look down to where the traffic was passing beneath our fence.
This is what the camera captured Thursday afternoon through Friday morning, the last image happening about a half-hour ahead of the morning walk with Asher when I retrieved the memory card and turned off the camera:
The time stamps add a lot to the story of this overnight activity. The raccoon photos started at 6:35 p.m. and then at 12:38 a.m., 4:32 a.m., and 6:03 a.m. These are just a partial selection of the raccoon traffic that was happening all night long. Interestingly, there was only a tiny percentage of pictures showing raccoons going in the other direction, leaving our property.
I have noticed raccoons living in a few of our trees, but I had no idea how many are roaming around in the woods all night. Since they likely evade coyotes by climbing trees, their main predator is probably automobile traffic. There’s not a lot of traffic on the roads in the countryside during the hours raccoons are wandering around, and there are more acres of woods than roads, so I can understand how the number of raccoons could get high.
Maybe we should offer hunters an invitation to spend time in our woods controlling the population. A quick search turned up coonskin caps on sale for almost a hundred dollars each. I could post an ad that I’ve got a lot of raccoon fur that I’m willing to give away for free. Interested parties just have to catch the wild raccoons themselves.
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Writing Results
On the 31st day of January in the year 2025, our weather is mild, and life on the ranch is serene. Yesterday, spring-like songs were floating in the air from birds taking full advantage of the softening of winter’s grip. Cyndie has been reporting from the coast of southern California and sending me pictures of textures in the sand and surf that she knows I appreciate.
The temperatures at each of our locations are not that different, but it’s chilly where she is and warm at home.
If you are a person who journals, this might be obvious to you, but it has been helpful for me to write about times when I find myself getting in the way of my own progress.
After posting yesterday about my situation with the trail cam and the pruning saw, I was compelled to take another crack at both. I stopped off in the shop after feeding the horses with the intent of giving a more intense effort hunting for the saw in the 4th place I thought I may have stashed it. It wasn’t there, but then I turned around and spotted it in plain sight on a shelf by my circular saw. A saw by a saw. Perfectly logical.
That success inspired me to grab the trail cam and set it up by the fence where there is an obvious animal trail that I believe is our neighboring fox. Asher and I left that spot and headed down the Perimeter Trail toward a series of young oak trees from which I wanted to remove low branches. To keep the dog tethered to me, I brought a clip to hook his leash to one of my belt loops. That allowed me to have both hands free to tend to my pruning.
It didn’t occur to me that taking my eyes off him might lead to something unsavory. I was working down in the dry creek along our southern border, which gave Asher access to the neighbor’s side of the ditch where I wouldn’t normally let him meander. When we set off on our way again after I finished sawing, I noticed he had a thick wad of grass wound up in the prongs of his collar. He had been rolling around in the tall grass.
With the warm temperatures, the thawing ground offers all sorts of scents that Asher can’t resist rubbing against. It wasn’t until we got back into the house that it became noticeable, but his coat now has picked up a heady aroma of dusty, dry grass and some wildlife perfume that smells a bit like plastic when it gets too hot.
It’s not as lovely as it sounds.
I am not writing that to inspire me to give him a bath.
We spent time out on the deck in the afternoon heat, where I could sand my current wood sculpting project without concern for making a mess, and Asher’s stink was only occasionally annoying.
No, I have no intention of trying to bathe him.
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White Stuff
Overnight last night, we received more of that white stuff from the sky. Probably enough that I will feel justified in firing up the Grizzly ATV to plow the driveway. Our other grizzly took on a shocked look at the latest batch of precipitation.
Possibly because the earlier flakes got covered with an icy drizzle. It created a crust over the surfaces that was just enough to make walking annoying because it caught the toe of my boot every few steps. There are enough trip hazards in our landscape that I don’t welcome the addition of any more of them. I’ve noticed a demeaning increase in my tendency to hit the ground over the last few years when my foot catches on unseen obstructions.
For some reason, those occasions are matched by an equivalent increase in F-bombs taking flight in reactionary shock.
The horses look like they stood out in the weather all night and then rolled around to get as wet and icy as possible. There is probably a word for the blocks of packed snow that build up and then get ejected from the bottom of their hooves. They are scattered everywhere around the paddocks. The series of days with this slowly accumulating snow at the temperatures we’ve had seems to keep the conditions right at the level that is prime for these to form.
Asher and I picked a spot to position the trail cam (which has been in storage [with batteries still in it. Boo!] for too long), hoping to identify what animal has been using an old downed tree trunk in our woods for its toilet. My scat-identifying skills have me thinking it looks like either a human or a dog as big or bigger than Asher. In reality, based on likely creatures traveling in that part of the forest, it’s a coyote, fox, or really large raccoon. Whatever it is, the amount of scat reveals this is a regular occurrence and not just an animal that happened to be wandering past.
There were no tracks in the fresh coating of white stuff this morning, so I didn’t check the memory card for images. New tracks in the snow will tell me when it’s time to check. You can be sure I will provide a full report as soon as we get some results. Heck, you’d think the tracks would give me the information I need to identify the culprit.
I’m about as good at identifying paw prints as I am with scat.
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Bad Decision
It has been a while since I used the Grizzly ATV. Last time I had it out, I decided to park it in the hay shed since we no longer need to store hay in there. That turned out to be a bad decision.
Maybe birds don’t like the Grizzly and they were sending a message.
If I had parked it one foot over in either direction, they would have at least missed the seat. It was positioned directly beneath a joist where they perch. Just lovely.
I posted a message to the neighborhood group for input on our fisher sighting. Nobody else has reported similar. We still have all eight chickens, despite visible signs where the critter had dug to get in and out of the barn. Luckily, the chickens aren’t ever in the barn. We keep the doors shut.
There were no visitors to the chicken coop in the last twenty hours other than Cyndie and the chickens, based on the surveillance of the trail camera.
Maybe the fisher is more interested in moles and voles than chickens. After mowing yesterday, it became obvious there are plenty of burrowing rodents active across our land.
That’s probably why the big weasel showed up. It’s here to rid our yard of pesky moles.
See how I visualize the outcome I desire?
I’ll let you know how well it works. (I’m guessing not so well in this case when delivered with a heavy amount of sarcasm.).l
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Woods Changing
Fall has arrived and it sure feels like it outside this morning. There is a distinct chill in the air, despite the ongoing global warmup occurring.
Well before the fall landscape color palette changes from green to red/orange/yellow, an inside view reveals the impending change.
There aren’t a lot of leaves on the ground yet, but there is a definite thinning of foliage going on. Delilah and I were traipsing along the soggy trail yesterday when I took the above picture. Times like this bring great appreciation for the “boardwalk” we envisioned in one of the swampy spots of our trails. It is an ongoing installation of blocks I remove from shipping pallets I salvage from the day-job.
Once again, it is getting easier to leave the trail and bushwhack through our woods to explore rarely visited spaces. I think this may subtly contribute to a universal attraction people share for fall, along with the obvious colorization and comfortable dew point temperatures. The woods open up and provide easy accessibility.
Friday night the easy access seemed to invite a noisy visitor to the grove of trees just beyond our house. Delilah spends many precious minutes every day barking in response to the sound of neighboring dogs miles away. Friday, that neighboring bark came from darkness just beyond the reach of our flood light.
Oddly, Delilah felt no need to respond, although she took great interest in our sudden fascination with the mysterious trespasser outside the back door. My guess was the stray visitor had treed a raccoon, or squirrel, or turkey and was “shouting” at it.
Last evening, during our last big walk of the day, I let Delilah’s nose direct us off-trail through the woods along the many odd paths frequently traveled by a variety of resident critters.
I also put fresh batteries in the trail camera to resume monitoring the night life visiting the chicken coop.
It was a very quiet night there last night. No motion until almost 6:00 this morning, when a cat wandered past.
We took down the netting around the coop yesterday, making it easy again to clean the poop board, so maybe traffic will pick up with time. Not that we wish for that. I just see it as inevitable.
Inevitable like the end of summer growing season, which is marked by the first real overnight freeze. I’m in no particular rush for that, other than a desire to be done mowing the grass for another year.
With the woods changing noticeably, and the noted chill greeting us this morning, we sense the big freeze isn’t far off.
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Gettin’ There
Well, in case you haven’t noticed, today is June 14th. It just so happens, the Tour of Minnesota biking and camping week starts on June 15th. Holy COW, that’s tomorrow! I suppose I better start getting ready to go.
Today is my last day at the day-job before starting this annual biking adventure. After that, it’s a quick stop for some supplies, a rush home to get some grass cut, and then it will be time to start packing.
Tent, check. Sleeping bag, check. Bike, check. Helmet, check. Bike shoes, check. As long as I pack those essentials, I will be functional. The rest is just superfluous accoutrements.
Okay, maybe I’ll bring a camera, and some clothes, a sleeping pad, sunscreen lotion, and ibuprofen. But that’s it. That’s all I need.
Oh, and a toothbrush. Spare shoes. A raincoat. A hat.
I found our old original Foxtail toy. I’m bringing the Foxtail
After dinner yesterday, in order to check off a couple of chores from my pre-departure list, I pulled out the diesel tractor and attached the loader. Cyndie and I transferred three large piles of composted manure to a remote location, to provide plenty of open space in the compost area before I go.
Whenever I was off dumping a full bucket, the chickens would show up to check out what Cyndie was doing. I could see them scamper away each time I returned. Eventually, I paid them a visit on foot to offer my regards.
They are just starting to show hints of what they will look like when they mature and start producing eggs.
As of last night, we still have all twelve birds. This kind of success is what breeds our willingness to keep trying the unencumbered free-range life for them.
After they start getting hunted again, our thoughts will change, I’m sure.
Speaking of them getting hunted… while the world was all caught up in the escapades of the downtown St. Paul raccoon that scaled a 23-story building in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, we had our very own varmint contemplating a climb up the side of our 1-story coop.
I admit, it wasn’t nearly as exciting, but it made for a cool capture on the trail cam.
You can almost read his mind, as he computes the potential reward of maybe gettin’ up there.
I wonder if I should be electrifying the hardware cloth that covers the windows. I’m hoping there is no reward whatsoever should he or she actually decide to make that climb.
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Night Visitors
I finally relocated the trail camera. It’s still viewing the same general area, but it now sees from the other direction. Instead of facing the coop, I attached it to one of the legs so it is facing out from the coop.
If there was any question about whether the fox was still hanging around, or not, we got our definitive answer Monday night.
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I think it’s cute to see how the fox tips its nose up in the direction of the coop window. Might be picking up a familiar aroma there…
There are still plenty of rabbit sightings, and last night there were a couple of dark figures in the distance that defy positive identification. I get the impression that one of them was a local barn cat. Cyndie didn’t seem convinced, although neighbor cats are frequent visible visitors around our place.
There was no question about one other regular attendee to the coop area, although there are likely many more than just one trekking past throughout the night. Exhibit A:
I found some online advice yesterday about ways to keep foxes away. One farmer swears 100% success with his method. It’s urine. But, there’s a trick to it. The instructions insist you have to actually pee on the fox’s den. Oh, I suppose you could just collect specimens and dump them on there, but where’s the fun in that?
My problem with that solution is that I have no idea where the fox’s den is located. I should have followed tracks when there was still snow on the ground.
Putting out a live trap would catch more barn cats and raccoons than fox. The common opinion is that a fox is too smart to fall for that trick.
Last evening, after Cyndie brushed Delilah, she took all the dog hair down and distributed it around the coop. Delilah can’t stand guard there, but her scent can hang around all it wants, for whatever good that might do.
Frankly, we are growing more wary every day that a daylight attack on the chickens, similar to what occurred about this time last year, is not only possible, but likely.
In last night’s fading sunlight, I was hanging out with the flock as they lolled about between the coop and the paddock. Many of them showed a fondness for perching on the bottom board of the paddock fence, which reminded me of the behavior of last year’s flock, right before the June 16th massacre that dwindled their number.
For the time being, we’ve still got twelve chickens, and we are enjoying each of them to the fullest. And they seem to be enjoying us, as measured by their cute little hustle of approach when we are in their vicinity.
I wonder if they know how many visitors show up to their coop every night while they are sleeping.
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Wild Life
Lately, the night views at the coop have been dominated by the masked bandits. Luckily, despite their regular visits, there isn’t anything left out overnight to reward them.
Doesn’t prevent them from checking, just in case.
The only other (not-so) wild life we captured shots of recently was a neighbor’s cat. It sat for over ten minutes with its body facing the camera, but the head was always twisted side to side or around backwards. I don’t know why it didn’t just turn around.
I think maybe it was trying to see where that rabbit went that had been filling our memory card with pictures the previous week. That critter was pouncing back and forth across the view all night long.
The other wildness we have been enjoying was in the sky. Cyndie snapped this panorama as a thundering shower loomed large over the ranch.
I had just finished mowing and was putting the tractor in the garage when the first giant drops started slapping the ground.
It was a wild day of chores yesterday, after I squeaked in a short bike ride to start my exhausting day. Our grove of trees by the road was expanding to obscure the view of traffic coming down the hill, so I hauled out the pole chainsaw and did some highway crew style pruning.
No mercy.
Being clever, I put the battery charger on the truck before heading out on my bike ride earlier, thinking I might want to load the cuttings into the pickup so I wouldn’t have to work on chipping them near traffic.
There is a phantom load draining the battery that we haven’t been able to identify. I have finally heeded advice from a smart thinking friend and purchased a switch to protect the battery. After all the branches were loaded in the back, I parked the truck at the shop to install the device while the battery had some life to it.
I bought a unit that will automatically switch out the battery when it senses the voltage drop to a certain point. To reconnect, we simply press the brake pedal or toggle the headlights and the switch re-engages the battery to start the truck. This way, we don’t have to pop the hood and open or close the switch every time we use the truck.
We never know how long an interval it will be between uses, and both Cyndie and I are prone to forgetting just this kind of occasional detail.
With the installation complete, I moved on to the lawn tractor to finish the yard that I started Thursday afternoon, before that round of all-night thunderstorms. On my bike ride in the morning, I saw a lot of farm fields with brand new lakes in them. Our rain gauge indicated over 4-inches had fallen overnight.
Low on gas, and running out of time before the next thunderstorm, I wildly hustled to the arena to mow that, too.
By the time Cyndie and I called it a day, the clock had reached 7:30 p.m.
Another wild day in our wild life.
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Brief Scare
I didn’t get to hear about it until long after the fact yesterday, but for a moment in the morning, a chicken safety alarm was raised. Our trusty assistant, Shelby, was tending to the horses when a neighbor whom she didn’t know drove up our driveway exclaiming that a pair of wandering dogs had killed all her cats.
She suggested we protect our chickens, so Shelby ushered our three surviving birds back into their coop for the rest of the day.
When Cyndie told me this story, she said our neighbor described the dogs as a German Shepherd and a Chocolate Lab. That sounded familiar to me. A quick search of the trail cam files confirmed my suspicion.
These trouble makers were captured trespassing on our trail in the woods back in March of 2016. At the time, no harm had been done, so we didn’t bother seeking a verification of ownership.
Now, I’m thinking we might want to keep this photo handy on our phones for possible inquiries around the block. I will also look for a new vantage point from which to aim the trail cam again, in order to watch for possible new sightings of these two.
If they are still coming on our property, it troubles me a bit that they’ve been able to do it without ever being seen, beyond that time the camera caught them. With our frequent movement around the grounds every single day, it would mean they are pretty crafty in their stealth if they indeed have still been paying us visits unseen.
Even though it was just a brief scare yesterday, it has left us with a lingering feeling of unease.
Wonder if it will help to send these dogs love. If it doesn’t, I’d like to figure out a way to offer them some of Delilah’s sharp-toothed version of a greeting to discourage any future interest in choosing to cross our property lines.
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Not Quite
First of all, I have good news and bad news to report on Dezirea’s progress. The good news is that she is showing interest in eating and behaving much less depressed. The bad news is that she is showing very little, if any progress toward returning to normal manure production. She remains under close supervision, but we have decided on a path of minimal intervention for now.
I caught several frames of activity on the trail cam a couple of nights ago, but the best way I can describe what appeared in the series of images is, the camera captured Predator in invisible stealth mode. It was actually kinda creepy.
It doesn’t show up in a single image, but when a series of multiple images is toggled, the blur of translucent motion is detectable. One possibility is that a deer was moving too fast for the camera speed. I suspect deer because a minute later, the view picked up an extreme closeup of a fraction of the rear flank of what can only have been a deer passing directly in front of the camera.
There aren’t any other animals that size, except for maybe the Predator.
It’s not quite warm enough for the chickens to be given full access to their little courtyard, but in the days ahead, the forecast looks promising. The birds are showing great interest. Cyndie snapped a shot of two of them enjoying the view out their picture window.
Delilah seems even more anxious for them to come out than they are. Lately, there is nothing about her behavior that assures me she understands their protected status in the hierarchy of our domestic animals.
I’m pretty sure she is not quite there.
Just like Dezirea is not quite back to normal health.
We are standing by expectantly, sending love to all our critters for good health and mutual respect.
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Relative Something 