The Things You See in the Woods

For Christ­mas this year we got our­selves a cou­ple of game cama­ras so that we could get a bet­ter look at the ani­mals ( includ­ing neigh­bors) who are using the net­work of trails that goes through our woods. (Peo­ple out here in the West usu­al­ly call what we’ve got for­est. But I’m old school and from the East, where the 20 acres that we’ve got would be called a Woods. So Woods it is for me.)

The cam­eras are a pair of Brown­ing Strike Force (BTC‑5). We got a two pack on sale. They take day­light col­or pho­tos and night­time infra-red. They can also shoot video but we haven’t exper­i­ment­ed with that yet.

Each pho­to comes with a bunch of data at the bot­tom. Tem­per­a­ture, moon­phase (use­ful at night) date and time, as well as a set­table cam­era name. We have one that’s unnamed and one that’s named BDF TWO.

Pret­ty typ­i­cal in the day­time pho­tos are the deer. This was tak­en at the inter­sec­tion of the two main paths to the imme­di­ate south of the log­ging road.

We also get oth­er peo­ple’s dogs. Any­one know this fellow?

The night pic­tures can be pret­ty —  shots of the deer brows­ing or trav­el­ing to sleep­ing spots. I’m think­ing that the next time we move the cam­eras I’ll try to find a fre­quent­ly used sleep­ing spot for one of them.

This spot is off of the path back to the garage. It’s at the junc­tion of two deer trails that can’t eas­i­ly be walked by humans.

A few min­utes lat­er anoth­er deer comes by.

Late in April we had a new night visitor.

It’s the first sight­ing of the bob­cat that we thought might be hang­ing around. (Look at the low­er cen­ter of the frame.)

Note the short tail with the dark tip.

We’ve had no sign of the bear that was here last win­ter. Maybe he and the bob­cat aren’t amenable to shar­ing turf?

Well, we did find this Bear.

And here Jim is walk­ing the dog in the morn­ing before it’s light enough for the cam­era to switch to day­time. (Yeah, it says 8:45 but I think the cam­era missed day­light sav­ings time — besides it stays dark in the woods.)

For some rea­son (cam­era tim­ing?) we get lots of butts.

The two most com­mon butts in the woods. Me and the Big G.