We moved that cam­eras back in ear­ly May and are now see­ing dif­fer­ent things. Lots of preda­tors wan­der­ing around the for­est.

One cam­era is locat­ed at the end of what we call the for­est road, the wide path that runs par­al­lel to the prop­er­ty line in the woods. The oth­er is on a small trail behind the manure pile that leads to the neighbor’s dri­ve­way. This is the one that I thought might show us the tran­sit­ing coy­otes and help pin point their den. But now I“m not at all sure. There is a lot more coy­ote activ­i­ty on the for­est road cam­era.

Some high­lights:

Going for a walk

We’re won­der­ing about how many coy­otes there are and whether or not we can iden­ti­fy them. In par­tic­u­lar are the coy­ote above and this one below the same ani­mal? We’ve had pic­tures of two togeth­er in the past. And the one below looks heav­ier set than the one above.

Coy­ote Face

In fact this round we have col­lect­ed the full set of preda­tors.

bear butt

bob the cat

cougar!

This is not the cougar that we’ve seen before. This one doesn’t have a col­lar. So there may be two work­ing over­lap­ping ter­ri­to­ries here.

And per­haps a bit fright­en­ing… our neigh­bor walk­ing her dog. Check out the time stamp — com­pare it with the one on the cougar pic above.

Yipes, look at the time stamp.

And some things can’t be iden­ti­fied oth­er than a pair of glow­ing eyes in the night.

eyes!

Then there’s the usu­al sus­pect. The Big G out for a stroll.

the one and only Big G

Jim has, of course, spent some time in the woods this spring. Here he is “road test­ing” the big dual sport bike before a back coun­try adven­ture in BC.

That’s a big orange bike!

And mow­ing, because it’s spring and the mow­ing nev­er seems to end.

Mow­ing the road

And here we are — walk­ing up to change the cards in one of the cam­eras.

the three bears

And because there is always one acci­den­tal­ly arty shot.

not exact­ly wildlife

Not so much on the cam­eras this month.

The deer are walk­ing around in groups again. Three most­ly. I haven’t seen any sign of the buck or his antlers since Decem­ber. I was hop­ing to get the antlers for the dog to chew on.

The preda­tors have been out at night. Coy­otes both on the low­er pas­ture road and in the sep­tic field.

And Bob the Cat.

and then there’s the weath­er — what a March. Rain, Fog, Wind! Giz­mo and I walked reli­gious­ly but some days nei­ther of us was too pleased about it.

We’re going to move two of the cam­eras lat­er this week. I think we’ve seen all there is to see in the sep­tic field and on the low­er pas­ture road. (The dri­ve­way cam­era will stay — that’s a secu­ri­ty thing that occa­sion­al­ly catch­es some­thing more inter­est­ing than the UPS lady com­ing and going.)

Soon it will be time to start on the farm projects for spring/summer. Look for news!

We were gone for a lot of the months of Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary but the wildlife goes on.

There is this lit­tle rab­bit. Nib­bling on a bit of brown grass.

Lit­tle bun­ny.

This bob­cat is look­ing for the rab­bits.

Bob the Cat

The deer are still here though not very much in evi­dence in the last two months.

Night time brows­ing.

We had a lot of snow and some pow­er out­ages. Here are the neigh­bors going home after drop­ping by to make sure that the house sit­ter is doing okay.

Thanks for the help!

The coy­otes are now three.

A third has joined the group.

Lots of snow. It’s been a pret­ty win­ter.

Cap­tur­ing the snow.

I seems like it snowed a lot in Decem­ber though part of that is that it has also snowed at the begin­ning of the year.

Ear­ly in the Decem­ber we had a decent amount of snow

snow — makes the farm pret­ty and the walk­ing treach­er­ous.

New sight­ing. I’m pret­ty sure that the bird tak­ing off (land­ing?) on the post that the cam­era is on is our local barred owl. We hear him at night and occa­sion­al­ly are dive bombed when walk­ing in the woods dur­ing the day.

the barred owl?

No sign of the large preda­tors this month. Just a cou­ple of vis­its by a solo coy­ote.

look­ing fat and sassy?

There were very few appear­ances by the does. But Bucky was around a lot He’s fine look­ing fel­low.

bucky makes a day time vis­it.

in the sep­tic field at night

Bucky is shar­ing the sep­tic field with the bun­nies. These lit­tle ones only show up on the cam­eras if some­thing else trig­gers them.

bun­ny!

I did fig­ure out what has been trig­ger­ing the sep­tic cam­era when there are no obvi­ous ani­mals. Now that we’ve used up the wood in the first rack the cam­era can see into the work yard and it trig­gers when ever some­one is out mov­ing around the wood racks or the back of the shop. Look care­ful­ly and you can see Jim fill­ing the cart to bring fire­wood to the house.

where’s Wal­do?

There was a Christ­mas Day walk with my mom and a tiny bit of snow.

the fam­i­ly goes for a walk on Christ­mas Day.

2017 year start­ed with more snow. And the cam­era on the pas­ture road was very arty.

snow mon­key eats snow.

coy­ote in the snow with arty fil­ter effect

In the last cou­ple of months we’ve seen more preda­tors and few­er deer than in the past.

We do have a nice lit­tle buck­ling hang­ing around.

our buck­ling

And here he is with one of the does.

buck­ling and doe in the evening

We also had a cou­ple of very excit­ing days when we were being vis­it­ed by a bear. We saw him wan­der across the work yard one evening around sup­per time. Here’s a pic­ture of him cruis­ing down the dri­ve­way. And we found him again a cou­ple of nights lat­er chow­ing down on the bird feed­ers. The first time in over 15 years that we’ve had prob­lems with the bird feed­ers. It’s sad that I can’t watch the sum­mer bird from my office win­dows.

bear on the dri­ve­way!

We’ve seen a lot of the coy­otes. Fre­quent­ly as a pair. There has been no sign of pups, per­haps they are too young? This is the first year that we’ve seen them togeth­er.

wan­der­ing around the low­er pas­ture road

Once more walk­ing up the dri­ve­way in the mid­dle of the night.

walk­ing up the dri­ve­way in the mid­dle of the night

The big news how­ev­er is that we have cap­tured on cam­era the col­lared female cougar that haunts our neigh­bor­hood.

Sad­ly it seems that she was in the neigh­bor­hood attack­ing live­stock. None of ours but folks just up the road lost an alpaca.

tracked under the name F17

Some­times you get just plain odd or lucky shots. The dri­ve­way cam­era is some­times trig­gered by birds land­ing on the rail that you can see on the left in these pic­tures. Here’s lucky shot of a bird fly­ing away.

one of the crows?

We also cap­ture the occa­sion­al strolling neigh­bor.

man and dog

Sum­mer is almost over — we’ll prob­a­bly only mow one more time. But in the mid­dle of sum­mer it’s a con­stant bat­tle against the over­whelm­ing veg­e­ta­tion. Here Jim is mow­ing the low­er pas­ture lane

And this one last shot of our­selves com­ing back from a con­cert in the side­car.

that’s a lot of reflec­tive gear

A few min­utes out of the morn­ing rou­tine on a pleas­ant sum­mer day. It’s not quite so much fun in the mid­dle of the win­ter, but the ani­mals are always about this amus­ing.