Remember in yesterdays post when I mentioned making a timelapse video of the camera photos? Well I did something clever:
That’s about half of the photos compiled into a timelapse video! About 6 days separates the first and last shot.
Toward the end you can see two frames of a furry rogue being very close to the camera! Very shortly after those photos the camera was knocked over, which is why the viewing angle changes afterwards 🙂
Ok fellows, time again for some candid camera backyard snaps! This entry is a good one…
Firstly, I set the camera up leaning against our house looking directly in the backyard onto the grass. I left it there for a few days and… almost no animal photos! However, by sheer coincidence our backyard neighbour was having a tree removed during this period and the entire process was captured in about 300 photos 🙂
Interesting… but not furry! However this next one – one of the very few animal shots captured during that period, is most definitely interesting:
Now I’m no zoologist, but that to me looks like either:
a) A bear
b) A cougar
c) A thylacine
Sadly, with no further photos of the mysterious beast, accurate identification may remain elusive.
I then moved the camera, placing it on the patio angled toward the tree you see in the right side of the above pictures. Here was the new vista when moved:
This was a good spot! It seems this little tree sits atop a backyard highway, since over the next few days many types of beast wandered into shot. I’ll not show the usual suspects (squirrels, birds) and focus on two visitors.
Here’s a rabbit hopping into view:
And here, my friends, is an up-until-now elusive opossum:
Look at that ratty tail and pointed snout. Could this be the same guy I saw with my own eyes years ago?
Now we cut to about a week later (ignore the date stamp on the photos; I never bother to set it when). For Christmas we received a brand new squirrel feeder. It is a wheel on an axel that rotates freely and has place to put three corn cobs. In addition, I purchased a different feeder myself, which hangs a food block off a spring. About two weeks ago we installed these and set a camera on them. Here’s an establishing shot:
300 photos would be captured in this spot, about 90% of them containing squirrels making use of their feeders. Here’s two examples:
The photos not containing squirrels fall into two categories:
1) Night photos, that almost always contain only deer, and
2) Photos of birds
Here is a night example:
And here is a bird example:
That’s a bluejay. We have yet to see any squirrels attempt to feed from the new hanging feeder (as opposed to the corncob feeder hanging behind it). I think it may be too far from the branch.
By the way, compare the lushness of the greenery in the above shot to the establishing shot above. Only six days separate the two. Next year I should do a timelapse in early spring to show the growth of the trees and ferns.
Now we get to the good stuff, as in the really good stuff. I also moved the camera to look directly at the rotating feeder, and switched it over to video mode. It was set to record 30 second clips, and during the very first night hit the jackpot. Here are four such clips edited together:
Yes, that’s a raccoon! Possibly the same guy we captured in a photo a few weeks back. According to the timestamps, he was there for about 14 minutes in total. Cute little bugger, isn’t he? 🙂
So the list is squirrels, chipmunks, deer, birds, cats, rabbits, opossum and raccoons that we have caught on our cameras over the years. We know of three other mammals we know to visit our backyard that have still not been captured on film. Will I ever see them? Can you guess what they are?
This time I put the camera in the back of our yard, in the only ‘wooded’ part of our property. I scattered corn amidst the fallen leaves as well. In a few days, over 150 photos had collected on the device. Even better, the vast majority actually had animals in them!
There were about eighty like these:
There are (at least) two squirrels in the second photo. Can you see them both?
And then there were fifty or so photos like these:
That second guy looks like he knows what’s going on doesn’t he? Two of the photos contained four deer in them!
And then we get to the unusual shots. Of the ~140 animal photos, all but two contained deer or squirrels. Here are the other two:
THERE HE IS AGAIN! A raccoon! Although his tail looks shorter…
And there we have it my friends, the first wildlife shot of a rabbit 🙂
(I won’t comment here that it’s not uncommon to see rabbits hopping around our backyard in the summer…)
Remember back in January when I visited the reptile park and hugged a wombat? The photo I posted that day was taken with my cellphone. At the time I also had a professional photo taken (ie. a teenage girl with an Canon digital SLR snapped a few quick shots and charged me $25). And here it is:
God that thing was cute!
So it’s been a while since I last posted pictures taken in our yard by our stealth camera. The reason is… well the camera died 🙂
Fear not, dear readers, for a replacement has been received. I present: The Primos Truth Cam 35!
This beauty is all digital, noiseless, and features infra red LED’s for pitch-dark photography! Furthermore, the battery life is astounding. Last week I set it up outside. Let’s see what we got…
Here’s the first shot:
As you can see, I aimed it at our squirrel buffet. Now given that the old camera used to die in a day or so, I assumed as much from this one and did not set either the time or date. So everything will be relative to the timestamp on the above. Notice also it records the temperature!
Two days later, this began. Why two days? Well the day I put it out a blizzard blew into town, and the camera was covered in snow for about 36 hours! There are a few photos before the one shown above, but they are blurry from the dregs of snow on the lens.
I hope you like squirrel photos, because there were (ahem) over 850 photos of squirrels on the device when I retrieved it yesterday, after only about 6 days in the yard. The vast majority were more or less the same as the two above, with only the occasional curiosity like this one:
Look at the bulge of his eyeball! What a shot 🙂
Happily, it’s not all squirrels… check out this:
Deer! Give the distance from the camera, I’m extremely pleased with the quality of these night shots. Remember there is no flash, this is infra red only. We were amused to see the deer checking out the squirrel feeder.
It only took two days for the squirrels to completely empty their feedbox (and eat the corn), but the camera revealed that they kept returning to check even long after it was empty:
This makes me want to more regularly feed them!
This last shot was our big surprise. Over the years we have seen (and occasionally photographed) many animal denizens in our yard, but when we looked at the photos yesterday we got quite a surprise (click the photos to make them bigger):
A raccoon! Look at that stripey tail! I’ve never seen a raccoon in our yard, but I’m happy they are there. As you can see, it seems they like the squirrel feeder as well 🙂