Fun With A Scouting Camera

Coyotes and Chickens

I've been having some fun with this scouting camera lately. It's a camera that's triggered by motion. It attaches to any tree or branch with a strap and is pretty durable to the weather. This is just the beginning. I have a number of little scouting camera projects planned that I'll be doing over the next few months.

It started out a few weeks ago when one of our hens died. I decided to donate the chicken to the natives to help 'em out a little during this years tough winter. Why didn't the chicken go in the soup pot you might ask? Well, we weren't totally sure why the chicken died, leaving us second guessing if we wanted to eat it ourselves. So, into the forest I went to set up my camera......

It took a few nights for anything to appear. I was hoping for something really cool to come by and have a snack like a bobcat, a mountain lion, or if I was really, really lucky a wolverine. I'm not completely sure, but I would imagine that a predator wants to eat it's own kill instead of snacking on the trash. So I settled for a coupla cool shots of some coyotes. Here's the first shot of this coyotes grand discovery:

 Mmmmmm, this looks delicous. I feel like chicken tonight, like chicken tonight......

There was over 30 pictures from one night, of what I made out to be 3 different coyotes. Each one came back a second time, just to make sure that he or she didn't leave any scraps. One of them had the mange, which is a very contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites. You can see this guys tail fur is almost completely gone:

Foxes and Mountain Goats

Last week I was out cruising on the snowmobile. I had the camera in my pack, and was really hoping to come across a mountain lion kill in the forest, in hopes of setting up the camera to catch the lion coming back later in the evening. Out of the corner of my eye, I see what I thought was a mule deer antler shed. I hopped off the sled and as I got closer realized it wasn't a shed at all. It was a mountain goat. The goat looked like it died of old age, but there had already been some animal tracks and scat around it. Perfect opportunity to set up the camera on a nearby tree:

I went back on the first couple days and there wasn't much action. After about a week of not checking at all, I went back today and found over 70 shots of a fox. He or she came in a few different times over the course of 4 days. We saw a fox on the road at night a few weeks ago, and I think this was the one.

I'm still trying to figure out if this is the same fox. It could be the photo, but to me it looks like it's legs are alot darker in a few of the shots. What do you think?

You may call me crazy. This post has nothing to do with sustainable living. It definitely doesn't have a word on our goats that have recently seemed to grow a bit larger, or our thoughts on the pigs we'll be picking up here in a few months, but I think it's kind of fun. I'm looking forward to the bears waking up this spring. Hope to have you along........