A fox in our backyard

Going through the fridge last week we found a Tupperware container with the remnants of three-week-old arroz con pollo. There was one piece of chicken left, a drumstick.  It was too old to eat, of course, and we don't put meat in our compost bin. But just tossing it seemed wrong. Repurpose! We got a bright idea: let's put it in front of the trail cam and see who comes to dinner!

We have been moving the trail camera to different locations in the hills here and have not gotten a lot of postable pictures.  We did see a few house cats or feral cats by a creek nearby (perhaps I'll post those later), and a bunch of blurry deer pictures.  We moved the camera into our back yard and put the drumstick a few yards in front of it.   A day later, the morsel was still there in front of the camera, but a couple of days after that it was gone.  We went to get the card out of the camera and 'OH NO' the batteries in the camera had died and there were no photos on the card.

Not completely daunted by this, we looked in the fridge for another item a critter might enjoy, and found a half of a cantaloupe that was never very good anyway and getting kinda old. We put it in front of the camera and 2 days later, voila, several very good pictures of a fox!  And a pair of raccoons, and a young buck.  All came to investigate the melon.

I'm not sure the species of the fox, all foxes look gray in the IR light at night.

Strange though, all they did was nibble on it.  It's still there.  Maybe we will get more pictures yet. Or maybe, like us, they didn't think the melon was very tasty.

We Caught a Fox

When we bought the game camera, we were hoping to get photos of a variety of critters crossing through our backyard.  It has been recording a lot of activity, but lately it has mostly been from our deer neighbors. We have seen other wildlife in the area, including raccoons (which we have caught with the game camera), opossums (but only dead on the side of the road), squirrels (every day in the trees), and skunks (OK, maybe we haven't seen them, but we have smelled them).  And we know that coyotes and mountain lions live in the open space nearby, and have been known to come close to suburban areas.  But all we get are photos of deer.  The camera had been in the same location in our backyard for a couple of months, so we decided to move it to a different site off our property.

There is a large open-space park area near our house that is criss-crossed with game trails and also with several small creeks.  We decided to put the camera at a game trail/creek crossing, about a quarter mile from any house. Even though few people traipse around this part of the open space, we were a little  worried that someone might come across the camera and steal it. But we decided it was unlikely anyone would be hiking there--it is thick with brush and bramble--and worth the gamble.  We left it almost a week in one location, and got 2 photos of guess what?  Yes, deer again. So we moved it to another critter creek crossing and checked it yesterday.  Bingo!  We caught a fox in motion!  The pictures are not the best, taken at twilight in infra-red mode, and blurry.  This quick red fox was jumping over a log and some rocks en-route to a meal, perhaps.

We will leave the camera in that location for a week or 2 and see if we can get a better photo, or with any luck, some other critters as well.