Backyard Critter Watch is back after a too-long hiatus during which jobs, home, family and life took over and kept us away! But back in time to capture the best of spring time when the critters are out and about and multiplying!

In early May, we placed our trail camera aimed at a small creek near our house to see what stops for a drink. This time we got very lucky when a doe and a newborn fawn stepped in front of the camera.  The fawn is probably only a day or two old in this first video. Look at those legs, still very wobbly. 

In this second video the fawn is only a month old, and already it can run and jump as well as any grown up. Keep watching after the doe leaves the frame. The fawn comes through a few moments later.

Feral Cats caught by Camera Trap

We placed our trail camera by a creek in an open space park near our house, and we were surprised when the results showed a pair of feral cats coming and going in front of the camera almost every evening.

We also got quite a few blurry pictures of the local deer, birds, and raccoon along the creek, and a couple of slightly blurry pictures of a rat or rat like creature.

I guess we shouldn't have been too surprised. The creek is probably a good home for these cats.  There is cover in the bushes, rats and birdies to eat, and water to drink.  I suppose they could get on quite well.

You will notice in one photo a strange snaky streak next to the black cat.  We are not sure what it is.  A snake ghost?  A ghost of some other animal?  Or just the blur of the reflecting eyes of another cat as it ran through the photo?

They say coyotes and mountain lions come into this neighborhood from time to time.  We have not seen them here and have not caught any on the trail cam, but we did see a dog-like foot print in some sandy soil behind our house.  If they do come around, these cats may find life here a bit less enjoyable.

Feral cats have caused tremendous harm to the native populations of birds, especially song birds, and many naturalists have sounded the alarm about them. Should we try to capture and deliver these critters to a shelter? At least if they can be neutered, they won't be contributing to the problem by producing more ferals.

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.

Camera Trap Captures These Critters

We have been moving around the trail camera to different locations in the open space parks in the hills of the east bay near Berkeley and El Cerrito, CA, and the results have been very satisfying. We've set up the camera near obvious game trails to spy on the comings and goings of our animal neighbors, often near streams that would be an attraction for thirsty critters.

This camera has proved to be a lot fun and worth the investment. Posted here are a few of the more appealing and intriguing pictures, and again, they are mostly of deer. While many are clear shots, others are more mysterious, leaving us to wonder the real identities of the flash of fur before the lens.

Click on 'Trail Camera' in the section titled 'Labels' at the bottom of the page for more pictures from our Trail Camera.

It is interesting we have not seen any bucks lately, only doe and fawns.  We would like to see how the buck's antlers have grown lately, and if they are losing their velvet yet, but no luck on this.  It is good to see that the fawn we wrote about earlier, with the swollen nose, is better.  We think it is the same fawn as in the first picture here.  It must have been due to a bee sting.

We have gotten a few pictures of other animals, but they have been at night, taken with IR, and they have been so blurry and muddy that it is often difficult to identify the critter.  We think we got several shots of a fox at one location, and perhaps a few shots of a bobcat, but it is really hard to tell.  We got a few very  blurry pictures of a  raccoon, too. There was a mountain lion sighted in El Cerrito a few weeks ago, but we are disappointed he didn't stop and pose in front of the camera while he was in town.  One animal we can't identify is posted here.  Is it a very skinny fox?  or perhaps a weasel, or a long legged  ferret, or ?

The Antlers are Growing

Reminds me of my drivers license photo

After we got back from our trip to New York, we moved the trail camera (formerly called the game camera) to a tree in back of our property and aimed it at a trail that deer have been using.  There are several spots of matted-down grass along this trail where we think the deer have been taking naps.

It is a lot of fun to look through the photos because the camera has been catching several deer each day. It's a well trafficked path! The better photos from the last couple of weeks are posted here  for your viewing pleasure. The nighttime pics are strange and beautiful, especially when the camera's infrared light reflects in the eyes of an approaching deer, which is visible only as two glowing globes.

Surveying his domain

Notice the antlers on the buck. He is one of two we have seen in the neighborhood recently.  The other buck has a smaller rack.  The velvet is still on the horns, so they are still growing.  Compare these antlers to the those in these older posts (Early April, Mid March) to see how much bigger they are now.

Sometime this summer we hope to get pictures of the velvet coming off, and we will post them if we do.

A doe looks over her shoulder

Doe, a deer, a female deer...

Two Spotted Fawns and a ?

The game camera, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. Sometimes little or nothing is captured, but sometimes we reap a bonanza of great images.  Yesterday was the bonanza.

We moved the camera last week to a different critter trail, also in the open space area near our house.  The trail leads from a clearing in the brush under a large spreading oak down to a small creek.   It looked well used, but when we checked the SD card after 3 days we had no critter pictures to show for the time.  We left it there another 3 to 4 days, and look what we found!  The first photo shows a pair of spotted fawns.  Both look healthy and alert, evidence that the local herd is thriving nicely.  This is, of course, good news  for the local nature lovers, but bad news for the local gardeners.

The other photo is obviously of some sort of animal from the cat family, but we are not sure what.  The cat was moving and it is quite blurry.   Our best guess is that it is a house cat or maybe a feral cat.  There are homes a quarter mile away.  And we do see feral cats around the neighborhood from time to time.  There are wild cats in the hills nearby, both bobcats and moutain lions, but this guy is too small to be a mountain lion and has too much tail for a bobcat.

We Caught a Spotted Fawn

Look what we caught on our game camera this week.  A spotted fawn!  It passed by the camera a couple of times and we got several good shots, including that second one of the newborn gingerly stepping over a log on brand new legs. Our speculation that at least one of the local does was pregnant has been confirmed. This baby can't be much older than a week. Hopefully, we will see more than just one this spring.

Strange, we did not see its mother.  Probably the doe passed by the camera too quickly. My main complaint about this camera is that it takes several seconds after the motion sensor is triggered before it takes a picture.  Many times we see just the tail end of an animal after it has passed nearly through the frame.  Other times we get pictures of nothing but the ground and the flora, because whatever triggered the camera is long gone by the time it snaps a photo.  In fact, we get 5 or 6 pictures of nothing for every photo of an animal.  If it was quicker, we would have a lot more photos to share.  Hey, Moultrie - if you are listening, please improve this! And anyone who is buying a game camera, be sure you consider this factor.

We also got this picture of  a squirrel, a first for our game camera.  I think we will leave it in this same location for another week and see what else passes.

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.

Deer Developments

There have been a couple of developments in the deer situation in our neighborhood.

 In this post from a few weeks ago, photos from our game camera showed just the beginning little knobs of antlers on the local black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) bucks.  Take a look at them now, just a few weeks later. They have grown significantly.  According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, antlers are the fastest growing tissue in any mammal.










Now, take a look at this video clip below, also taken by the automatic game camera.  Compare it to the photos in this post from just a few weeks ago. Back then, we speculated that one of our doe neighbors may be pregnant. And sure enough, I'd say the doe trotting away from the camera definitely has a bun or two in the oven, so to speak.

Perhaps in another month or two we will have a spotted fawn or two to gaze at, and a full set of antlers on these bucks.  We will keep you posted.

Young Bucks

One rainy day--and we have had a lot of these lately--these two young bucks posed in front of our game camera. I always wonder how animals deal with the rain, whether they try to seek as much shelter as they can, or if they simply put up with it. These two don't seem to mind the rain, but it seems they do have an itch or two.

Notice that their antlers are just starting to grow back. See the velvety knobs between their eyes and ears?  These will grow into antlers over the next few months.  They will use them to attract a mate in the fall, and will lose them again in early winter. The 3rd photo is from January, when we caught a three-point buck who still had his horns.  About that same time, I saw a buck with only one antler. The lopsided headgear looked like it could give him a headache or a pain in the neck.

I have heard that each year the antlers will grow out larger than the year before, that yearling bucks have only a spike and they add a new point to each side each year as they grow older. But I have not been able to confirm this with any reliable source on the internet.  In fact, some of the more reliable sources say that the antler size depends more on the health of the animal or his feeding habits.  Growing antlers requires a lot of calcium, as they are basically just bone, and when bucks have difficulty getting enough calcium in their diet, their antlers are smaller.  Rodents are known to gnaw on fallen antlers to get this source of calcium.

Last year while hiking in the open space behind our house, we found an antler, and now it sits on our mantle shelf, an objet trouvé.  Perhaps over the next few months, we will see the antlers grow on these bucks and then lose their velvet covering.  If we do get more pictures, we will post them here.

A Doe Poses for the Camera

Here are a couple of very good pictures we recently got from the game camera.  This doe walked up, stopped, smiled, and if she could, I bet she would have done her best 'Miss America' wave for the camera.  Now you know where the expression 'doe eyed' came from.

Does she look pregnant?  It's hard for me to tell, but I hope she is.  Perhaps the doe in the night photo at the bottom of this post?  We'd like to see their numbers grow, not just because they are fun to watch, but they also mow the hillsides, which reduces the wildfire danger here.  According to my neighbor, there were a lot more deer in this neighborhood 20 years ago.  Even though we see them several times a week, they are usually alone or in groups of 2 or 3.  Back then there were herds of 8 to 10.

We saw a doe with two spotted fawns in our backyard several times last summer.  One of the fawns looked healthy, but the other had a large lump on its neck near its head.  We thought it might be a goiter or a tumor, but when we mentioned it to a retired sheep rancher, he said it could have been due to a rattlesnake bite.  He said that sometimes when his sheep were grazing they would get bit and the area would swell up like we described.  Unfortunately, he said, the bite was usually fatal.  There are rattlesnakes in this area, we have seen them several times.  Later in the summer we saw a doe with only one fawn, and we think that the other one didn't survive, but we don't know for sure.

Maybe this year there will be several fawns to watch and photograph, and get into people's gardens.

Game Camera Update

The game camera has been quite some fun to play with.  We have been moving it around to various locations in the yard to see what critters are out and about when we are not looking. We exchange the memory card every few days (sometimes we're impatient and don't wait more than a day) and look at the pictures. Often there is not much to see, but we have gotten a few interesting photos, mostly of deer, and our cats.

We aimed it at the pile of scat beneath the overhang of our house for several days, but we did not catch the culprit who is making the deposit.  We saw a scat on the lower deck, so we left the camera aimed there for a week, but all we got were the cats and a few pictures of a California towhee.  Fortunately for the towhee, he was not there the same time as the cats.  We also aimed the camera at a hole in a pile of brush by a rock that seemed like a cozy den but we saw nothing coming or going there.

We get the best pictures when we aim it along one of the paths that the deer take through the yard, either the path we carved into the hillside (our goat path), or the routes they have created themselves. We usually get one or two deer per day passing in front of the camera.  I have been wondering if it is the same deer each time, or how many different deer there are, but unfortunately we don't see a lot of distinguishing features on them.  One deer with a swollen left front knee has passed by a couple of times. Others have marks on their fur, but I am not sure if they are permanent, or just fur ruffled from brushing against some brambles or brush.

One thing for sure is that these deer do not keep to any schedule.  They pass by the camera at random times day and night.

Deer caught on camera

So, now that we know the game camera works (see http://backyardcritterwatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/masked-bandit-comes-for-dinner.html) we have been thinking of other uses for it. I put it at the back of the house and aimed it at the pile of droppings below the overhand (see http://backyardcritterwatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/game-camera.html) and left it there for a couple of nights, but few of the photos had animals in them, and those that did just had our cats walking by.


There is a low spot in a fence behind our house, far from our enclosed garden (see http://backyardcritterwatch.blogspot.com/2011/02/deer-in-garden.html), where we have seen deer jump over in the past. We mounted the camera on a tree, aimed it at that spot and left it there for 4 days.  Here is the result.  Amazing!  We got deer looking into the camera, deer walking away, bucks with horns, and does.  See the slide show in the side bar.  But only deer.  I was hoping we might see a fox, or coyote, or even a mountain lion.


It seems the deer come through here once or twice a day, so I put the camera back near that same spot.  The doe could be having babies in May, so hopefully we will get some pictures of spotted fauns in the future. We will keep you posted.

Masked bandit comes for dinner

In order to test our new game camera, (see http://backyardcritterwatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/game-camera.html) we aimed it at the cat door from our deck, hoping to get pictures of our cats coming and going from our house.  We put it on a plant shelf and left it there for the night.  The next morning we grabbed the camera, and were we in for a surprise!

Most of the pictures showed just the cat door, with no cats coming or going.  A few showed Ninja and Paloosh--the felines--either entering or leaving the house, or hanging around at the cat door, but one series of three pictures clearly shows a RACCOON, approaching the cat door until his nose is just about touching it!  

Did he go inside?  We think 'yes'.  For the past month or two, it seemed like the cats were eating more than usual.  Some mornings their food bowls were completely empty and we wondered how they could eat that much food in one night. Putting two and two together, we believe that this raccoon has been coming into our house while we sleep, raiding the cat dishes in the kitchen and exiting before being caught!

We have now ordered an electronic cat door, one that stays locked until it senses a magnet on a cat's collar.  http://www.petdoors.com/cat-mate-electronic-cat-flaps.html  (Thanks to Brian for the idea)  When we get it and install it we will let you know if it works. 

The Game Camera

Ever since we moved into this house, we have noticed a pile of scat (or feces, or poop, or whatever you want to call it) behind our house.  Our house has an overhang there, so that spot keeps dry in the rain. Whatever has left the pile must be a close neighbor because there are fresh droppings there quite frequently.  Although we think it is likely a raccoon making the deposit, as we have seen raccoons up close to the house, even on our deck, I wanted the proof. I wanted to know for sure.


There is such a thing as a motion sensor actuated camera, commonly called a 'game camera' by hunters who use it to find out when or if their prey frequents a location where they plan to hunt.  They are on the pricey side, though, too expensive for doing surveillance to satisfy our curiosity about nighttime visitors. So, I started on a project to make one by hacking into a garage-sale-purchased digital camera and a cheap Ebay motion sensor, and combining the two with an Arduino controller.  I got as far as hacking into the motion sensor, and got it working as an input to the Arduino, but hacking into a digital camera turned out to be a bigger job than I had anticipated, so I set that project aside.


Lately though, deer have been getting into our garden, and my car was broken into, so I began thinking there may be several good reasons to own a motion sensor triggered camera. When I  got a $100 gift certificate for Christmas, it was a no-brainer and I started looking in earnest.

After a couple of days of research, I bought a Moultrie D55IR 'Game Camera'.  This baby takes 5 megapixel pictures, and for night shots, it takes infra-red (IR) pictures with an almost invisible IR flash, which means it will not scare the critters.  And it was reduced to $101 on Amazon.com. Here is the info on it:
http://www.moultriefeeders.com/productdetail.aspx?id=mfh-dgs-d55ir


After it arrived, I needed a way to test it to see if it was worth keeping.  Hmm, the cat door!  I set the camera on our deck just out side the cat door and was going to leave it there until evening, and hopefully catch the cats coming and going.  A few hours later I looked out and my cat had decided to take a nap just inches in front of the camera lens.  I grabbed the camera and looked at the photos.  There were about 30 photos of out-of-focus cat fur.  Well, at least I knew it works!


More on the game camera to come! (see http://backyardcritterwatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/masked-bandit-comes-for-dinner.html and http://backyardcritterwatch.blogspot.com/2011/02/deer-caught-on-camera.html)