February Fauna

A camera trap has been on the hill above the house ever since I began using camera traps a number of years ago. Currently there are six of them on the hill (can you ever have too many?). For years they were home-built camera traps that took still images day and night.

In the last several years some brands of commercially built cameras have markedly improved and I’m now using several to take videos of wildlife, color videos during daylight and black and white videos at night.

February was, unlike Februaries of old, a month of variable weather – several times it was warm enough to melt the snow and then cold again, with snow followed by freezing rain, then warm, and then cold again. But, the month of February was good in the land of camera traps, producing photographs and videos of opossums, fisher, gray and red fox, deer and squirrels –

The videos were some of the clearest I’ve ever gotten from a camera trap. Here are the best of the videos in the order they were taken. Because there were so many videos of white-tailed deer and gray squirrels on the camera’s memory card, only one of each were included.

In the first two clips of the fisher the animal follows the same path in front of the camera, the clips must be watched carefully or the second looks like a repeat of the first – actually they were taken three hours apart. Another thing to watch for is how many times the male gray fox scent marks. 

I’m still waiting to get a video of a bobcat on the hill out back – maybe next time, or the time after that, or …