Spring on the Rim

The camera on the rim has been very productive of videos of a host of wildlife species. For those of you who haven’t seen earlier posts of videos from the rim, here’s a brief description of the location: The rim is the edge of the Allegheny Plateau in northcentral Pennsylvania; it’s an ecotone, the boundary between different habitats. Here the ecotone is between a forest dominated by chestnut oak with an understory of mountain laurel on gently rolling terrain and a forest dominated by black birch, red maple and red oak on a steep slope with very little understory. 

Videos from the winter on the rim were posted in March, here are videos from spring on the rim: white-footed mouse, hairy woodpecker, raccoons, white-tailed deer, black bear and eastern coyote –

Summer has now arrived and with it the heat and humidity that usually causes wildlife to seek shade and moisture. Oak forests with abundant mountain laurel are not places where it’s easy to keep cool – but steep hillsides with birch-maple forests are usually cooler. We’ll see if wildlife activity on the rim changes in summer or if some species disappear for a while.