Found in the stacks (in flagrante)

Periodically I have to visit the library annex in my garage. It isn't easy getting into the stacks because camping equipment, wood, and tools have to be moved.

Yesterday, I found this couple ensconced in the stacks. For those of you who listen to Prairie Home Companion, let me just say that the quintessential Reference Librarian, Ruth Harrison, would NOT be amused.

On the other hand, I found it quite amusing. The shop steward was taking a break, or as Mark Twain would have said, he was refreshing himself. Where his pert little friend came from, I can't say. I've never seen her in the stacks before.

Fox imitating squirrel

Gray fox wanted the maple flavored syrup I had painted on this fir trunk. He gave it his best shot and imitated a squirrel.

The problem is his legs aren't designed for climbing. The claws aren't right, he walks on his toes, and his hindlegs can't rotate to descend head first. But his balance is good, and his legs are a little short for a fox. Like a good hound he can scale the wall of bark for a few feet.

Back on the mountain -- part 4

All travelers have to cross the log. There's no easy way around it. The camera trap captured each step as the bear surmounted the obstacle. It was 1:00 in the morning, April 17th.

Suddenly the camera's flash seemed to register. He reared up on his hind legs with a slack-jawed look of surprise. Maybe it was a threat. Maybe he was just trying to see what it was that flashed in the dark. I would guess he had never seen such a thing before.



The next few pictures show the bear ambling about between the log and the camera. Then he approached and tried to fathom the thing with his senses. The flashing continued.



Good bear! He left only his breath on the lens.



Several days later a gray fox and bobcat climbed over the log, and six days later the bear came back at 2:00 AM.

He must have noticed the flash again, and maybe something just snapped. The good bear turned bad. It was a clear case of assault and battery. He tore off the bear guard, opened the camera case and tore out the camera. He bit the camera just hard enough to jam the menu panel and the lens, which is now permanently extended at an unnatural angle.

My camera trap is finished. This is the down side of camera trapping.



The bear is recognizable by a small notch in the right ear, and over the three week period he encountered three out of five camera traps.

His first encounter was on a sunny morning, and he only approached the camera to examine it. When he found the camera two days later in the middle of the night he pushed it down, but didn't damage it.

Seven days after that he came upon the second and third cameras. He walked on by. I suppose he just wasn't in a mood for tinkering that day.

But when he met up with the second camera 6 days later he decided to examine it thoroughly.

I don't really think he snapped or that he's a bad bear. But he taught me a recurrent lesson of life. You always get a surprise when you think you have it all figured out.

The spiked bear guards are not the final solution to curious bears.

Maybe I need a constant reminder, an anti-trophy to hang on the wall.

How about this? I could mount the camera on a walnut plaque, frame it with the defeated bear guard, and include a picture of the great brown tinkerer wearing that slack jawed look of surprise.

Back on the mountain -- part 3

This is NOT where I had aimed the third camera.

This camera was attached to a short length of steel fence post, aimed at a gap in a large fir that had fallen across the trail. I'm afraid I had set the camera a little too low. I was trying to cover as much foreground as possible.

Something had pulled it down. It was undamaged and pointed at the ground. Since then the camera had taken 31 pictures of hot air puffs on the ground.

We checked the pictures.

The first travelers were a skunk and a wood rat, but . . .



on the third day a bear ambled by at 9:20 in the morning. It was about to pass through the gap when it noticed the camera.



It turned around, approached it, and then went away.



Two nights later the bear was back, and the camera took three closeups.



Then the bear pulled the camera over.

I told Rich we were lucky. It only pushed the camera down. The bear guard had worked.

(2 cameras to go. Coming soon: "Back on the mountain -- part 4")

Back on the mountain -- part 2

The second camera trap set had nothing to offer in the way of scenery. It was just a pile of hairy turds on a trail, signaling that a large carnivore had passed this way. Carnivores keep tabs on one another by sniffing each other's scat. It's a hell of a way to manage one's social affairs, but it works.

So, 3 weeks ago we all agreed that the scat pile would make a good camera trap set.

As to the species of carnivore, we were uncertain. No one in our group was game enough to take the analysis farther than the sniff test. It was either a small bore mountain lion or a large bore coyote. Now, a young buck mammalogist with a six pack -- you know, a graduate student -- might have settled this question for us, and I would have had a better story to tell. But that wasn't the case.

Those weathered old turds, however, had lost their tang. So I doctored their bouquet with a few drops of aged crab stinkum, and a twig dipped in artificial civetone.

So much for background.

We disarmed the cam and called up the data. 137 photos! Not bad.

The bobcat was the first visitor. The scent cocktail had worked. The cat came back 3 nights in a row, and most of the 14 pictures were of it sniffing the scat or grimacing with the "flehmen face".

A gray fox appeared only thirteen minutes after the cat's last visit. It left only two partial images of its arched tail bristling like a bottlebrush: a sure sign that it was pumping adrenalin. It must have smelled the cat's recent presence, pranced about with that air of defensive bravado, and then got the hell out of Dodge City.



Next was a long string of blank daytime pictures caused by convection or 'hot air puffs'. A steller's jay and a junco were the only daytime visitors.

A more confident fox returned six nights later. After scent rolling in the turds, it cocked its leg and spritzed. We got 21 photos of foxes, and one photo of a pair together. They visited the set 15 times.



We also got two partial pictures of a striped skunk, but what really got our attention was the bear. It showed up on the 4th night, 2 hours past midnight, fresh from its bath.



Whether it had noticed the turds, I can't say, but it definitely noticed the camera and approached it boldly. This is not an image I want to see while in my sleeping bag.



Over a period of 3 minutes the camera had snapped 4 pictures of the bear, and the camera hadn't been touched.

Rich was thrilled with the pictures, especially the bear. It was the first time he'd checked a camera trap-line, and I'm sure he is pleased with his recent purchase of parts for 7 home brew camera traps.

In high spirits we headed for the next cameras.

Rich: "Two cameras and seven species!"

"This is quite a place", I reflected, "and these Napa county bears are kinder and gentler than those rowdies up in Butte county."

(There are three more cameras to go, so stay tuned for the next installment -- part 3).

Back on the mountain

Rich disappeared as soon as he unpacked, but I knew where to find him. He was sprawled in the weeds next to the snake pit eyeing a western diamondback through the zoom lens of his Nikon. (Yes, that's his picture.) He crawled a little closer for another shot and the reptile lurched over the edge and bellyflopped on the bottom of the septic tank. It sounded like a deflated tire hitting a cement floor.

"Wow!"

"A flying snake!"

We were back at the Cleary Reserve, supplied for an overnight with carne asada, beans, tortillas and tequila. And oatmeal. It was 3 weeks since our last visit.

The "camera trapline" was waiting. So we put on our boots, grabbed our gear, and headed for the nearest cam at the bottom of a gulch.

Such a promising set -- a giant fir across a stream bed. The old veteran had lain there for several decades. I knew when I saw it that it was an occasional game crossing. It was made for camera trapping. A bay tree was growing at a suitable distance to anchor the camera. If a bear or puma crossed the log, I'd still get a full body shot.

There was a promising sign, too. Something had dug out the area where I had prepared the scent cocktail-- crab juice stinkum (aged for 7 months), smoked trout meal, and castoreum.

I disarmed the camera of its bear guard, and noted the number of exposures -- 20. One a day. Not bad.

Oh no. The first picture was a self portrait of two sorry looking codgers. It was taken as we were "walk testing" the camera 3 weeks ago. We looked a little like trophy hunters posing beside a fallen giant.



We clicked through the rest of the pictures.

Bear and puma hadn't found the tempting cocktail, but a juvenile gray fox had. Notice the blocky puppy look. It still has some growing to do.



This fox decided to give the scent cocktail a thorough butt-scrubbing, known in the technical literature as an anal drag. Dogs are good at this sort of thing, and it probably explains the dug out section of the log.



Oh yes. A couple of squirrels visited, and one dashed across the log.



Hmmm. Gray foxes and western gray squirrels. No surprises here.

We shouldered our packs and moved on to the next camera beyond the mouth of the gulch.

(Continued in "Back on the mountain-part 2")

Gray fox climbs snag

I thought this new set on a leaning cedar snag would make an interesting picture. The camera is the dark thing next to the crossed oak limb.



Here's a closer view. The camou works well, huh?

However, the pictures of the gray fox didn't thrill me. A more interesting picture would have been of me setting the camera and stuffing salmon into a crack in the log. The bait was frozen smoked salmon that had been forgotten in the garage freeezer. It smelled great, and since it had been hermetically sealed, I sampled it while mounted on the log. It was so good I took it home and ate the rest for lunch.

Clasping that log for dear life with my old bird legs was a bit of a work out. Inner thigh fatigue. You should have seen me crab walking up the trail afterwards.

The value of the exercise though was that it taught me that the fox was more comfortable facing down the log. The animal faced the camera in seven out of twenty pictures, and they were all a bit overexposed. The Sony s600's automatic setting averaged the exposure reading for the much larger dark background.



Maybe it didn't like the flash in its face, or maybe it was just more comfortable, ergonomically speaking.



Anyway, it climbed down the log head first.



Even with their cursorial legs and feet, canids are better climbers than you think. A friend just told me he found a coyote had treed his cat. It was 12 feet up in an oak tree, and the cat was out on the thinnest branches. They're not the best climbers, and their limbs aren't designed for it, but dogs can still climb.