Another trashed camera unsolved

As you can tell, not much has been happening in my world of camera trapping.

Healing a torn tendon is a long process.

The tendon attaches and grows stronger while the rest of the body grows weak from inactivity.

So I have been on a data analyzing blitz for two months. My hard drives are clean and tightly organized. I can find everything, and I analyzed 4 years of data from 7 camera trapping sites.

So what does that have to do with the muddy camera pictured above?

Well, yesterday I had visitors.

Rich Tenaza and Dave Fletcher drove up from Stockton to hack cameras, and Rich gave me copies of his Cleary Reserve jpegs so I can finish the analysis.

Rich shut down his camera trapping operation at Cleary when he found the trashed camera seen above (one that I hacked) late last year.

The vandal thoroughly totaled the camera and case -- broke the glass windows on the Pelican case, tore out the camera, dragged it through mud and dropped it in a pool.

Rich is convinced it was the vile deed of a non-ursid camera trasher.

I have the feeling it was the innocent work of a non-human (=ursid) curious about the wonders of modern electronics.

Also, there was no bear guard on the camera, which wouldn't have stopped a human, but would likely have limited the activities of a bear.

It makes one long for those good days when the only surprise you got was a shaggy bear mooning the camera.

 
Regarding my recent silence, Craig now has a few cams out at Chimineas, and even though the place is too wet to hit the back roads some new material should be rolling in soon.