Wanna Go Walkie?

Every now and then I used to dog-sit for our good neighbors who own Fred's mom, Roxie.

At the time I had just gotten my new GoPro Hero2 with the various mounts and waterproof case, and "the walkie" seemed a good opportunity to start using the equipment.

Here you get some glimpses of three slightly deranged creatures enjoying each others company in the heat of the summer.

Training a small primate

The redhead and I flew to northern Virginia last week to visit our daughter and family.

I wanted to expose my grandson (7 months) to camera trapping. Okay, I confess. It was just a photo op.

He posed well and looked interested, but all he really wanted was to eat the camera.

A little publicity

Science writer Douglas Fox called me last fall for a quote about urban wildlife. When he learned I was a camera trapper he asked to tag long. The result is a piece in the Christian Science Monitor about the codger and his old buddy Reno. Check it out here.

A camera trap with tunnel vision

In one of the ravines not far from here there's an outcropping that has a short tunnel through it. This outcropping is actually a moss covered pinnacle of a soft gray-colored stone, and I'm not sure whether the tunnel is a natural formation, or resulted from miners playing with dynamite a hundred or more years ago.

For a couple months I've wondered if the tunnel would make a decent set for a camera trap. My idea was to place the camera at one end of the tunnel and then try to lure critters to the camera from the other end. It might make an unusual picture.

I hadn't visited the site since late winter, so I made a brief recce to convince myself it was feasible.

It was, but I might have to make two trips to get the set ready. The limiting factor would be finding a place to anchor a steel post for the camera mount. If I couldn't set a post, I might have to juryrig a camera mount that could be set right in the tunnel. That would require an appropriate length of pipe with a strong compression spring to hold it in place. If you don't know what I'm talking about maybe you have seen a spring-loaded pull-up bar in a door jam. That's the idea. I'd have to mount the camera in the middle of it.

A week later I packed my rucksack, filled the water bottle, "pre-hydrated" by guzzling Gatorade, and sprayed myself with insect repellent.

In about 40 minutes I arrived at the new set (# 62 -- yeah, I keep a register of camera trap sets).

Wonderful! On the East (uphill) side of the tunnel there was a crack in the rock base. I drove in the 2 foot length of steel post with a hand sledge. It fit as snug as a bug in a rug. It would take a Herculean effort for me to extract it, but it was comforting to know that even a bear with the strength of Arnold Schwartzneggar would have trouble tearing it loose.



I mounted the camera on the pipe, tightened the mounting screw and stood there admiring my handiwork. Something was missing and I started to curse. I had forgotten to pack the bear protector -- the spiked frame for the camera case. A cantankerous bear could still chew it up even if the post was anchored in cement. Forget about it, I told myself. You can fix it next week.

A few words about my plan. If small mammals visited the site, it didn't matter which end of the tunnel then entered. There was enough space inside for them to turn around. But if a bear or mountain lion came, I wanted it to enter facing the camera. That means I had to attract them from the west side.



I climbed to the top of the pinnacle and suspended the FurFindr (a digital recording of a squalling rabbit) from a tree limb about 6 feet above the tunnel's west side. I switched it on; the rabbit squalled twice. It was now ready to start at sun set. Then I tucked two dead mice into crevices in the middle of the tunnel, and dabbed castoreum between them.

If the plan works, the predator will hear the squalling rabbit from the downhill (west) side. If it comes from the east, it will hopefully move to the downhill side where the sound is loudest. Then it will pick up the scent coming from the tunnel, because breezes move downhill at night. Next, it will look in the tunnel, and if all works well, it will crawl partially inside to snort beaver scent and eat mice.

I switched on the power, climbed around the rock to the other side, and did the "walk test". The red light on the passive infra-red sensor blinked whenever I moved. A minute later it blinked 5 times, and the lens extended.

The set was ready.



[Stay tuned: In the next post you will learn who is dumb enough to go into the tunnel.]

More background

When I was a kid thumbing an ancient issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine I encountered a morbid high-speed photo of a mouse execution. The luckless mouse was airborn as the bar of the mousetrap closed in for the kill. I think that's when the obsession took root. In college I made my first camera trap under the guidance of the late Professor Joe Hall of San Francisco State University. That was the "doorbell model". The trigger--a whisker switch--was wired to a battery-operated doorbell. Activating the switch made a little wooden bar press the shutter button. At the time, it was a wonderful gadget, but you had to hand crank the film after each exposure. If you were lucky you got one picture a night.



In 1980 a couple of my colleagues from the National Zoo and I went to Indonesia where we used an improved homemade camera trap to photograph the little known Sulawesi civet. Camera technology was becoming electronic. We wired a photoelectric trigger to plug directly into the electrical shutter outlet on the front of the camera--a Nikon FE. With battery powered film advance, you could take many pictures in a night. Two months later we were back in the states impatiently waiting for our developed film. When it finally arrived, we found that box after box had slides of night-flying moths and falling leaves. But there were also a few photos of the civet, and we considered it a great success.

Now in the age of the "home-brew scouting camera" you can get hundreds of digital pictures a day. I have slowly advanced from easy-to-build "plug and play" systems, to those that require taking the camera apart and soldering internal contacts. Luckily there are some great support groups on the web, whose mentors patiently assist greenhorns.

Affordable digital cams have one irritating deficiency--the camera has to be turned on to take the first picture when an animal activates the passive infra-red sensor. The delay of a few seconds can give you a lot of cut-off images.

The latest control boards however keep the camera awake when there is infra-red activity, which means you no longer have to wait for the camera to wake up for each picture. This is an acceptable challenge. You just have to use your "jungle lore" to compensate for the camera's shortcoming.