Travels with Gray Fox, Part 2.

Here's Part 2 of the gray fox footage. I hope it gives you some chuckles. 

Travels with Gray Fox, Part 1

Travels with Gray Fox, Pt 1: On the trail from Chris Wemmer on Vimeo.

I've accumulated a pile of clips of gray foxes on trails, and decided it was time to make a fox movie. My apologies -- it's subtitled "On the trail". It's a bit of a workout making trail footage from trail cameras interesting. You have to use your imagination for nuanced perspectives. But occasionally the foxes supplied me with some surprises, and that helped.

The bear's rubbing tree

The Rubbing Tree from Chris Wemmer on Vimeo.

I set this trail camera on a meandering game trail with a long view.

I expected clips of the usual cast of characters, but soon learned that the trail passed a bears' rubbing tree, a mountain lion scrape, and a pit stop for a bobcat.

I pointed the camera at the rubbing tree.

Though it must surely reek of bear, it smells like tree bark to me.

A lot of critters besides bears check it out, and gray foxes occasionally pee on the stump. 

This film shows last month's action at the bears' rubbing tree.   

Bears on the puma kill

After filling its stomach with one haunch the puma left and never returned. But 4 bears came to feed nightly and eventually a few other scavengers made their appearance.

Murphy's Law struck on the second night when the camera failed, but this whipped me into overkill mode. On each following night I staked two or three cameras. Each one operated independently and triggered one or two 27 watt LED lights.

I was learning on the run. When all cameras were in operation too much light marred some pretty cool clips. All I could do was adjust the position of cameras and lights every afternoon based on the previous night's results. I just didn't have the moxie to test the lights in darkness.

Then Murphy's Law got me again: the camera that gave by far the best clips in terms of lighting and perspective failed to record sound! 

I kept plugging away, and the game was up at the end of the week when the bears lost interest in the scraps.

I had an overwhelming 7 hours of very interesting video of variable quality.

This 3+ minute movie gives you an idea of what happened at the carcass on just one night and the next day.   

How to kill a dead snake

The background to this video concerns my good neighbor, a hard-working businessman, dog-lover, Iron Man competitor, irrepressible optimist, and electronic wizard who loves all things natural, except rattlesnakes.

When California's foothills warm up in the spring, Pacific diamondback rattlesnakes show up to lounge in the morning sun.

And last spring my neighbor from Chicago, let's just call him Larry, started finding rattlesnakes lounging in his backyard.

When this happens most folks around here start to curse and do a little fandago with a shovel or hoe while beating the snake to a pulp.

And that pretty much describes how this rattler met its demise.

Larry was kind enough, however, to deliver the corpse in a bucket, and after removing its head, I stashed it in a hole dug by a local pair of gray foxes.

The camera showed how a cautious fox "kills" a dead snake.

Its reaction tells me this wasn't the first time it used the old "shake and break" method to dispatch a snake.

But it makes you wonder if gray foxes prey on rattlers very often, and if so, how risky is it?

I imagine that as long as a fox seizes a rattlesnake somewhere away from the head, and shakes it quickly and violently, it can inflict a fatal whiplash and prevent a venomous bite.

It's not something I expect to see, so someone else will have to prove it.

A Hollow Log

I've been scoping out the woods for hollow logs, meaning potential den sites, and the "jonah log" was an irresistible camera trap location.

I wasn't optimistic, because even the light from an infrared LED could dissuade an napper.

On the other hand, Craig and I had a gray fox take a high noon siesta in a cave where the white flash pulsed continuously, and it wasn't bothered in the least.

As you will see (and yes, I expect you to read this BEFORE looking at the video) no one took a nap.

But even so, there was a interesting selection of visitors.

Mystery of the Night Flies

When I finally figured out that fast flying bats were causing blank video clips, I started to pay more attention to the insects in my videos.

Soon I noticed that swarms of small flies often showed up when an animal passed the camera.

I wondered if the hungry swarms ever give the critters any peace.

On the other hand, maybe the swarms aren't parasitic insects.

Maybe animals just stir resting flies into motion when they walk by.

I compiled some clips to show you what I mean.

And since I couldn't make any sense of it, I wrote to entomologist Bunyipco (an old friend) for an answer.

He didn't have an answer, and responded as expected of a taxonomist -- "Catch some specimens for identification".

"And how do I do that, may I ask?"

"Simple, hang some fly paper where you see the swarms".

If I post any pictures of bears donning fly paper next year, you'll know what happened.

The head on the tree

"How come you're so big but don't have antlers?"

Richard told me he was sure I would have some use for this old deer mount, and I knew there was no way out.

When you owe a very helpful friend dozens of favors you enthusiastically cart off a moth-eaten head mount and find a place to hide it.

I discreetly balanced it on a cob-webby pile of wood working jigs on a shelf above the radial arm saw, and was pleased how well it blended in.

The redhead didn't notice it for about a month.

I sawed off the antlers the other day to make handles on the doors of the pump house, and they look excellent there.

Then I hung the head on a live oak next to the house.

Fred was out of sight at the time, but as I was getting a camera ready in the garage I heard him barking up a storm.

He had discovered the tree with the deer head.

"What is it, Fred?"

Emboldened by my attention he advanced and gave a full-throated train of yodel barks.

When I cautioned "Be careful" he backed off with a sideways glance. (He learned that command with the aid of mousetraps.)

The photos herein are the other two visitors of "the head".

There's no question the young buck is looking at the bulky profile of an unfamiliar buck, but he didn't hang around long enough for a second photo op.

It's hard to say what the gray fox is up to, though he could be sniffing a frayed ear.

The Nones of March

The goose pen on the Nones of March at 1607 hr.

Buoyed by the speciosity of the goose pen's visitors, I was seized by a creative impulse.

I would try for some portraits of the visitors framed in one of the goose pen's portals.

There were 8 or 9 of these openings, but we didn't know which were used by critters as entrances and exits.

I had settled on a small portal when I noticed Terry's countenance looking down at me within the chamber.

"I think you should put it over here", he said with gravitas.

He was right. The larger opening would admit larger animals, and maybe the bear would come back and peer inside.

If it entered, of course, it would knock the camera down, but what the heck.

I staked the camera at an angle looking up through the charred window,  but the bear didn't come back.

Instead, there was a celestial event.

On the Nones of March the setting sun aligned itself with this particular portal.

According to the Naval Oceanography Portal my camera recorded the position at an azimuth of 242 degrees.



That was perhaps the most interesting event recorded by the two cameras we had set in the goose pen.

The striped skunk, gray squirrels, and wood rats that made a showing were not as cooperative at this gray fox.

I pulled both cameras and made new sets elsewhere, hoping they are properly aligned for a zoological rather than a celestial event. 

The camera bully revealed

This may be the rascal that dislodged the camera in the tree cavity last week. 

You may recall that finding the camera on the ground changed my game plan. 

Before getting creative again and stuffing the camera down the cavity, I had to see what creature had sent the camera tumbling.  

A bear was the first thing that came to mind, but maybe a ringtail chimney- stemmed the hollow trunk and jarred the camera loose. 

Even a spotted skunk could have knocked it down. 

These were the more exotic possibilities, but more realistically a rotund wood rat might have pushed it aside while trying to squeeze through the gap.

I learned last Saturday that gray fox and wood rat were the only ones to show. 

One photo captured gray boy doing the unexpected.

Look at this odd posture.

It resembles the scent-marking handstand done by a number of carnivores, including some civets, mongooses, and the stubby-legged bush dog of Latin America. 

Even the oddball dog has been known to defecate in a handstand, but I never knew gray foxes performed this charming maneuver. 

Following this little stunt gray boy examined the camera at close range and left 6 telling images.

After that the camera stopped taking pictures.

When I found the camera it was ajar and no longer aimed at the hollow tree.

I can only conclude that the fox was the camera bully. 

The Goose Pen

A goose pen with a circumference of 38 feet
can hold a lot of geese or sleep several loggers.

If you have seen one redwood you have NOT seen them all.

This old veteran was hidden in the brush and almost escaped our notice.

Standing 20 feet high, with a dbh (diameter at breast height) of 12 feet, it was one impressive stump and deserved thorough exploration.

I climbed down through a rent into the cavity 4 feet below the ground.

Several passages of differing size led to the outside through the charred walls, and internal recesses reached deeply into the roots.

This was one helluva place for a camera trap; so we climbed through the slash back to the truck and returned with the gear.

Then it started to rain.

The stump was not much of an umbrella; the camera case was soon wet, and the camera lens fogged immediately.

I tried drying it, but it was too dark to see what I was doing. I gave up and hoped for the best.

Before continuing our rounds, we interred some pieces of road killed squirrel into and under the old stump's walls.

Later that afternoon I told Lowell about the magnificent stump.

"You know what they call them up here?", he asked.

"Goose pens. The old timers used to pen up their geese in those stumps." 

The goose pen rewarded us with 107 photos of 9 species, and a success rate of 95%, which means there were few false triggers.

The deer mouse and wood rat of course were the first to show, but a hermit thrush appeared shortly after the alders dropped their leaves into the stump.

A Trowbridge shrew almost escaped my notice, but there it was, the voracious and fearsome midget mammal.

The brush rabbit's venture is a mystery. What was the attraction? It seemed a risky place considering the other visitors.

Of all the visitors, however, Fang the opossum spent the most time there (7 visits, 37 photos).

A bobcat paid three visits and left 11 images,

while a curious gray fox and a wet bear paused to examine the camera.

Though I like other images better, the shrew and the bear gave me the biggest thrill.

When I got home I realized I was missing my side cutting pliers.

You can see their blue handles under the bobcat's foot.

The blue plastic grips were all but missing when I recovered them.

There were rat nibble marks on the remaining traces of plastic, but the pliers still work.

Pulled in two directions

Day 3

By the time Coyote showed up at set 421, Gray Fox had paid 7 visits and left 27 images.

I have no way of knowing exactly how many foxes Gray Fox happens to be, but suspect there are two look-alikes, a couple, in this corner of Chimineas.

But back to Coyote.

His first visit was brief. He looked at the camera, it flashed, and he was gone.

Caution, suspicion, fear, neophobia -- call it what you like -- it ushered him away.

Day 7

On his second visit, 4 days later, his decided to leave before the suspicious thing flashed.

Day 21

But  2 weeks later he was back.

He studied the suspicious thing long enough for it to flash, but when that happened he didn't hang around.

Day 28

Coyote made another appearance seven days later.

This time the camera was a stronger lure than the bait.

He needed to know more about the suspicious thing.

When the flash went off he played it safe.

He decided to leave Dodge City to braver souls like Gray Fox, who by this time had left 54 photos of his visits and scent-marking shenanigans.

Day 34

On day 34 however Coyote once again found himself drawn to the increasingly tempting stench from under the rock.

He was savoring that smell when the suspicious thing flashed and ended his reverie, but once again he escaped unscathed.

Day 57: 8:49:56

Finally, on day 57 Coyote stood his ground for over a minute.

He discovered that the suspicious thing was only a bluffer.

Its flash was harmless.

He sniffed the fascinating but fading balm with impunity.

The camera captured 4 images as he alternately sniffed and regarded the suspicious but harmless thing.

Day 57, 8:50:16

Day 57, 8:51:09

Day 57: last photo -- 8:51:29

The camera trap took pictures for 108 days.

Coyote left 12 photos during 7 visits, and Gray fox left 62 photos during 22 visits.

Two MOs.

If the suspicious thing had been dangerous, there's a good chance Gray Fox would be gone, and Coyote would still be around.

Pay attention to your enemy

Set 421 at the Chimineas Ranch-- an eroded outcrop hidden by a patch of holly leaf cherry -- was an interesting crossroad.  

It was there that a flock of chukars paused to roost in the trees, and bobcats left their calling cards.

But let's not fool ourselves; the attraction to the mammals was the bait (a punctured can of cat food) and the scent lures -- your garden variety fish emulsion and a butterscotch-scented concoction imaginatively named "green death".

They summoned gray fox, coyote, bobcat, and wood rat and deer mouse.

Here we see Br'er fox sniffing the lure while wood rat watches in the background.

Smart rat.

The wood rat that doesn't pay attention becomes dinner.

On only three occasions have we camera trapped these two species together, and the rats hadn't paid attention.

Consequently, they were limp or missing body parts.

Risky business concluded

Wet weather delayed my return to the beer can highway, but when it dried up I checked the cams.

I surmounted the cut bank without acrobatics and bee-lined to the camera, which was facing the sky.

The woodworked sapling had snapped under a snow load.

I knew at a glance that the case contained water. The fresnel lens always has the weakest seal in my home brews.

The LCD was fogged, the D-cells were taking a bath, and the silica gel container was soaked.

But the camera fired up and I quickly clicked through the pictures.

I could only make out two species: the  neighborhood wood rat hung its tail over the lens and a gray fox posed demurely.

The other two cams had even less to show, but I was still high from the Burma trip, so I could afford to be reflective.

When I downloaded the photos at home, however I found a pleasing wood rat portrait,

and the unmistakeable tail of a ringtail.

There was only one other photo -- of the ringtail sniffing castoreum and looking patently stupified.

With a year and half of camera trapping on the Chimineas, I believe that Chimineas's ringtails are few and far between, but we are not ready to throw in the towel yet.  

We've just got to climb down into those deep rocky canyons and set cams near water and dense cover.  

By the way, I dried the camera and controller over the wood burning stove, and they are again in working condition. 

Latecomers

When I let Fred out for his morning constitutional about a month ago he bee-lined to something near the driveway.

It was a fresh jackrabbit carcass.

There was hair all over the place -- something had plucked it, and chewed at it with small jaws.

Maybe a domestic cat, I thought.

When I went to set a camera trap later in the day I found that it had been dragged down the hill.

 Ravens and vultures had pretty much finished it off.

The carcass was gone the next day and there were no pictures on the camera, but I left the camera there and forgot about it.

Yesterday I remembered the cam and pulled it.

There was still some hair on the ground a couple weeks later when a gray fox and a striped skunk visited and sniffed the area.

It's not a surprise.

When a mountain lion peed on a mossy rock a few years ago, it killed the moss.

It also continued to attract passersby for several weeks.

Gray fox gets around

 

Round round get around

I get around

Yeah

Get around round round I get around

Here he is again, the get around kid, this time checking out a dab of delectable fox butter on a chilly night near the crest of a steep hill.

Like car-cruising Beach Boys, Gray Fox gets around very well indeed, even with a low-slung chassis.

I sometimes tire of his ubiquitous image, but he deserves credit for being a cooperative subject.

He has none of Coyote's inhibitions around camera traps, and in my experience he is often the first fellow to show at a set.

Figuratively speaking, he's a rambler, showing up almost everywhere habitat-wise, except in the grassland.

Here from set 318 there's a commanding view of the grassland, but outcrops and nearby chaparral offer cover.

  

Gray Fox may get around, but only one of the Beach Boy lyrics really apply.

My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone

Well, if you're a Gray Fox, Coyote is the bad guy.

On this chilly night Gray Fox stood only a few yards from a burrow, vertically elliptical in outline, and thus one that most probably accommodates Coyote.

Yet the two species coexist on the Chimineas rangeland.

Before California Fish and Game took over the management of Chimineas ranch, Coyote was persona non grata, and culled.

According to my colleague Kathy Ralls, who used to work on Chimineas, Coyote was very retiring in the old days, and hightailed it when he saw people.

Nowadays you can snap his picture if you are quick with your camera, but he still doesn't hang around.

Not so with Gray Fox.

You might not see him very often, but he's smaller, and perhaps less prone to daylight escapades.

As for getting round, the codger isn't.

Not since tearing my Achilles tendon a week ago.

I am now sporting the big-foot-star-wars boot, and you don't hike, dog walk or boogy wearing something that feels like a bear cub hugging your ankle.

It's tough on Fred.

He knew something had changed right away, and hung back the first 24 hrs.

Then separation anxiety set in.

I knew he was spoiled but didn't think it was this bad. I mean its not like I went away.

He cried so much when we put it to crate at night, that now he sleeps in the bedroom.

For exercise he is getting  2-3 games of fetch-the-ball daily (which by the way was the cause of my injury).

Camera trapping diversions like Chimineas Ranch and Marin County will have to be on hold for a while.

It's going to be a long winter.

Gray fox's co-napper

I had missed it completely.

The napping tarantula hanging from the wall of the sandstone grotto.

Behind the sleepy gray fox.

My fellow camera trapper and Cal Fish & Game biologist Craig Fiehler pointed it out to me. 

It seems the spider joined the fox in its high noon siesta.

It just hung there peacefully for at least a half hour.

Just wanted to pointed it out. 

High noon siesta

12:24:14 -- first photo

It was a hot August day and little past noon when gray fox entered the sandstone cave. 

12:24:31 -- 4th photo

He immediately settled in the back of the cave, stretched out on the cool sand, and schnoozed for the next 2 hrs and 20 minutes. 

12:27:10 -- 18th photo

During his siesta the camera seems to have taken a picture every time he moved, and in 53 photos produced a time motion study of his gradual movement to the front of the cave.  

14:46:51 -- 67th photo

When he woke up he seemed to notice he wasn't where he was when he started the siesta. 

14:48:44 -- 69th photo

So he went back to where he started.

14:48:48 -- 70th photo

And started over again.

15:58:53 -- 88th photo

The siesta ended an hour and 15 minutes later, and our thoroughly rested fox left the cave.  

Craig and I agree that as camera trap photos go, this siesta was no sleeper. 

Chimineas Ranch update: There is a lot more coming from our last round of camera trapping at the ranch, but it takes a lot of time to compile and analyze nearly 1000 photos. 

I'm a bit compulsive about this compilation business before drafting blog posts. 

You will see all the good stuff in due course, if not in continuous sequence, then interspersed with other posts about my usual adventures with Fred, etc. 

Poison oak and a gray fox

Smoke was rising from Badger's stovepipe, so I walked up to the cabin, and my friend came to the door.

"I'm going to check some camera traps. Do you want to come along?"

I met Badger shoveling snow a few months ago, when his playful cocker Mac could overwhelm the pint-sized Fred.

Now Fred is bigger than Mac and goes border collie on him -- nipping and herding relentlessly and making a nuisance of himself until the cocker lays into him.

This morning they had their first real dog fight while my neighbor was putting on his boots.

Badger is a Maidu Indian from the Enterprise Rancheria.

That's not his real name, but he chuckles that like a badger he's "a good digger".

He got the name for his feats in excavation when he was in construction work. Later he worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and after that he did contract work with many tribes across the country.

Of the Maidu, he says, "They killed most of us, but they put the rest of us on the Rancheria. When they made Lake Oroville we lost some of the land, and they didn't give us enough money to buy another piece."

I felt guilty for not warning my friend about the poison oak, which is leafing out in profusion.

He wore cutoff pants and had to pussy-foot through the shiny red leaves, which he did quite well.

"How did the Maidu keep from getting poision oak?" I asked.

"They didn't touch it," he answered.

"We were known as Digger Indians", he continued, "because we dug and ate a lot of roots."

Did he find "digger" an insulting term?

"No. . . that's how we survived. There were lots of foods to take and my people were good at it."

I had a clear image of the camera set, but I was slightly off course. We were trudging through dead manzanita and blowdowns, and my friend must have thought we were on a wild goose chase.

Finally I used the GPS to backtrack and found it.

The camera had been on that ridge for a month, and I expected at least a picture of an early season bear, and maybe even a mountain lion.

That would hardly compensate for the case of poison oak my friend would get, but my expectations were dashed as I flipped through the images.

The only pictures that camera had taken were of me and Fred a month ago, and Badger and Mac this morning.

I grumbled my disappointment as we retraced our steps to the ridge shoulder.

"I promise the next one is easier to reach, and the poison oak isn't as thick."

Badger didn't complain.

The second camera had the usual gray squirrel, and the gray fox seen above.

Badger thought the gray fox was a good result.

That afternoon, I drove back to his cabin and gave him a bottle of Technu.

More plank walkers

A raccoon and her family started to cross the plank, but changed their minds and retreated. Another raccoon preferred the creekbed.

Gray foxes were undaunted by the camera. They were in fourteen out of 38 photos at the site.



A pair of them explored the creek bed.



Only one possum was seen scuttling up the trail, barely visible in the distance. I suspect it arrived via the creekbed rather than the plank.

Almost all of the deer pictures were of creek crossers.



Only this buck might have walked the plank.