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.   

Visitors of the great pool-Part 2

Surely there are dickey birds that bathe and drink from the big pool, but Rich's cam photographed only the big birds, like the band-tailed pigeon and a raven that was a little too blurry to post.

The red-shouldered hawk was there to bathe.



And so was the great-horned owl. Rich says, "The owl looks like it could be young or a molting adult. There were two shots of it, one up higher on the rocks, then a couple minutes later this one at pool level. It was last Friday at 2:30 PM, which was a hot day all over the area."