Old men and old machines

"I've got a log splitter that'll split 'em sideways."

Childhood friend and co-codger Paul was waxing bragadocious about his Lickity-Log-Splitter -- the first of its kind and according to Paul, the Cadillac of log splitters.

Clayton Brukner patented the Lickity Log Splitter, with its stationary wedge and hydraulic platen, in 1959 when he was head of the Waco Aircraft Company of Troy, Ohio.

Brukner's mechanical inclination and production smarts came from a childhood of wandering around his daddy's workplace -- farm equipment factories in the midwest.

A self taught mechanical engineer, he drifted from thresher construction to aircraft assembly, and after WWI founded the Advance Aircraft Company with his friend Elwood James Junkin.

Brukner wrote that "My aircraft engineering background taught me to employ properly heat treated steels in the design of the machine (i.e., the Lickity Log Splitter), with the result that a machine weighing slightly over 500 lbs. is capable of a 36,000 lb. force if you can log that will require it."

Last Thursday Paul came rolling in with the Lickity Log Splitter on his flat bed trailer, and it looked more like a piece of wreckage with paint-eczema than a Cadillac.

The old dinosaur needed a snort of ether to fire up, but my how it worked!

It was soon splitting stumps with a terrible roaring vengeance.

"Don't put your hands on the ends." cautioned Paul as I dropped a stump onto the rail.

"A laborer lost his hand between the wedge and a log."

The din of machinery sounds like boots and saddles to tinkerers, and in no time neighbor Richard came putting down the driveway on his own antique, a vintage Honda 90 trail bike.

It was good timing, because we soon discovered that most of the stumps were 3 inches longer than Lickity Splitter's throat.

No amount of sledging made them fit.

Paul removed the steel stop that backed the wedge.

"It needs to be 3 and a quarter inches shorter."

Richard carried it off on his motorbike with Fred in tow.

So where did Paul find his yellow relic?

It was in a weedy lot in Carmel, California, an eyesore to some but a clear statement about Yankee thrift.

It wasn't for sale, and it didn't work, but the owner didn't mind chatting.

The splitter had seen many good years, and when the state widened Route 1 ("the coast highway") in the 70s, they felled the old eucalyptus aisle, and the Likity Splitter reduced a lot of very big stumps to firewood.

Paul finally talked the owner into parting with the machine, hauled it to Scotts Valley, and got it working, though he still laments the $100 dollars he paid for a new gas tank.

"I just didn't want to fool around making one out of parts."

When Richard came down the driveway he delivered the original part intact and a new and shorter wedge stop he had just welded from his own scrap.

"I didn't want to cut the original piece, so now you have two."

We were back in business.

Twenty-four hours later we had split and stacked a cord and a half of black oak.

Codgers can be pretty helpful when the work is done with big old machines.

Gully cams -- a self portrait

Leaving with high hope, an unintentional self portrait.

Self portraits are inevitable when your controller's dip switches are set to shoot around the clock. 

(It doesn't happen when the camera is set to take night photos -- unless you work at night.)

So, unless you sneak away or creep up to your camera trap there's a good chance it will take your picture.

I regard my own self portraits as collateral damage and usually delete them, but this one of Craig retreating from set 301 almost has painterly qualities. 

As he walked away the camera took a sequence of 14 pictures, and this one just stood out.

Gully Cams

A Western screech owl perches near the camera 

but at the edge of the frame where there was no eye shine.

Unless there's a visible bait, sound lure, or water you don't expect owls to come to camera traps. 

Craig set a couple of cameras in or near gullies, which many mammals use as travel lanes.  

He used a punctured can of mackerel under a rock as bait, and a couple of scent lures, none of which should attract owls.

The surprise was that an owl visited each camera. 

 

Western screech owl faces a gully camera. Picture was cropped, 

but bird was close to the center of the frame, thus the eye shine.

You can't rule out the possibility that they were attracted to rodents attracted to the bait. 

Second photo of the owl, after retreating. 

Gearing up

A mix of old and new camera traps ready for the field.

Large cases contain 2D-cells as backup power; 

small cases contain 4 AA cells as backup power.

I've been gearing up to deploy additional cams at the Chimineas Ranch and Marin County.

Seven camera traps were out of order, and parts for 5 additional units had been accumulating dust and dog hair for several months.

When I started home-brewing my own camera traps I often encountered problems, and I always thought it was due to some technical failure beyond my limited knowledge of electronics. 

The problem was almost always due to dying or dead batteries in the camera or controller. 

So I got in the habit of using the multimeter, and when something goes wrong the first thing I check are the batteries. 

Weak batteries however were not the problem in these cameras.

The easiest fix only required tweaking.

It was a case of lens impotence.

The lens would struggle to extend while grinding noisily for several seconds, and then it would suddenly appear.

By then of course the animal that triggered the camera was long gone.   

All it needed was tough love. 

Believe it or not, you can fix a jammed lens motor by slamming the camera in your hand while the lens gear is grinding. 

More often however, finding what doesn't work requires fairly simple trouble shooting.

Test the camera with a functional controller,  and vice versa until you know what component has failed.  

Then test the wired circuits for continuity.

Very often there is a short, a solder contact has broken, or a wire has been pinched. 

I repaired 4 of the units by replacing controllers or rewiring the cameras, built 5 new units with new Sony s600s and YetiCam controllers, and laid one camera to rest -- a source of spare parts.  

Fixing a camera makes you feel pretty good.

Sometimes you even hear trumpets blaring that familiar theme from Rocky.  

Sonoma puma

These photos were taken by Rod Jackson on November 2.

It was a little past 12:30 AM when the cat walked past the camera on a farm in Sonoma County. 

Rod directs the  Snow Leopard Conservancy, and is an old hand at camera trapping. 

He has relied on remote camera technology to census snow leopards in the mountain wilds of Asia for three decades. 

He also tests new camera traps near the conservancy's headquarters in Sonoma County.

This particular one was a Sony s600 with a YetiCam controller.

There is a hint of spots on the coat in the upper photo. 

According to Logan and Sweanor, the dappled coat usually disappears by the time the cats reach 2 years of age, but faint markings may persist on the legs until 30 months.

Many thanks for sharing these images, Rod. 

Reference

Logan, K.A. and L.L. Sweanor. 2001. Desert Puma, evolutionary ecology and conservation of an enduring carnivore. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

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. 

A Trail Camera Curriculum

It's time for an update of Dawn Tanner's school trail camera project I wrote about a few months ago.

Dawn's teaching aid has now been published. 

"Taking Action Opportunities -- connecting kids to wildlife with trail cameras" is a 74 page 12-lesson guide with a DVD.  

It is designed to "help teachers use trail cameras in schoolyards and protected areas to connect students to habitat loss and landscape fragmentation issues and empower environmentally responsible behavior."  

The target classes are elementary and middle schools. 

This is a step-by-step guide for teachers, who also receive a USB drive with the files they need for the lessons, and camera trap photo from three protected areas.

It starts with the simple fun stuff -- learning how to scout and identify animal sign, and then how to set trail cameras in school yards. 

The students then make predictions about which species of mammals will be found in the school yard.

When the photos start to roll in they identify the species and compare their findings with their predictions. 

Compiling data comes next, and that leads to the use of spreadsheets to graph the results. 

Thus they gain an understanding of activity cycles, species differences in the duration of feeding bouts, etc. 

In the classroom they also study dietary adaptations by examining skulls of camera trapped species. 

    

Camera trap findings are related to habitat. 

The kids learn to use Google Earth to compare satellite imagery of their school yard with protected areas in the state and abroad.

The DVD introduces the teachers and students to three Minnesota scientists who use camera traps to study wildlife -- Ron Moen who studies Canada lynx in Minnesota, Dave Smith who studies tigers in Asia, and Hadas Kushnir who studies lion-human conflict in Tanzania.  

Appendices supplement how-to information found throughout the manual, and include a student opinion survey.

Now, what I want to know is how come this wasn't going on when I was a kid?

Huh? 

For more information contact Dawn Tanner by email:  tann0042@umn.edu.