Barny's cakewalk in the swale

A marshy stretch on Barrett Creek . . . . the barn owls' stomping ground. 

Craig thought Barrett Creek was good for another camera trap set.

Though all but dry in early August, a lush swale marked its meandering course, and here and there the ground was even soggy.

It was a little oasis of greenery, but if any critter smelled water there it would have to dig for it.

I predicted that the swale would be a haven for meadow mice and their predators, thinking we might at last get a picture of our long-tailed weasel.

So we trampled down a couple square yards of grass and concealed the camera at the edge of the clearing -- set 388.

Six weeks later the team viewed the photos and found that the camera had taken over 750 photos of pigs, black-tailed deer, and cotton-tails, and not a single carnivore.

But barn owls were the big surprise.

There were 357 photos of them.

Barn owls all look the same to me, but I suspect it was one or two birds that visited 32 times on 26 nights, and almost always before midnight.

On only two successive nights however did a pair of owls show up in the same picture, and in three frames they curtsied.  

I need an experienced owler to tell me if this was courtship, threat, or begging for food.

Or maybe the introduction to a cakewalk?

Who knows?

The bigger question though is what exactly were they doing there?

How to solve the one-way road dilemma?

Oct. 8, 2010, 9:50 PM

Oct. 14, 2010, 1:42 AM

Oct. 18, 2010, 8:44 PM

I think it's the same cat, and it's ignoring the sign.

It seems to think it's on a one-way road.

How to get a head-on picture of this trespasser?

A) Turn the camera around.

B) Change the Posted Sign so it faces the opposite direction.

C) Urinate across the road to turn the cat back.

D) Move the road apples closer to the camera.

Rodent rendezvous, cont'd

Pigeon holing your wood rats isn't as easy as it used to be.

We can thank molecular biology for that.

As a result of recent investigations using traditional morphometric and molecular methods there are more species of wood rats than there were a couple decades ago, which is a good thing.

So here is Bryant's wood rat, which rendezvous'd with the other rodents at Badger Head Gulch.

It used to be called the desert wood rat (Neotoma lepida), which is the smallish and generally fair-haired wood rat of the greater southwest.

Professor Patton and his colleagues at UC's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley painstakingly revised the desert wood rats, and showed that the California populations deserve recognition as a separate species.

This is the first time we've photographed the species at Chimineas.

The mouse below,  however is in all probability the Tulare grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus tularensis).

It's hard to confuse this little snub-nosed predator with anything else in the area.

Onychomys torridus 

And for those of you who prefer birds to rodents we have the California towhee, which seemed to be drawn to the burrow.

California towhee

Reference

Patton, J. L.,  D. G. Huckaby, and S. T. Álvarez-Castañeda. 2008. The Evolutionary History and a Systematic Revision of Woodrats of the Neotoma lepida Group, UC Publications in Zoology, Volume 135. 

Rodent rendezvous

The large burrow at the mouth of Badger Head Gulch

The mouth of Badger Head Gulch was a broad dry-wash with a sandstone bank, and in that bank we found a burrow large enough to be a carnivore den.

Since Fred kept coming back to sniff the burrow, it became camera trap set 393.

The camera snapped 155 pictures during the next 42 days of August and September, and the site was bustling with rodent activity.

Four species.

I am not sure what the attraction of the site was to these rodents, but not a single carnivore made an appearance.

Heermann's kangaroos rats were the most common visitors.

Adult Heermann's kangaroo rat (Dipodomys heermanni)

Some of them were juveniles.

Juvenile k-rat before filling the external check pouches

You can tell them from adults by their fetching, sleek, big-eyed looks. Very cute.

after filling the cheek pouches

The California pocket mouse was the other heteromyid rodent that visited the site, and though it is widespread at Chinineas, it was infrequently seen at this site.

The California pocket mouse (Chaetodipus californicus)

The hoax makes the news

The photoshop hoax that used my camera trapped photo just became a story in the Yakima Herald.

Thanks to Scott Sandsberry for hunting me down and producing the article.

My blog hits are waning a bit, down to the high hundreds now, but I definitely picked up some new readers.

Thank you, artful photoshopper, wherever you are. 

A Lone Ranger in the gulch

The night flier and a grounded rodent.

A chance photo of a bat is always icing on the cake.

Identifying bats from photos like this one is a guessing game, but sometimes you get a hunch from some diagnostic feature like those teeny weenie bat feet.

The night flier with the Lone Ranger mask was possibly the Western small-footed myotis, Myotis ciliolabrum, which we have previously camera trapped at the Chimineas.

Whatever it is, the image brings to mind a staccato hi-frequency voice amidst the nocturnal buzz and chirps of crickets, a piping poorwill, and the imagined footfalls of predators in the arroyo.

And there were other stunt fliers.

Night life in Badger Head Gulch is a contrast to the hushed stillness of the summer afternoon when we set our camera.

The big cat cometh

August 12, 2010, 3:46:10AM

The big cat came 3 nights after we set the camera trap.

That was the same night that Studly unearthed the can of cat food.

The trail was hopping with activity before the cat's appearance, but white-footed mice, wood rats, and even cottontails make a meager meal.

The cat walked on by, and after its brief appearance activity on the trail was nil.