Back at the coyote den

Here is a new video about the coyote den in Sierra Valley, taken in the winter and spring of 2023/24. This one had a few surprises. 

Scree in Winter

Deadman Lake and its scree, on the north facing slope of Rt 49 (Google earth image)

You are looking at Deadman Lake at 6675 feet, and its ancient field of scree that spills downhill nearly 700 feet.

A camera set in deep boulder-scree

We set camera traps on Deadman's scree slope last November.

It's a strange place.

In summer you can slow-fry eggs on the sun-baked boulders, while cool drafts and the babble of moving water rise from the depths. 

In winter it's a wasteland of ice and snow,  

We've camera trapped Deadman in summer and fall, when little chief hares or pikas raise their squeaky alarm.

Scree isn't plant friendly, and you wouldn't expect many small mammals other than pika to live there.

But we've photographed wood rats, deer mice, chickarees, chipmunks, and golden-mantled ground squirrels far from the more vegetated edges.

The presence of those critters convinced me that talus must be a winter paradise for weasels.

It offers ever-present protection from the elements, thousands of recesses to escape from hungry raptors, and a steady supply of food.

Normally Deadman starts to look glacial in mid October, but winter was late last year.

We managed to get our act together in early November, and set our camera traps in shirt sleeves on a fine Indian summer day.

Six months later we were casting about and scratching our heads looking for our cameras.

I was the one who couldn't find his cameras, and even with the GPS telling me I was there I still had to peer into deep recesses to find two of them.

The camera batteries had died months earlier in most, but two of my cameras set a new record of 6 months -- they were still running on external D-cells.

We didn't have much to show for our patience, and we didn't get a single picture of a white weasel.

But a bobcat made several appearances at the first cam I set at the foot of the scree.

Full frame of scree visitor

The space was too small for a full body shot, but the cat showed us both working ends. 

Another revealing view.

Catnipping Bobcat

Getting cabin fever.

We've gotten but half the average rainfall we should have at this time of year.

 But I'm not complaining

To keep the show going I'm posting this brief video of a bobcat getting it on with a little castoreum and synthetic catnip oil.

Big bear sniffs, Little bear rubs

With all the warm dry weather the bears have been more active than in past years.

It's much easier for codgers to get around in the woods in beautiful dry weather, but it's ominous when the insects are prematurely abundant and trees are blossoming early.

I dread thinking about wildfire this year.

But life goes on in the barranca.

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A Montana scat set

A cock Franklin's grouse "walks on by" the scented goodies.

"Whoa! Did you see that?"

We were buzzing down a forest service road on Carl's quad and almost missed it.

It was just another turd on the road, and it wasn't steaming, but it was fresh, and it was big, filled with hair and bone.

"This might have been left by a wolf. I'm setting a cam here."

 I've always had good luck with scat sets -- that is, a camera trap set at carnivore scat, usually on a trail.

I added a few drops of synthetic civetone to give it a little olfactory sparkle.

Set 577 was reasonably productive, but as luck would have it, the only wolves to show were of the domesticated variety.

Fred gives the scat an early morning sniff

A bobcat paused to give it a sniff, but I can get bobcats at home in California, and would have been much happier with a picture of Canada lynx.

The same for a striped skunk that checked in,

though it gave a good photo when it mosied over toward the camera.

The herbivores couldn't have cared less about the scat, but snowshoe hare and Franklin's grouse are new species for my camera trapping life list.

Our best shot of a snowshoe hare.

Snowshoe hares of course are legendary for their cyclical predator prey games with the Canada lynx, and they're dirt common in this neck of the woods.

We got a fair number of photos, and this is the best I can show. 

Franklin's grouse, a subspecies of the Spruce grouse, was more cooperative and also gives us a flavor of the north woods.

And of course there were white-tailed deer and chickarees, which you've already seen.

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.

About to leap

Not much to say, except I wish the camera had taken this photo a half second (or so) later.

What goes in gotta come out

Bobcat with Botta's pocket gopher,  Jan 19, 2011 at 10:36AM

With this post we are back at the Chimineas Ranch where winter storms washed out most of the back country roads.

Cattleman Ross made the roads right again, and Todd finally made the camera trap rounds on a quad.

Yesterday Craig sent good tidings,  "All cams we set out in November made it through the winter fine and there was no water damage. All are accounted for."

What you see here are a few of the recently downloaded photos from set 421 made last November.

"The amazing thing about this set, "writes Craig,"  is that the cam operated for the entire period from November 9, 2010 to February 24, 2011. That's 107 days!"

I know a lot of camera trappers make their home brews compact, but there's something to be said for 2 D cells as backup power. You just have to settle for bigger housing.

The bobcat made its appearance with a pack lunch of fresh pocket gopher, which looks like it was taking its last breath.

Take note where it placed the gopher, and its interest in the depressed area beyond.

Bobcat looks at the latrine

You could say it put the gopher on the toilet seat, because our cat, or another one just like it perched in the very same place 3 weeks later.

I don't think there's any debate about what it's doing.

Feb 11, 2011 at 12:08AM

Craig viewed all the photos at this set and reports that bobcats visited the depression several other times.

It may well be a latrine, and we'll check it out to satisfy our curiosity when the weather warms up.

No doubt the cat or cats devoured quite a few gophers between the input and output photos. 

Saltos Canyon

Saltos Canyon may have its waterfalls in January, but most of the year it's a dry canyon with a few seeps and stagnant pools.

In late September we searched the lower reaches of the canyon for water where we might place some cameras.

The only water we found were a few small pools, and yellow jackets lined the seeps like drunks in a bar.

The potability of the water is another question.

It leaves a rime when it evaporates, possibly a derivative of gypsum which is abundant there.

But few vertebrates can live without water so we continued our search for a suitable place to set a camera.

After a mile and a half the canyon opened up, and we found a pool pocked with hoof prints.

We set a cam there in the shade of the mule fat.

We returned a month later. 

Wood rats, Peromyscus, and a Heermann's kangaroo rat visited the puddles.

Though kangaroo rats and pocket mice can live on metabolic water from their food, a photo of a drinking k-rat would have been a prize.  

Black-tailed deer and cottontails also showed, but they weren't regulars.

Bobcats were more frequent visitors.

Two of them, though not together, were often snapped in a swarm of moths. 

So the bats were there too. 

Four visits -- four views

August 17, 1:27 AM -- Day 6

Back from a few cool days on the Chimineas, the camera trapping wonderland, but I am running a bit low on material.

The previous trip was a hard act to follow, and this time there were no surprises -- only the usual suspects

So we're serving up a few shots of bobcat(s) from a 38-day set made by the team in mid-August.

This is on top of the rock pile where we photographed a bobcat last winter.

The bait is secreted in the crack between the two rocks at the right.

None of the pictures was cropped, so you can see how the cat(s) moved around on the 4 occasions it visited the set.

August 22, 1:33 AM -- Day 6

Yes, the first two pictures of the same cat.

Aug 22, 9:39 PM -- Day 11

And it looks like she visited again 5 days later.

August 27, 10:28 PM --  Day 36

Not sure it was the same cat on the last visit, because it's behind the rock on the left.

It was upstaged by a moth impersonating a bat with landing gear deployed.

Lil Red moves through

Twenty-eight days passed before a young Bobcat came down the gulch

It didn't stop to smell the cat food -- if it did, the camera missed it.

It was still on the move the next night,

and 26 minutes later it was back, retracing its tracks up the gulch.

A wood rat and this kangaroo rat were the only other mammals photographed.

These were quiet nights at an otherwise active camera trap set where we found rodents, cottontails, and Studly making numerous appearances.

The problem with sleeping in caves

The problem with sleeping in caves is that large cats, coyotes, wolves, bears and pumas like to sleep there too.

Not all the time, of course, but often enough to cause problems if you happen to be sleeping there already.

When snow is in the air a field biologist camped in the rimrock might want to drag his sleeping bag into a nice leaf-filled den like this one on the Wind River Ranch in New Mexico.

And that's exactly when the larger critters are likely to show.

Thus the evolution of snoring that sounded just like a cranky bear.

[Just discovered this photo on the internal memory of one of my s600s. It was taken at 4:00AM on Nov. 2, 2007]

The log botherers

The camera at set 340 managed to take 100 images before the mysterious impostor filched the batteries 3 weeks into the venture.

But let's forget the impostor and talk about the others who visited our set.

A handsome Heermann's kangaroo rat was an active visitor.

It even ventured into the log.

Of course there were deer mice,

 and a fit looking cottontail also explored the inner architecture,

which just proves something we already knew -- fallen logs are attractive features to small mammals.

But in addition to the log's natural allure, some bumbling biologists had stuffed a perforated can of cat food down a ground squirrel burrow right behind that grass.

This might have attracted a bobcat with nicked ears,

that waited patiently for that smelly can or a small mammal to appear.

A few days later our old friend with the crumpled ear showed up with those jade cat eyes.

He's a poker-faced veteran of the range. 

And we know he's an old rambler, because this is two miles from the hilltop where we clicked him last fall. 

With a range that large the chances are good that this cat is a male. 

Bobcat bonanza

From the standpoint of scenery there was nothing special about set 312.

It was just a narrow defile, a very old and slightly winding erosion gully in a steep hill.

Craig found it and I am glad he did.

Thirty-five days later the cam snapped his picture a few moments before he pulled the camera.

Macy is leading the way.

The camera snapped 88 pictures of which 30 were blanks.

The amazing thing is that nearly 60% of the animal photos were bobcats.

We got them coming,

and going.

Check out their left forelegs and you will see that at least these two cats were different kitties.

We counted nine different visits, where a visit is one or more photos clustered in time.

It seems the defile was a passage way for at least two bobcats. 

Now then, what was the next most common user of the defile?

Go ahead -- take a guess.