A Room with a View

The snag -- a canyon live oak.

If hollow trees were sentient beings, they would cringe when they see me coming.

You see, the codger regularly administers an examination of hollow trees that resembles a colonoscopy.

Looking up from the bottom.

My point and shoot camera is the endoscope.

It's a harmless procedure for tree and examiner, though there's a remote risk that something inside might clamp down on your arm during the examination.

All you do is stick your handheld camera into the cavity, point it upward, press the shutter release, and check the resulting image on the LCD.

Most of the time the cavity is shallow and filled with rotten wood and spider webs.

The conjoined trunks of this oak however measured 12 feet around, and both were hollow and free of spider webs, indicating that furry mammals used it regularly.

Looking down from the top --  a distance of 11 feet.

One trunk had a capacious space that tapered upwards and extended into the limbs.

The cavity opened to the outside 11 feet up, where a limb had snapped off some years ago.



There was another "window" 5 feet above ground.

The cavity was a room with a view, but the most interesting view was from the outside looking in.

I could see inside from three openings, and decided the best view for the camera trap was looking down from the top.

A camera trap wedgie

I lodged the camera into the opening, and when I came back a week later found 353 photos of brush mice and dusky-footed wood rats.

Wood rat ascending the hollow trunk.

There were no surprises. It was a busy place, and I expected rodents, but I wanted to show them in a setting we don't normally see.

Brush mouse caught in the midst of a grooming session. This picture was taken at noon, long after bedtime.

The upper reaches of the cavity seemed to be a wood rat's feeding perch, but for the life of me I cannot identify the food.

Wood rat eating unidentified insect??? 

Mr Smiley of Bunyipco thinks it might be the instar or larval form of a cicada.

If so, the rat dug it up, because at this time of year all cicadas are immature and live in the soil.

Glimpsing natural history in a hollow log can raise unanswered questions, but that's good.

If images from a camera trap don't make you wonder you are missing one of the simple pleasures of the sport.

Deadwood Stick Real Estate.

Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that winter is the time to check out real estate.

The irrepressible Random Truth has been doing just that.

He's been regaling his fans with photos of properties on the SF peninsula and their stunning homeowners, and his candid reportage has gotten a lot of folks off their duffs.

They're out cruising the neighborhoods, scoping real estate.

I had already filed and almost forgotten this photo of an impressive mansion I recently encountered.

It was in an upscale community near Arcata.

Thought you would enjoy a glimpse of luxury.

Here's the listing from Deadwood Stick Realty.

"Spacious construction in a gated community on a quiet country road.
Intimate setting. Built to last. Arts and crafts home with pleasing rustic touches. Hardwood stick floors, walls, and ceilings. Great dining room with 3 attached larders. Master bedroom generously provisioned with bay laurel. Passive solar heating warms the home in winter, and 2 composting toilets keep the master bedroom toasty warm. 4 strategically placed exits guarantee safe emergency evacuations.Stunning views of the scenic Mad River. Frolic or fish in crystal clear pools just outside your back door.    

80% financing available to qualified buyers."

A windfall of cherries

Hollyleaf cherry (Prunus ilicifolia)

A year and a half ago we were bumping along in the pickup when a bulb above Random Truth's head suddenly filled the cab with bright light.

"How about setting a cam in that patch of hollyleaf cherries on Gillam Spring Road?".

According to the scatological calendar it was that time of year again: the landscape was littered with carnivore scat, as it always is, but now most of the scat was chock full o' nuts, which means the critters were pigging out on wild cherries.

You can't mistake the pit of the hollyleaf cherry for anything else. As cherry pits go, they are BEEEG.

"Good idea, RT".

I am fond of windfall sets, but Craig was non-commital.

"You never know who's gonna show up at the cherry patch", I continued, "and ringtail might make a surprise appearance.

If indeed Craig was lukewarm to the idea, the mention of the elusive Chimineas ringtail changed his mind. He headed for Gillam Spring Road.

Well, we were too late in 2010. The cherries were past fruiting.

But we didn't forget.

A bumper crop of hollyleaf cherries called us back in 2011, and we set a camera at the assigned thicket.

We fetched it a month later and found over 400 photos.

The most common visitor (151 photos) was our old friend the wood rat. 

The wood rat (probably Neotoma macrotis) hauling a stick , which it dropped a few moments later.

In two shots the rodents were carrying cherries, in three shots they were hauling sticks, and the rest of the time they were running around or exploring. 

Gray foxes appeared on 4 occasions, and there was one photo of a bear's backside, clearly detectable only after photoshopping.

There were no surprises at set 530; in fact it was a bit of a disappointment.  

I knew the wood rats would be there; they're everywhere.

But I thought they would tell us a different story, a story about fulfilling their manifest destiny as seed dispersers.  

Not this time.

If we try again, with cameras at several patches of hollyleaf cherry, wood rat might give us a surprise.

But there are a lot of other subjects worthy of camera trapping, and wood rat can always be relied on for a cameo appearance.   

Into the rock pile

The first visitor to this set of course was a dusky-footed wood rat.

No doubt it lives very near by, and it dropped by almost nightly.

The bobcat made an appearance the day after we set the camera.

You see it above as it cautiously entered the recess, which was late morning (11:09).

It didn't linger long, because this was the only picture taken.

But three and a half hours later it was back, and three more pictures were taken.

Additional bobcat visits were on day 4 and day 20.

They looked to be the same cat.

Troglodytic rodents

California pocket mouse, Chaetodipus californicus

 

Three species of rodents came to the cave, but none was a frequent visitor. 

The pocket mouse, photographed on three different nights seems to have done a little digging and dust bathing. 

   

Digging and dust bathing in the fine sand. 

There is also a series of pictures where the sand magically forms a crater, and our best guess is that a dust bathing pocket mouse was out-of-site doing the work.  

The short-tail of this pocket mouse is an aberration due to the angle.

Two long-tailed species of deer mice have been recorded in the area: the Pinyon mouse (P. truei) and the Brush mouse (P. boylei). 

The Pinyon mouse also has big ears and a dorsal tail stripe that is less than 1/3rd the circumference of the tail.

This looks like a Pinyon mouse -- and a handsome mouse it is.

 

Pinyon mouse (Peromyscus truei), a species of foothill woodland and juniper woodland. 

 

Our old freind the dusky-footed wood rat appeared only once. 

Dusky-footed woodrat (Neotoma fuscipes)

Shameless Fig Foraging

Adriatic figs ready for picking on the shoulder of the road. 

Ever pay $4 for a teeny weeny basket of fresh figs? 

Not the codger. Not anymore, anyway.  

He shamelessly forages figs from roadside volunteers in the land of fruit and nuts, and has no qualms about scrounging grounded fruit.  

You see, volunteer fig trees grow wild in the Sacramento Valley. 

You find them next to highways, country roads, and fence lines, and along seepages, creeks, and rivers. 

An Adriatic fig growing along a frontage road in Butte County. 

The story has it that Junipero Serra's followers planted black figs around the missions of Alta California.

I once read that the descendants of these Mission or Franciscan figs can still be found, but far from adobe walls. 

I live in a time warp so to speak, and browsing wild mission figs always gave me a vague but gratifying sense of connection to the state's past.  

Well, googling California figs disabused me of my romantic notion. 

My volunteer figs look more like the green Adriatic figs brought to California by American settlers after the gold rush. 

They are thick-skinned and pale green on the outside and a deep reddish color inside. 

Adriatic figs were planted as a cash crop in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, and  in 1889 ranchers shipped their first dried figs to markets in the east. 

I imagine they were pretty chewy when they arrived in New York. 

In my experience, drying Adriatic figs pass through the gooey candy stage only briefly.

When fully dry they're as leathery as snake eggs, which doesn't stop me from gnawing them.

You can still boil them into a wonderful jam.

But the dried Adriatic figs didn't win over eastern palates.

So Smyrna figs were introduced as a substitute in the 1880s. 

Last Sunday we picked figs. 

A few years ago the tree was a glorious specimen, fermenting figs carpeted the ground, and a dusky-footed wood rat had stacked sticks and dried figs among the multiple trunks.    

Then PG&E had its annual power pole ritual and chain sawed the biggest trunks.  

This year the old fig set fruit again.

The rat nest was gone, but a rodent had been dining there.

 The leftovers of a rodent's feast -- 

possibly a squirrel, but more likely a rat. 

  

We carried our booty home and the redhead made fig bars.

The best part of foraging is always on the plate.

I'd love to camera trap the visitors of a fig tree, but I just don't trust the two-legged visitors. 

Exposing the stripper

She was naked and alone. A redwood sapling stripped of her outer bark.

The question was who was the stripper. Chickadee, titmouse, bushtit? Maybe a nuthatch. Or was it a rodent?

I suspected a dusky-footed woodrat. There was a stick nest only yards away.

Rich thought maybe a Sonoma tree mouse.

We set the camera about 12 feet away and 5 feet off the ground on a metal post, and we waited 6 weeks for a good weekend to make the four and a half hour drive, which was last Saturday.

The camera batteries died after a month, but there were 52 pictures.

Forty four were of grey squirrels and twelve of them were of squirrels on the tree.



There was one visit by a woodrat.



And 4 of deer, who looked only to be passing through..



The evidence is inconclusive. None exposed the stripper.

We'll have to use video to catch it in the act.

The work never ends.

Br'er fox nails another rat

It's hard to believe, but it happened. Rich got another camera trap photo of a gray fox with prey.



It not only walked past a camera carrying the half eaten rat, but paused to give us a second picture.

Predator with prey (From the mountain)

Br'er fox nailed a wood rat, and walked past a camera trap before eating it.

It's not common to get a camera trap photo of predation, but that's what Rich Tenaza found this weekend when he checked the cams on the mountain in Napa county.

It would have been nice if wiley fox had faced the camera, but I'm not complaining. We are mighty pleased.

Back on the mountain -- part 3

This is NOT where I had aimed the third camera.

This camera was attached to a short length of steel fence post, aimed at a gap in a large fir that had fallen across the trail. I'm afraid I had set the camera a little too low. I was trying to cover as much foreground as possible.

Something had pulled it down. It was undamaged and pointed at the ground. Since then the camera had taken 31 pictures of hot air puffs on the ground.

We checked the pictures.

The first travelers were a skunk and a wood rat, but . . .



on the third day a bear ambled by at 9:20 in the morning. It was about to pass through the gap when it noticed the camera.



It turned around, approached it, and then went away.



Two nights later the bear was back, and the camera took three closeups.



Then the bear pulled the camera over.

I told Rich we were lucky. It only pushed the camera down. The bear guard had worked.

(2 cameras to go. Coming soon: "Back on the mountain -- part 4")

Revenge of a zoological collector

[The zoological collector's hoard: 13 cat turds, 17 acorns, 25 deer mice, 3 woodrats (1 adult, 2 pups), 3 lizards, 21 millipede segments, a small sampling of numerous wood splinters, and 1 cigarette butt]


Where do all the little mousies and rats go that eat warfarin under your house? Did you ever wonder about that?

I never gave it much thought until last weekend, when the bedroom started to smell rather poorly. Something had died under the house, and I was responsible.

The day before we flew to Virginia last month I put rodenticide in the crawl space. Normally, I trap homesteading rodents. Sorry, but I just can't afford to donate my library annex in the garage to mammalian paper shredders.

Well, the redhead had been telling me about nocturnal gnawing and splintering sounds. Under the house something was going bump in the night.

Obviously, a wood rat had gotten into the crawl space and was collecting materials for a stick nest. I would have preferred to snaptrap the newcomer, but we weren't going to be around for a couple weeks, and I didn't want surprises when we got home.

Well, the poison worked, and this stench was the rodent's revenge. My first reaction was to close the heating vents, and for two days I was feeling quite clever, but then the rodent cranked up the stench and it got worse, a lot worse.

As readers of this blog are fully aware, I can handle stenches better than the next man. After all, I'm a student of mammals, and appreciate the fact that most mammals live in an outrageously rich universe of smells. The mammalogist's call of duty requires the occasional sniff of a scat or scent gland, and the quest for specimens necessitates close encounters with road kill and other ripe carcasses.

But a night of sleeping in that stench had crossed my threshold of tolerance. There was no choice. Whatever it was, and wherever it was, I had to go under and drag it out.

I changed into my field duds, fetched my enormous 2 million candle power spot light, and stuffed a 12-inch forceps, and 2 plastic grocery bags into my back pockets.

A half hour of belly crawling took me beyond the plumbing and ventilation to a space beneath the bathroom, and as the dust settled I saw the ground littered with little bundles of yellow fiberglass insulation and the shredded remains of the box of rat poison.

The dirty work hadn't even started when the spot light started to fade. I had to get out while I could still see. I humped back to the entrance at remarkable speed for a codger. There my granddaughter handed me another spotlight.

Starting over again, I illuminated my destination in 10 foot lengths and groveled in the dark to the littered dirt. (This light had limited power too).

Hmmm. The insulation between the floor joists was sagging in places. I rolled over on my back, and pulled back a corner of the insulation. Acorns, a couple of mummified mice, and a dried cat turd spilled before my face.

In a dozen places the woodrat's zoological collection was sandwiched between the floorboards and the insulation, and the stashes were connected by tunnels through the insulation. This was the resting place for dead mice in the crawl space. The rat also had a fondness for millipedes and cat shit.

Finally, I found the source of the stench. Swaddled in insulation was a soggy and maggot-ridden dusky-footed woodrat.

I felt a little sad that it had to end this way, because I never met a zoological collector I didn't like.

Oven-lovin' drummin' rodent

We'd spent a long day in the field coming and going, setting camera traps, and coming and going.

One liability of codgerdom is forgetfulness. Retrieving forgotten or misplaced gear probably added an extra mile to our peregrinations, but it didn't matter. No one was in a hurry. Nonetheless, by late afternoon we were all dragging, and whether we needed it or not, it was time for a shower. It took an hour to sweep up the rat shit and chlorox the shower stalls.

Rich grilled the tri tip to perfection over "Cowboy Charcoal", a new product that deserves mention as a brilliant marketing ploy. We expected mummified cow flops, but the charcoal was just pieces of old barn boards and fence posts.

It was a splendid meal -- red meat, brie and cambazola, fresh asparagus, and a tossed green salad. Anti-cholesterol tonics included beer, red wine, tequila, and single malt Scotch.

We were thoroughly enjoying the repast and our own engaging conversation when we heard a sound like someone practicing drum rolls. It was coming from the oven.

I opened the door and there was an oven lovin' drummin' rodent.



It was our old friend the dusky-footed woodrat in a luxuriant nest of cotton stuffing plucked from the lodge's chairs and matresses. The second oven compartment contained a king-size nest.



We shut the doors and resumed our conversation, but the rodent continued to distract us with periodic drumming. Our intrusions and remarks about her boudoir were getting pretty silly when we realized we were missing a camera trapping opportunity.

Rod baited his set on the floor with a carrot, and I propped my camera inside the oven. Soon we saw the flash going off through the cracks, and decided to give her some rest.

We retired to our sleeping bags outside. If you are wondering why we didn't use the available beds, well, the rats had already claimed them.



The next morning we found that Rod's camera caught the drummer making off with the carrot.



My pictures showed her sitting demurely in her nest, but when I got home I managed to erase them by mistake.

Fortunately, Steve had the foresight to photograph the rat in the stove (above). Thanks, Steve. And thanks to Rich and Rod for the other photos.

The cat's ear

The camera trapper's occasional rewards are usually a meager number of decent pictures, and by that I mean well-framed images of the animal in a visually pleasing setting. The best wildlife pictures are taken by people who control the shutter themselves. Camera trappers want dazzling pictures too, but by playing out a kind of frontier fantasy they choose to do it the hard way. Because the odds are against them, they're often happy with less. Like this bobcat's ear.

Until this picture, only 3 carnivores had passed the cameras at Point Reyes National Seashore. That's a small percentage of almost 2000 photos taken during 215 camera trap nights (# of cameras x number of nights).

The best carnivore photo -- of a long-tailed weasel was a thrilling surprise. A raccoon's rear end, and a partial view of a striped skunk weren't worth keeping.

Any picture of a bobcat though is a welcome event, even if it's just an ear. This cat stood still long enough for the camera to take 4 pictures of ears and whiskers.

The camera set on this trail was the most productive of the ten sites. I didn't get any mountain beaver photos here, but there were numerous pictures of brush rabbits and a large woodrat, not to mention a few pictures of shrews and a red salamander.

The image speaks to me. "If you want a better picture, dummy, move the camera back."

That would be hard to do because the trails are narrow in that tangled thicket. If I try for bobcats at Pt. Reyes in 2008, I'll find some trails that are in the open.

Amberrat on my workbench

It's been a year a half since I banished this wood rat from the shed for messing with my tools, and using the workbench as a latrine.

When we dragged the picnic table and chairs to the shed last Sunday, we were again assaulted by the smell of wood rat piss. The workbench was piled with scattered tools, crisscrossed with rodent tracks, littered with rodent turds, and blotched with dried rodent piss. If the dust could tell a story it was an epic of rodentdom.

Conclusion: another rat and several mice have moved in, or they're making nocturnal visits to reestablish the latrine on my workbench.

I scrubbed it all down with disinfectant, and must comment on the super-glue like tenacity of the piss. It had welded the rat turds in place. I removed all but five, which I left as a monument of sorts.

That night I surfed the web and found Chris Clarke's excellent post about Joshua trees, desert woodrats and solidified wood rat urine -- or amberrat -- which is definitely worth a read.

Then I found Joe Eaton's article on the use of amberrat as trail rations.

It's true. Some starving 49's thought they had found an Indian's cache of peanut brittle in Death Valley, and -- you guessed it -- tried eating it. It was a chunk of amberrat the size of a small pumpkin, which means it had some age on it. Needless to say, the dark inclusions didn't taste like raisins, and when the nausea passed, the party decided to seek vittles elsewhere.

They were lucky they never found out what it was.

A ratty flashback

Ever since discovering the screech owl nest I've been scouting for nest cavities of other owls.

I'm about to give up. With the exception of the fortuitous encounter with the saw-whet owl, none of the tree cavities I've staked out during the past 2 weeks have yielded anything but deer mice and wood rats.

These pictures were from the most active site. A gopher snake was resting quietly at the base of the tree when I arrived. As it parted ways it occurred to me that I might be wasting my time. The snake might have eaten the occupants, but then again, maybe the snake would come back and eat the occupants after I left. Now, that would make a story.

Three days later there were 44 exposures; 14 were of deer mice, and 9 were of a wood rat. The rat and mouse visitations were separated by a couple hours.



The wood rat must have found the quarters a little cramped.



Nonetheless woodrats and deer mice cohabitate in the rats' stick nests. In fact, the coastal subspecies of the California mouse (Peromyscus californicus) was dubbed "parasiticus" because of its habit of living in nests of the dusky-footed wood rat.

The Allegheny woodrat, on the other hand, may not be as mouse-tolerant. If you'll excuse a flashback, I'll explain.

Many years ago a senior colleague of mine at the National Zoo had an uninvited dinner guest in the form of an Allegheny woodrat. This was shortly after Guy had moved into a partially renovated cottage at the zoo's Conservation & Research Center. Aware that the rodent was the previous occupant, and perhaps with a twinge of guilt, Guy offered it some hamburger from his plate.

Guy related the story in my office the next morning. After going to bed that night the rat had lived up to its moniker of "trade rat". It had deposited several pieces of plaster on the floor near the dinner table. (There was apparently a large supply of the relics of the lath and plaster walls under the house.)

Might the rodent become a nuisance? I asked. He didn't think so. The completion of the dry-walls would create a rat-proof boundary.

The dry walls were completed a few days later, but the rat kept showing up at dinnertime and continued delivering its nightly gift. Guy's amusement quickly wore off. I knew the game was over when he came puffing into my office one morning and deposited a bag of broken plaster on my desk. He explained that this vast amount--enough to fill a 2 lb coffee can--was deposited just last night.

It was time to catch the rat.

I live-trapped the rodent, and put it in a large cage of 1/2" hardware cloth in my chicken coop. In due course it made a respectable nest out of shredded feed bags and -- you won't believe it -- its own fecal pellets, which it heaped on top of the nest box.

The rat was particularly fond of animal protein. It tackled chunks of ham fat with the ferocity of a predator, literally throwing itself against the mesh, pulling the scraps through the mesh, and dragging them into its "lair".

Curiously, no mouse was permitted to share its domain. It promptly dispatched trespassing mice, and incorporated the carcasses into the pellet pile, which became a grotesque collection of fly-blown mouse mummies.

The rat thrived for 6 months, and then one night I left the cage open, thinking it might return for a day or two to the familiarity of its old digs.

Apparently it never looked back..

Such are the flashbacks after a bad day on the camera trapline.

The end of the experiment (for now)

To bring you up to speed -- in the two previous wood rat blogs I recounted several of my embarrassing experiments on the climbing ability of a local wood rat. Because I had misinterpreted the photos and made incorrect assumptions, I was blissfully pursuing an experimental path of self-deception. Then I realized I had underestimated the rodent's gymnastic skills. To wit, it had been shimmying up a 3/4" pipe and negotiating the overhang of the bait station. So I used a "squirrel baffle" to prevent the trickster from reaching the bait station by the "impossible route". That experiment demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the rodent had shimmied up the 3/4" post rather than climb down the 2" PVC pipe, as I had been mislead to believe. That's where we left off.

I still harbored a belief that the wood rat could "chimney stem" down the inside of the PVC pipe. As mentioned, he had never descended the pipe, either inside or out, to reach the bait station. But I thought he could do it. He might need to build confidence using the tube horizontally before trying to go down it vertically. With the squirrel baffle on the post, the gently inclined PVC pipe was the easiest route to the bait station. (I didn’t think he was desperate enough to try jumping the 28-inch span). I hoped of course to get that one shot of the rat entering or exiting the pipe.

It rained that night, and when I checked the camera the next morning, two pictures showed the rat stepping off the pipe. It seemed to use the PVC as it would a branch.




Another picture however looked like the rat was peering into the tube.



I looked inside the tube. It was still coated with dust. If the rat had passed through, it would have been swabbed clean.

So I fastened the tube to the overhead branch -- the vertical access route. I was leary he might shimmy down the outside of the tube, so I jury-rigged a baffle from a plastic milk container. There was another potential flaw in the set-up. In an attempt to surmount the milk container he might drop to the top of the squirrel baffle below. From there he could climb up to the bait station. To prevent that scenario I suspended the bait station at the end of the tube, and removed the vertical post.

The peanut butter was untouched the next morning. The baffle had worked. I turned off the camera thinking the experiment was over. But when I came to collect the camera the next day the peanut butter was gone! Wonder rat had circumvented the baffle on the second night, and there were no documenting pictures. The inside of the tube was still dusty. If only I had a camera trap that shot video!

I consulted with neighbor Richard, who advised me to replace my shabby plastic baffle with a two-pound coffee can.

The new baffle did the trick. The next morning the peanut butter was untouched. I had enough. The question of chimney-stemming would have to remain unanswered until some later date. I just can’t believe that this wood rat can’t pass through a 2-inch pipe, but for some reason he wouldn’t have any part of it.

Reflecting on all of this I thought about the advantages of a camera trap that uses video.

That night I was sitting at the kitchen counter as my wife was cooking dinner,

"You know, sweetie, if I had a video-camera trap I could get some fantastic footage. It would be pretty neat seeing that rat in action, wouldn’t it?"

"Yeah, that would be nice", she admitted. "But it would be nice to see the leaking roof get fixed too."

Obviously she wasn't buying it. I guess my timing was off.