Patch Update # 4

The lower deer trail is getting regular wildlife traffic now, which is quite a change from last summer and fall when it seemed to be a dead zone.

Thirty photos were taken since my last update on the winter solstice. Three of these were blanks, i.e., the camera fired after the animal moved out of the frame. That's an acceptable success rate of 90%.

Squirrels, a deer mouse and a flock of turkeys walked past the camera. The photos weren't worth showing.

The gray fox spent 3 minutes sniffing about the trail (8 pictures), and the last picture of the series is the alert stance at the top of this page.



Three hours later and just before dawn this fox or its lookalike cocked its leg and pissed on the base of the tree. This was 12 days after the dog marked the same spot, but I suspect it was in response to some outrageously stinky Billingsley's Flat Rock Predator Bait I had dabbed at the base of the tree and a light garnish of dry catnip.



Two days later at 6:26 in the morning the fox indulged in a brief frenzy of neck rubbing on the same spot.



A spotted skunk also visited the site on three different nights and sniffed at the predator lure. Though the neck fur of these little charmers sometimes has a yellowish tint, I have never caught them in the act of "getting it on".



What I want to know is what happened to the bobcat? Now there's a species that plays hard to get.

The call of smelly crab

Not back to the normal codgerly routine yet, but thought this frame was worth posting. Though I got 43 pictures in two nights, none captured foxiness as well as I would have liked.

What the picture shows is that gray fox is powerfully attracted to smelly old crab shells. It came to the lure the first night. If I had baited the site with only a mouse or a chicken neck, I probably would have waited several days for the fox to show.

By the way, here you can see the volcanc capstone that is so prevalent in this area. The gray fox is quite at home here, and next to striped skunks is my most frequent camera trap visitor.

Solstice patch visitors

I couldn't take Terrierman's winter's solstice advice today, because I don't have a dog.

Yet something magical happened. Dogs joined me in my morning camera trap beat. I didn't know I had company until I switched on the camera and viewed the images. I don't know whose dogs they are; I've never seen them before.

But there they were, a few minutes ahead of me on the trail, pissing on my scent patch.

Egg yolk perfume

Last week neighbor Richard asked if I had any use for boiled egg yolks. "Sure", I said. I hadn't trapped any mice in the garage lately, and I was out of chicken giblets." I'll try them as bait." Which brings me to the subject of deviled egg sandwiches. Back in the Pleistocene, when the codger was a kid, mothers sometimes unwittingly subjected their children to unpleasant experiences in school. In those days it wasn't "uncool" to bring your lunch to school in a lunch box or a paper bag. But deviled egg sandwiches were NOT considered "cool", because they would "stink up the cloak room". Those "stinko kids" were ribbed so badly they begged their mothers never to put another egg sandwich in their lunch bag.

Carnivores of course find many smells interesting and seem to love things that smell nasty. So I sprinkled the crumbled egg yolk in the recesses of the boulder -- the same place the bobcat visited last week.





Two nights later, the ringtail and the skunk smelled the eggs. Ringtail got there first, and spent most of the first 6 minutes hunkered over the eggs in a kind of reverie. Its eyes were closed, and it looked like it was drifting off into dreamland. In other shots it looked like it might be rubbing its cheeks on the rock, that is, scent marking. It deferred to the skunk, who sniffed around for 3 minutes and moved on. But the attraction on the boulder was strong. Five minutes later ringtail was back with the dreamy look.

I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe it had indigestion or just decided to take a nap.