Another telling tail

Only 23% of the 77 pictures at this night set had animal images. The rest were blanks.

That's a rather crappy success rate.

Something was triggering the cam.

Was Bigfoot toying with me again? I think not.

More likely small cryptic critters were triggering the sensor and vanishing like Tinkerbell.

They can be hard to see. You have to click back and forth between images on a computer screen.

Then your eyes can see changes in the scene. Often the change is in vegetation caused by a gentle breeze, but sometimes you can see a disturbed path in fallen leaves, the footfalls of a phantom passerby.

I zoomed in on the edge of this picture and there was a long rodent's tail.

There's only one rodent in the upper Yuba River area with a long tail like this, the Western jumping mouse (Zapus princeps). All the other species have tails shorter than the head and body length.

Plus, the coloration seems right -- "pelage on sides usually washed with lemon yellow" (Verts and Carraway, Land Mammals of Oregon).

I can't really prove it to the satisfaction of all, so you call me a bluffer, BS artist, or worse.

(Thanks to Don E. Wilson (aka Batfinger) for confirming my hunch.)

A fleeting glimpse of tail

A fleeting glimpse of tail is sometimes enough to identify a faceless subject.

In this case it was Herman the Ermine, also known as the short-tailed weasel (Mustela erminea).

It's a new species for my camera trapping life-list.

The location was the bank of a steep falling creek that feeds the Yuba River's north branch.

Weasels work creek bottoms on their foraging rounds, but I attribute this picture to serendipity.

Here's a full-frame camera trap view of the site on June 21 when I set the camera.



And here's what it looked like 24 days later.



Yes, growing vegetation can be a problem when you leave your cameras out for even three weeks.

It took me an hour and a half to find one of my other 5 cameras in the area.

My GPS told me I was on top of it, but it wasn't there until I pushed through a patch of Delphinium that had grown up around it.

The other cameras operated for a total of 96 camera trap days.

I got lots of pictures of deer mice and chipmunks, but no mountain beavers climbed the alders to reach the apple and birch scent lures I had painstakingly attached.

Herman the ermine was the only picture that stirred me, but only a little.

I'm too old to attempt a back-flip for a fleeting glimpse of weasel tail.

A beaver dam bipass

The Sierra Nevada beavers are now using PVC. It's a labor-saving innovation.

Okay, I'm pulling your leg.

I took this photo yesterday in Plumas County, where a homesteading beaver tempted fate by damming the creek next to the local landowner's house.

The "environmental logger" who lives across the road learned of his neighbor's resentment, and advised him to use PVC to trick the beaver.

The PVC device is a called the Clemson beaver pond leveler, but its really just a bipass of sorts.

According to the beaver specialists, "Beavers repair dams in response to the sight, sound, and feel of running water. The Clemson leveler transports water through a dam in such a way that beavers cannot sense it and as a result, beavers don't attempt to plug the leveler."

It doesn't work all the time, but so far it has given this beaver a stay of execution.

Skinny cat nails plump bunny

The young bobcat caught the brush rabbit on the evening of June 11.

I couldn't see the rabbit when I scoped the pictures on the camera's LCD the other day, but there was no mistaking it as a rare event when I saw it on the computer screen this evening.

I think the dead rabbit is the same one the cameras photographed between May 31 and the morning of June 9. (I have three cameras on this trail.)

No bunny however was photographed after June 11 and until I checked the cameras on June 30.

The rabbit had the habit of loafing on the trail. I got multiple images of it.



This trail seems to be on the cat's regular beat.



Between June 10 and June 23 the cameras photographed the same cat on 5 occasions.

Look at the it's right foreleg and you will recognize a distinctive broken band of dark fur.



It's the same in all photos, except the one with the dangling rabbit.



My guess is that the hunter is the same skinny bobcat seen in the other pictures -- a young adult probably from last year's litter.

Bitter cherry sauce

I was on the trail with Fred the other morning when I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small creature eyeing me through the thimbleberry bushes.

As it humped down the trail its black-streaked tail gave it away -- gray fox. Not a surprise.

Fred of course was oblivious until he stumbled into the fox's scent trail -- apparently it had been enjoying the company of a pile of horse pucky.

Fred took off like a bloodhound.

The chase was a short-lived phenomenon. Reynard abandoned the trail about 50 yards away and disappeared into the underbrush.

Fred returned with gleaming smile and hanging tongue.

It was then that I noticed I was standing in a small thicket of wild cherry trees -- bitter cherries, Prunus emarginata, to be exact.

Laden with fruit.

I hooked a limb with my stick, and was soon lost in a reverie of browsing -- the yellow and red fruit were highly edible, and Fred whined for me to share the fare.

Yes, Fred eats sour cherries. It's a bit odd.

Well, let me just say that I developed a powerful craving for bitter cherry sauce on vanilla ice cream.

The next day I picked a half gallon of the seductive fruits, and the redhead pitted the batch and cooked it into bitter cherry syrup.

It's a good excuse to eat ice cream and completely nullifies the effects of all that cholesterol.

The tail wasn't enough

...but was the rest of the meal too much?

I wonder.

When you find half an alligator lizard on the trail, you know the old tail autotomy trick didn't work.

Did the catcher of the luckless lizard lose its appetite or did something scary interrupt its meal?

Stinkarella and skunklets

Stinkarella took the kids for a stroll three nights ago (June 14), and walked right past the camera on a jeep trail.

The site is in the chaparral a couple hundred yards from my house -- the same place where something nailed a striped skunk over a month ago, and where Fred got his lessons in rattlesnake avoidance.

I am always pleased to get pictures of spotted skunks, especially when it's a family like this.

I get spotted skunk images here quite often, especially in mixed conifer-oak woodland, but mothers with young in tow can be seen only a few weeks during the year.

Last year I recorded a mother with skunklets on June 25th.

On a related topic, I have to confess that the three cams at "el paso de las pumas" were a bust.

I pulled them this afternoon, and I'm taking them to greener pastures in Sierra County this weekend.

The redhead and I'll be attending a reunion of San Francisco State University biology graduates.

We're meeting at the SF State Field Campus, where I'm supposed to demonstrate my camera trapping obsession.

I'll set 5 cameras in preparation for the Camera Trapping Workshop there next month.

The reunion should prove amusing. Most of us are geezers, and we haven't seen each other for decades.

Anyway, I am back in commission, so I'll be posting more often than during the past month.