Two different bears

A few weeks ago two bears made an appearance at a camera near the house.

The cinnamon-colored bear was well-groomed and muscular, and the pictures tell me it had a calm but cautious presence.

If this was Scruffy, whom I encountered several years ago as a cub, she had grown into a fine specimen of womanhood.

Blackie on the other hand had a clownish bearing.

The camera was attached to the tree with a bungie cord and armed with a spiked bear guard.

Cinnamon approached and examined it with an inquisitive look. 

The camera's position didn't change, so I know Cinnamon didn't touch it. 

Blackie also examined the cam.

It  pawed the camera and tipped it toward the ground, and the cam snapped three pictures. 

The spiked bear guard did its job, so no damage was done.

But the interesting thing is the different way the bears reacted to the cam.

Maybe it as just a difference in mood or hunger, but animals differ in disposition.

Maybe they just have different MOs.  

Rescue practice

Blogger needed emergency rescue yesterday.

While their engineers geeked madly to get it going again, and bloggers like yours truly were harboring unkind thoughts, our local rescue squad whacked into view down slope from the house.

The chopper hauled a long line attached to a coffin-like litter.

OMG -- was I witnessing a human drama?

The vultures were also out in full force. Was there a corpse down there in the manzanita?

Grabbed the camera, tripod, telescope (and a cold beer) and hurried outside.

The pilot lowered a coffin-like litter into a clearing; the hovering chopper descended to within 50 feet of the ground, and then rotated.

Someone climbed half way out of the cabin -- apparently peeking down.

Then the chopper ascended and headed down the canyon. As the coffin turned I could see it was empty.

It was just practice, and they practiced in the same place all afternoon.

Late in the night Blogger was working again, but they are still trying to recover lost posts.

I was lucky -- I only lost a few comments to the previous post.

Never forget your wedding date

The codger held forth at an event for a worthy cause last weekend.

The subject of course was camera trapping, with some illustrated biographical recollections of how zoological obsession took hold of an otherwise normal yours truly.

The event took place at the very church where the redhead and the codger took the sacred vows of matrimony nearly 45 years ago.

I was actually preaching from the pulpit of the church when a slide popped up of the dazzling redhead and the boy-codger at the alter.

Since there was a chronological series of events I had posted the year of the wedding next to the blissful photo.

Now you won't believe it, -- well, if you know me, you will believe it . . . but I didn't get the year right, and the redhead piped up in the audience to set the record straight.

Everyone knew the redhead was right, so I played the fool, and the laugh was on me.

(PS--The redhead just read this, and informed me, "You didn't play the fool, you were the fool." I tell you, its tough being a camera trap codger.)

 

Corpse in the nest box

Neighbor Richard's titmice are nesting again and he and his Mrs have been viewing the family life daily on their TV monitor. (They're using the same Harbor Freight set up I was using for the screech owl).

I've been remiss in maintaining my own titmouse box.

It's been hanging by a thread of weathered bungie cord since last fall, swaying in the breeze.

Believing it was unsuitable and abandoned, I took it down for repair on May Day.

Pried it open in the garage, and to my surprise found 6 warm eggs.

I got another surprise when I put my glasses on.

The mound of fluff next to the entrance was a mummified titmouse.

Makes you wonder.

Did it die last winter or early this year?

Did the surviving member of the pair take another mate? Or are they a new couple?

The only thing we know for sure is that a dead conspecific didn't deter the new pair from getting on with nesting.

I repaired the box (without the use of hammer), and as the resident pair chirped nearby I secrured it to the live oak in the potting shed.

[May 4 update -- all is well -- the titmice are brooding.]

 

Unexpected rat of marsh and swamp

Sacramento Valley farmers call them rice rats, a fitting but incorrect name for a rodent associated with rice fields.

True rice rats (genus Oryzomys) are natives of the southern US and beyond into South America.

Most likely these guys are Norway rats, stowaways from Asia that arrived with Spaniards and English seafarers.

In this neck of the Sac Valley they are abundant and at home in water and on land.
























Many times I've glimpsed them in the beams of head lights on the road shoulder.

And I've flushed many a barn owl there too, which leads me to speculate that the rats may be a fatal attraction and one reason why Barny takes so many hits on the roads.

From our camera trapping results I can tell you that these rats also live in the riparian woodlands.

They're tough, and they're here to stay.

Does the wild bear poop in bed?

We all know the wild bear poops in the woods, but does he poop in his bed?

I stumbled upon this old bear bed beside a large ponderosa pine in steep canyon country.

Ponderosa pines sometimes have a distinctive elevated berm of shed bark around the trunk, and disturbance of the zone is easy to see.

This tree had such a disturbance -- a clear round depression the size of small bear right next to the trunk.

Normally a bear bed looks like someone tried to dig a hole with a rototiller.

This bed wasn't fresh because it was covered with pine needles.

Fred wouldn't lie down in it, so I put my rucksack there for scale.

Cool enough. I was pleased with the find.

As I stepped away from it however, I exposed a well composted bear pie under the needles.

It seems the bear hung its hiney just over the rim of the bed, and therefore came close to committing the unforgivable -- pooping in bed.

Wetland engineer

Location: Paradiso de los Mapaches

Beaver visited the set 7 times, and left 10 pictures over 3 week.

This was the only full body shot. 

In another photo it was munching a stem of cat tail. 

These are "bank beavers" -- they lodge in burrows dug into stream banks and levees.

My fellow camera trappers at Camtrapper.com post some very good beaver portraits with fair regularity.

For a monogamous rodent, however you'd expect to see more family shots. 

Seems they sleep together but work independently.