The continuing quest

The biggest blue blossum (Ceanothus thyrsiflora) I've ever seen (uprooted by the storm)

The weather forecast was for sunshine on Thursday, so I drove to Arcata on Wednesday.

It drizzled on and off the next day.

Spring storms had uprooted a few trees, but spared the video camera in the fir tree.

When I reached it I saw worrisome droplets of water inside the Fresnel lens over PIR sensor, but my paranoid fears were for naught, the camera was still perched on the limb.

After unscrewing the lag bolt I took a close look at the tree vole nest, and realized something had destroyed it.    

The nest cavity had apparently been only an inch or two under the surface of the fir needles, but it was no longer a solid mass. The core of the nest had been torn apart. 

We retreated to the truck, uploaded 12 video clips to my laptop, and found only 2 contained footage of the vole.

The other clips contained other arboreal visitors.

What follows is not exactly action-packed, and the jury is still out as to the identity of the nest wrecker.

But if you want to see the voles and the suspects, have a look.

Black bear

This image of a young black bear is from the Chimineas Ranch, taken at set 551.2 last November.

Craig checked the camera in mid-March. The cams are often inaccessible in the winter, so its a long haul. But we've gotten over 4 months of battery life using 2 external D cells.

Twelve days after the camera was set the bear climbed the outcrop to reach the bait and eyed the camera.

Craig still has a few cameras to check in the back country at Chimineas, and  soon I'll also be checking the cameras in Humbolt County, as well.

"The dog is not for sale"

Oliver Gordon Young, April, 2012

Background: My friend Reno Taini and I recently had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Oliver Gordon Young. We had both read "Tracks of an Intruder" his 1967 book about hunting with the Montagnards of northern Thailand. Reno and I may fancy ourselves as "old Asia hands" , but Gordon is the real thing. He was born in 1927 into a Baptist Missionary family in a remote village in Yunnan, China, had Lahu wet nurses, and spoke their Tibeto-Burman language long before acquiring proficiency in English. Like most missionary families, his had a deep understanding of local languages, customs, and beliefs.   I'll write more about his life and times, but here I want to share his story about match-making for Teddy, his Lahu hunting dog.

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"Did you ever encounter indigenous breeds of dogs in the remote hills of northern Thailand", I asked.

Gordon answered without hesitation.

“Yes, there was a breed in the Lahu villages that looked like a small Alsatian – brown and off-white coat with pointy ears, but smaller and more delicately built, and the tail carriage was upright – not like an Alsatian”. 

“I had one named Teddy, given to me as a puppy, and he came from an excellent hunting dog line”.

“They’re known to chase game silently, and Teddy barked only when he cornered wild pigs and deer”.

Teddy watches a tame leopard cub at play with another dog 
(Photo by Gordon Young).

“Teddy’s favorite pastime was fighting stray semi-feral curs quite numerous in those days.

"I remember the time, just outside the compound’s gate, he had pinned a cur to the ground, and seemed to want to hear 'uncle' just one more time.

"I ordered him to ‘go home’, but he just looked at me sheepishly, wagged his tail that he’d heard me, and the theatrics continued.

"I ordered him again and he finally quit, but not before cocking his leg and peeing in the vanquished cur’s face.

"My wife was with me in the Jeep. We couldn’t believe that purposeful gesture.

"Teddy demonstrates the fearlessness of his kind for leopards. Other dogs would panic from just the smell of a leopard, dog's dread and most mortal killer in this area of the world"
(Photo by Gordon Young).

"I was smitten with Teddy’s breed, and considered it probably the best type kept by the Lahu people as hunting dogs. 

"I also wanted to find Teddy a mate, and maybe even start a recognized hunting dog breed.

"While conducting an ethnographic survey in the late 1950s I thought at last I had found the perfect match in a Shehleh Lahu village near Doi Mak Angklang in Chiang Mai Province.

"The dog was sleeping soundly in the shade of the headman’ s bamboo and thatch-grass house, and she was exactly what I was looking for.

"The chieftain said she was a good hunter, and she always obeyed when he told her to back off a cornered boar.

"The last Shehleh chief of the village many 
years after the bargaining. He is holding his 
musical gourd pipe" (Photo by Gordon Young)

“The more he talked about that dog the more interested I became.

“The chief had two good-looking daughters, rather buxom girls between 14 and 16 years, which is marrying age for mountain people, and as was the custom they served us a meal, hill grown red rice with a mustard green curry and a fresh-killed chicken.

“We were sitting round the hearth in his hut, and I offered him 100 bhat for the dog.

"It was a reasonable offer in those days, but he replied “Hpuh chi haw a-hpeh meh”, which means ‘The dog is not for sale’".

"Well, every man has his price, so I offered him 200 bhat, and again he answered, ‘The dog is not for sale’.

”My assistant, Chanu, whispered to me 'Wait till we finish the meal, and then offer him 300 baht'”.

"when we finished eating I made my final offer, and once again the chief repeated ‘The dog is not for sale’.

"I couldn’t believe my ears.

“I just offered you the bride-price! 300 bhat! Does it have to be in silver?

“I could have one of your daughters for that price. Do you mean that dog is worth more than your daughter?

"The chief replied, 'You can have both of my daughters for 300 bhat each, but I will never sell the dog. Hpuh chi haw a-hpeh meh!'"

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References
Young, Gordon. 1962. The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand. Siam Society, Bangkok
Young, Gordon. 1967. Tracks of an intruder. Winchester Press, New York

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Gordon and his daughter Debbie Chase for hunting down the family photos for this post.

"Trapped" -- a film about camera trapping

Last year, Emily Narrow wrote to tell me she was making a film on camera trapping.

Emily is pursuing an MFA in Science and Natural History Filmmaking at Montana State.

She wanted to use some critter photos from Camera Trap Codger, and of course I was happy to oblige.

She did a great job on that film, which captures the ups and downs of camera trapping.

Now she is busy with new projects.

"For my second year film", she writes, "I am coordinating with the National Park Service and the Yellowstone Association to make a film for them about Yellowstone in winter. That film should be finished around late spring/early summer. I'm also a junior producer on a science/natural history podcast called TERRA".

Enjoy.  

Bear hair and a Texas toothpick

A pile of hair is not a regular find on a country road.

Around here beverage bottles and aluminum cans are the usual findings, then food wrappers and gun cartridges, and finally the odd bit of clothing, discarded, lost from a pickup truck, or abandoned due to temporary memory impairment.

They all have their stories, but most are not particularly interesting.

But a pile of hair like this is a different matter.

The obsessive dog groomers who walk their pets on the flume trail never leave hair balls like this.

It was unmistakably bear hair, and Fred sniffed it with more than casual interest.

But why was it there?

Did a hungry coyote chew a patch of mouldering bear hide there on the road?  

Could the carcass be nearby?

I climbed down the bank into the chaparral, but failed to interest Fred in taking up a trail.

During the past two days he energetically examined two bear skids on steep road cuts in the canyon.

Now he was more interested in going home to be fed, and all I found were crumpled Bud Light cans.

I snapped a picture of the hair pile and made a parting poke with a stick.

That's when I found the Texas toothpick, one of the few unpaired bones found in the body of many male mammals.

Yep, it was a baculum, also known as the os penis or penis bone, a rare and auspicious find.

I took it and headed home.

Another Arboreal Adventure and PSA Syndrome

Sonoma tree vole diorama, Photographer Gabriel Moulin,
courtesy California Academy of Sciences Archives. 

Fifty years ago the red tree mouse diorama at the California Academy of Sciences looked like this*. 

Periodically I would visit and stand there spellbound.  

Like the mossy gym sock exhibited in the same hall, the tree mouse diorama featured an intriguing nest with red-haired mice disporting themselves like sugar plum fairies.

I knew that some day I would find one of those nests. I was certain that I would know one when I saw it. 

Little did I know a half century stood between my youthful ambition and its realization, but faithful readers of this blog already know the codger encountered his first red tree vole a couple months ago.  

It was a fleeting engagement and not particularly satisfying.

The nest was a pathetic example of mouse work, a paltry accumulation of fir needles balanced over a recess in the trunk, and the resident's activities were usually out of the camera's view.  

I needed to find a brood nest like the one above -- an overstuffed cushion of fur needles, a spacious stage where a mother vole performs her nocturnal ritual and little voles play in the moonlight.

A week ago we resumed the search and wandered the logging roads with slack-jaws and craned necks looking like crazed birders.      

Nests we found, and some were even in climbable trees, but all were beyond reach unless you had a cherry picker or a very well-trained monkey.

They looked like tree vole nests, but only a fool
or a monkey would climb them to find out.

The afternoon was wearing on and I was ready to admit defeat when we wandered off the road into a young stand of Douglas fir, and there it was about 35 feet above us --  a messy tangle of sticks and fir needles right next to the trunk. 

Fresh clippings and resin ducts told us the nest was occupied.

It was an excellent climbing tree with whorls of reasonably stout limbs -- living limbs mind you, not the rotten ones so common on older trees. Terry fetched the ladder while I admired the tree and yammered about its suitability.

My first ascent convinced me that the climbing path needed a haircut. So dense were the springy wire-like twigs that I felt like a Lilliputian climbing a wire chimney brush.

That done, I drilled a hole in the limb and screwed in a lag bolt mount.

The camera was a HD video cam -- a DXG 567v with a small IR array home-brewed by the talented camera hacker "EgbertDavis" .

I dropped the camera stem into the mount, adjusted the camera angle, opened the back one last time, and powered it up.

Having tested the camera on wood rats last fall, I knew the infra-red illumination wouldn't bleach the subjects at close range.

Terry and I made 5 camera trap sets that day, but this was the set that haunted my reverie as I drove up the Trinity River Canyon on my way home.

Then the car radio lost its reception and disturbing thoughts started to seep in.

Had I tightened the wing nut enough to maintain the camera angle? Would the wind buffet the camera, cause false triggers, and fill the SD card with useless footage? And how long would the batteries last?

Two nights later a big storm blew in off the Pacific.

I emailed Terry: "We've been getting heavy winds and rain, and I'm a little worried about that cam in the Doug fir. Hopefully it is sitting tight".

"We had wind gusts up to 40 mph", he answered "and last night got a big hail storm which lasted about 10 minutes".

I envisioned the fir's limbs whipping furiously in the storm, and then I saw the distressing aftermath -- a heap of broken boughs and my DXG lying on the ground.

Manic expectation, doubt, worry, disillusion, chagrin, and finally the blues -- this is the emotional roller-coaster called camera trapping.

As for the haunting doubt and worry -- I guess you can call it Post-Set-Anxiety Syndrome.

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*/ Of course, the wire mesh and support structure wasn't visible; the photo must have been taken when they demolished the exhibit.

2012 Camera-trap Photo of the Year kick-off

 PRESS RELEASE

16 March 2012

Caught on camera: Global search for the BBC Wildlife Magazine Camera-trap Photo of the Year 2012 begins

BBC Wildlife Magazine launches its 2012 Camera-trap Photo of the Year competition today, kicking off its annual search for the most exciting and revealing camera-trap images captured around the world.

The competition, sponsored by the World Land Trust and Páramo, is open to anyone working on a research or conservation project that uses remote camera technology. This year also sees the competition opened up to keen amateur photographers for the very first time, with the launch of a new British Wildlife category for anyone experimenting with remote cameras in the UK.

Entrants to the BBC Wildlife Magazine Camera-trap Photo of the Year competition can submit a maximum of 12 camera-trap images into any of the four categories:

·      Animal Portraits - Images taken during the course of your research which capture the character or spirit of their subject.

·      Animal Behaviour - Images captured during the course of your research which show interesting or unusual behaviour.

·      New Discoveries - Images should show something new to science, such as a species never before photographed in the wild or outside its known range, or behaviour never before recorded. The caption must make clear what the discovery is.

·      British Wildlife - Images must be taken in the British Isles by amateur photographers.

Sophie Stafford, Editor of BBC Wildlife Magazine, commented: “Remote camera technology is an increasingly important tool in conservation efforts and is helping to unravel the secrets of rare and secretive species around the world and close to home. This year, in response to reader feedback, we are delighted to invite amateur photographers to enter their photos of British wildlife. I can’t wait to see the results.”

The winner of each of the three ‘research’ categories will be awarded £1,000 for their project. The overall winner will be chosen from one of these three winners and their project will win an additional £2,000.

The winner of the British Wildlife category will win a top of the range Páramo Halcon jacket worth £310. The winners, up to three runners-up and up to six commended images in each category will be published in the December 2012 issue of BBC Wildlife Magazine and in a gallery on the BBC Wildlife Magazine website, www.discoverwildlife.com.

Entry is online at www.discoverwildlife.com/competitions, and all photos must be submitted by the closing date of 13 July 2012.

For competition rules and further information on how to enter, see the April issue of BBC Wildlife Magazine on sale 17 March 2012, or visit www.discoverwildlife.com/competitions

For all media enquiries, please contact:

Carolyn Wray

Press Office | Immediate Media Co

0117 3148812 | carolyn.wray@immediate.co.uk