Game Camera: May 2019

We’ve had a game camera for a year and a half now and it’s been intermittently recording the back yard for about a year. I say “intermittently” because I turned it off this past December (or thereabouts) and only turned it back on again at the beginning of May. Last year we got a nice video of a black bear roaming around our back yard, and any number of stills and short video clips of deer and rabbits, and once in a while, a bat. Not as many raccoons and so forth as you’d think.

So, anyway, it’s back out in the back yard after taking the winter off. We’ve got it set to take stills and short video clips when it detects motion. Once in a while we’ve gotten nice stills only to have the video turn out essentially blank, showing what happened just after the animal wandered out of shot. But on the other hand, now and then we get something like this:

This year’s batch had significantly more raccoons — one out of every three photos was a good sized bandit-masked critter, maybe the same one each time. We got a bobcat once, although blurrily, and we got a nice big black bear, although only on stills; by the time the video triggered the bear had stepped out of shot.

Aside: I turned off the game camera one snowy day when I heard squealing out back and looked out to see a weasel of some sort killing a rabbit right there on the snow outside my window. I decided I didn’t want to capture any wintertime kills and turned off the game camera. I grant you that nature (red in tooth and claw) can happen any time, any date, but for some reason, I just didn’t have the heart to look at any more footage of my wintry back yard after that.