Since I placed my trail cams in a new location last week, I wanted to get up there to see how they were doing. Sometimes a spot looks like it has potential but turns out to have one of the worst kinds of problems: too many activations caused by vegetation blowing in the wind. Another time I had a location that had zero activations in a week -- no animals whatsoever, not even a bird or butterfly. The worst though, was a location that captured nothing but dragonflies and thousands of wind-activations.
Usually a wind-activation is the result of something in front of the camera, anything from a plant you didn't notice (or that blew into the frame after setting up the cam), to bushes that seemed innocuous when you set up the cam on a day with little or no wind, but which tossed like crazy later on and set off a couple thousand "empty" frames.
When I got my SD cards home and saw that one cam had 591 captures, and the other had 2,118, I knew right off that I had a wind problem -- although neither involved movement in front of the camera. Instead, both were caused by movement of the tree I'd mounted the cams on. Although it was somewhat tedious to sort through all those frames, I at least got some decent captures (video below).
Because of recent issues with my bike tires (my new pump and innertubes have arrived, but my new tires won't come till Monday) I didn't feel comfortable riding all the way to Mt. Tam, which is how I usually prefer to get up there for cam-checks. Since I was driving the car I figured I might as well bring my DSLR and poke around the mountain a little bit. My first stop was to check out a large patch of calla lilies, but only a few were in bloom. I continued out that trail a little bit in the hope of spotting a hunting bobcat, but no luck there.
I continued up to Rock Spring and hiked down the Cataract Trail a ways to look for calypso orchids and fetid adder's tongue. I didn't see orchids in any of the usual locations, but I was glad to see that the fetid adder's tongue was still in bloom. It's still early for the orchids, which often bloom into April. In the past I've found them as early as February 20. That was 2016, and this year is no 2016, flowerwise. The forest seemed quite dry.
