Fresh Air

 

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Phone snaps from our Sunday hike. I'll take fog over smoke any day.

Funny how it was so hot up there--baking hot and dry--and yet soon after we got back into the fog at home we had to turn the heat on to warm up the flat.

Sunday morning at Rock Spring, and not a single car.

View of East Peak on the way back down the hill.

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Coyote Stories

I've got a lot of video clips from the month of September, but not enough time yet to put them into a single video montage. The coyote only wandered through the camera traps once all month, pausing to lap up some creek water from the little (and still shrinking) pool.

I like to remind myself that coyotes, and all other wild animals, live without agriculture. They find what they need as they travel about, roaming the Earth like Jules in Pulp Fiction wanted to do. 

The gate to Rock Spring was closed all weekend, but you could still park and hike in. Pam and I were surprised and a little pissed off to encounter about a dozen mountain bike riders illegally descending the very narrow Old Mine Trail. Farther up the hill you could see where bikers have been abetting the erosion of a hillside by carving their own routes. Even on the trail, they managed to knock out a couple of wooden water bars, abetting erosion there as well.

It was smoky when I drove up on Saturday, but the air was supremely clear when we hiked up on Sunday. Despite the lack of smoke, the fire danger remained. 

Speaking of fire danger, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry last night when I watched a 60 Minutes segment where a scientist put in layman's terms to the President of the United States a very clear and rational explanation of how global heating works and the dangers it presents to our way of life, and the President's response was that the Earth will cool off soon. Does he mean because winter is coming?! Is he telling us some kind of inscrutable coyote story? To see the President of the United States engaging in magical thinking to guide national policy on the defining threat of our time was just mind-blowing. 

Anyway, I'm glad I was able to spend a little time in nature this weekend. This new camera location turned out to be pretty good. I'd already seen that deer had been browsing on the plants, but I couldn't tell until I saw all the camera footage that they were continuing to do so. The most obvious sign had been some Indian hemp whose leaves have been gnawed down to its tough stem, but the deer have also been eating the sedges, the ferns, and even the thorny blackberry plants.

I had to take this kestrel frame off the video footage since I didn't get a still shot. The kestrel somehow triggered the camera to shoot three still frames without getting caught, but when the video kicked in, there it was.

Before I left the area last week I placed a couple of windfall bay nuts on the log. This video clip shows who got one of them. I'd placed the other one in a nook, and it was still there. Maybe it'll sprout next spring. This time I placed several acorns on the log. 

The water hole has shrunk quite a bit. I hope it lasts until the rains come. The pool was so small that I moved the camera to a new spot, thinking this viewpoint wasn't going to work much longer.

It was nice to catch the gray fox with the new camera location. If you look behind the fox you'll see some branches that I placed across an opening in the hope of steering the critters between the two rocks in the center of the frame, but the critters often wriggled through the branches instead, probably preferring their usual route. 

I don't know why this honeysuckle decided to hog the camera on the final day of the month, but I wish it would have waited until after the bobcat came by to drink from the pool.

And the owl too. I've been catching this owl for a while, but the old camera location was too far away to see it very well. Unfortunately, I don't know owls well enough to do more than hazard a guess as to what this guy is: screech owl? saw-whet? spotted? I doubt I'll ever get a daytime image of it, but hopefully I'll get another chance without a honeysuckle vine obscuring the view.

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Foxy

 

It was more foxy than usual around the pool the last couple of weeks.

One difference, though, is that the fox was always alone. Another is that it's showing up in the daytime.

Sometimes I can't figure out how an animal that appears to be heading directly for an area covered by another camera manages to escape without being camera-trapped. This fox is leaping toward the pool, but it didn't trigger the pool cam.

Often, an animal will light up one cam...

...then trigger a second cam.

This is where the fox ended up when she jumped off the log. In the past, this cam often didn't get triggered at times like this. The pool is to her left, but she has never stopped there to drink. As I was biking up the mountain I was surprised to hear a fair amount of running water in one of the roadside drainages, so I imagine there are still plenty of watering holes for a fox on the move.

The pool keeps getting smaller, but the raccoon continues to check it out. It's not coming to drink, but to hunt.

This guy chattered at me from high in a nearby tree almost the whole time I was hanging around the camera trap area. I recorded some video on my phone to capture all the sounds -- the scolding squirrel, the laughing acorn woodpeckers, the drumbeat of the woodpeckers making acorn holes, the loud calls of a nearby pileated woodpecker, and numerous small songbirds companion-calling.

This big buck made his first appearance.

Stepped in for a close-up.

Here, a different cam had caught him ten hours earlier.

And here he is trailing a doe.

I've always liked the general view of this cam, but it seemed to be missing a lot of shots (for example, when the bobcat was on the log, this cam did not fire), so I moved it to another tree slightly closer to the log. When I got the memory cards home, though, I could see that the cam had suddenly been doing much better. Why, I don't know. Hopefully I won't be sorry I moved it. It sometimes seems like whack-a-mole to get the position just right. I also brought my yard-cam up, so there are now four cams in this one little area.

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Dinner Bell

 

We've been adopted by one of the neighborhood cats, and I've been trying to get her to come when I make a non-verbal cat-call (if there is a word for that sound, I don't know it). She must not have been nearby because I didn't hear her footfalls in the leaves in the neighbor's yard, or even a meow to let me know she was on the way. It was last call, though, so I set out some food in the hope she would get it before the raccoons found it.

No such luck.

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At the Pool

Camera Trapping on Mt. Tamalpais

 

Bobcat

Gray Fox

Raccoon

Blacktail Doe

Coyote

Screech Owl

Sharp-shinned Hawk

Red-tailed Hawk

Raven

The Day the Earth Stood Still

N95 Weather

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Favorite Visitor

 

I love seeing all the critters--owls, red-shafted flickers, band-tailed pigeons, deer, raccoons, and gray fox. But what always makes my day is when the cams catch a bobcat.

This wiry little guy showed up several times over the last few weeks, all but once during the daylight hours.

These two shots were taken a week apart. The earlier shot is on the bottom. In the top image you can see how the pool of water got smaller despite the storm that passed through and set off the big lightning fires. We got so much rain at my place in San Francisco that I was actually a tiny bit worried the camera in this spot was going to get swamped. When I saw yesterday that the pool had shrunk, I moved the cam to a new spot where the view will continue to include the water.

I strung together three 15-second clips below, two of which show different angles on a pair of foxes playing on a log. The third is the bobcat making a night visit and apparently being put off by the glowing red lights on the trail cam.

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Interspecies Envoy

 

I placed the full bird bath saucer on the ground to see what I might catch (and also because I was afraid raccoons would pull it down), but other than the neighborhood cat (who did not drink), the only visitors have been a couple of late-night raccoons. The camera trap has caught birds bathing in little plant-pot saucers in the past, but I have yet to catch a bird ever using the bird bath, which has been in our yard since 2002! It has sentimental value to my wife, however, so we've kept it around. And like I say, the raccoons seem to like it. Unfortunately I have to empty it periodically to clear out the mosquito larvae. 

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Tam Cam July

In my post earlier in the month I said I thought this trail cam location had potential, and I sorta cursed when I later got this image of a bobcat apparently bolting through so quickly it's head was cut off before the cam could jump into action. I have the cam set to fire off three frames when it's triggered. This was frame number one, and it seemed impossible to me that the bobcat wouldn't have triggered the camera sooner. I didn't figure out how it could have happened, aside from an insanely slow camera trigger, until I returned to the scene yesterday, July 31.

I had two cams set up, with one on the log and the other on this pool. For part of the month I had both photo and video working on this pool, but I ended up with so many useless frames that I turned off the video. It's a lot more time-consuming to review video in Lightroom than to review still images, and video also eats up the trail cam batteries more quickly.

What kind of owl is this? Check out the video below to see what happens next.

Yesterday I brought a third trail camera along, even though I wasn't sure where I wanted to place it. Biking up toward Rock Spring I returned to the scene of my recent fox encounter to look for anything obvious about the location that would be of enough interest to foxes that I could expect to catch them again. Seeing nothing more than a faint animal trail on the very steep slope, I didn't think it was worth setting up a cam there. 

The log cam has been catching foxes fairly often anyway. The video shows a nice little interaction between two foxes who meet in apparent joy.

All the other usual suspects also showed up, including mice and band-tailed pigeons, which are briefly included in the video.

When I swapped out the memory cards and batteries yesterday, I also re-synchronized the timestamp on each of the cams. Unfortunately, each cam gains time at a different speed. This image of the fox heading downstream past the pool and toward the log was stamped at 9:51 p.m.

And this one of the fox crossing the log was stamped at 10:04 p.m. I doubt the fox actually dawdled at the pool for 13 minutes, but who knows. I wish the timestamps were more accurate.

 

All three bobcat captures (July 9, 23 & 26) occurred in daytime. I suspect the bobcat in this image leaped up to the log from the downstream (left) side. More of this cat appears in the video.

What I also found yesterday is a nearby upstream ledge which probably explains how the bobcat's head was already cut off in the first frame at the top of this post. Unlike the foxes, the bobcat doesn't traverse the log from end to end, but leaps onto it.

The foxes always seem to get on the log from one of the ends, but they sometimes exit by jumping off. This one appears to be checking out something of interest at the pool.

Here it is almost noon when the bobcat comes down for a drink. Unfortunately I had turned off the video on this cam, but the third shot in the series clearly shows the cat dipping its head to drink. 

Having found nowhere better to put the third cam, I decided to set it up to overlook the pool and the log. I set its video to run for six seconds instead of the twelve that runs on the log cam, and already I regret doing that. I'm thinking about going back up tomorrow to set all the videos for 20 seconds. 

Even though it will be a pain to go through them all, and I'll have to swap batteries more often, it's probably worth the trouble to get the one-in-a-hundred (or several hundred) captures that would make the enterprise more fun and interesting.

Mt. Tam was gorgeous yesterday, with warm sunshine (which we haven't experienced in my fog-bound Sunset District neighborhood in recent memory) and best of all, hardly any bugs. On my last trip to swap out memory cards and batteries, I rushed through the task, swatting at various gnats and flies that swarmed around my face and tried to bite my legs. This time I sat rapturously next to the creek with a breeze singing in the trees and numerous birds flying about, in no hurry to leave.

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