Trail Cam Tuesday

For a change of pace, i set my trail camera to video, and it was a good decision!  the rational was that instead of capturing one angle of blurry, out of focus animals i could choose from multiple frames, take screen captures, make gifs, or even post whole videos of interesting interactions.

this week, my camera was graced by a porcupine, and two young bucks; a proud, but modestly antlered 5-point and a nervous young spiker.  screencaps have been provided below, though i shall include full-video links to all the encounters at the bottom of the post.

the nervous spiker

if you are concerned about the well-being of these deer, do know that in the state i live, bucks must have at least 6 points to be legally taken, so these youngsters are for now safe from the glances of hunters.  but also i feel it must be mentioned that by and large, hunting is far more humane than raising animals for meat on farms, and these animals will have lived full lives, filled with warm summer days, nectar flavored flowers and rich autumn acorns.  Should the day come that these noble beasts end up on a hunter's table, they will have had a life brimming with experiences most of their domesticated brethren have never known.  this blog is 100% pro subsistence hunting, though definitely not anti-agriculture, and not all farmed animals live their life penned up either. 

the proud 5-point

 so withut further ado, i will supply links to the videos, although the porcupine strayed very close to the camera and he is an over-exposed mess of spines.

                           

Trail Cam Tuesday

A good chunk of my spare time is spent out in the woods, but unfortunately i cant spend all my time there.  Being as it is, last year i purchased a trail camera to first of all keep track of what wildlife visits my backyard, but also found that it is a great way to get candid shots of your pets as well

granted, this shot has been cropped, but this is one of my favorite pictures ever of my dogs, Myth (the large Samoyed) and Chia (the little Eskie-mix)

I enjoyed harvesting these images from my remote cameras so much that this fall i bought a second one, and now i have one for backyard and for the forest to capture a greater variety of wild creatures, and not just the backyard fare of squirrels, crows and opossums ( though these are animals i always enjoy seeing, no matter the setting)

every tuesday i check my cameras, and so on tuesdays i will post what good images were captured that week, although, some weeks i get nothing but overexposed blurs of animals i can make hide nor tail of, so Trail Cam Tuesday will be an on-and-off venture

for the week of 11/29/2016

note the strange furry crest on this opossum's back

   

a normal looking opossum

we see two different shots of opossums!  my favorite animal! unfortuanely both my trail cams are cheap and the quality of nighttime photos is poor, so i had to really doctor (or butcher) these images to make them more discernable.

the first image is quite bizarre, since the face is obviously an opossum, but the back of the animal resembles a skunk, with those raised bands of white fur and black down the middle.  opossums do not have such markings and dont raise their fur in that manner either, so perhaps a skunk was walking behind the opossum as the shot was taken or perhaps i have photographic evidence of some cryptic skunk/opossum hybrid haha!

one day hopefully i can invest in a trail camera that takes decent night shots, but that day is long away i'm afraid.   the most interesting animals we have around here by and large are nocturnal or crepuscular, and especially with how late in the year it is, the hours of daylight my camera has to operate at its best are few.  So as we near the winter solstice, heres to hoping for better shots and more hours of light in the weeks to come.

thank you for reading :)