The motion-triggered, infrared trail cam which the Scotts baited with a couple of venison rib cages really brought video pay dirt this month: coyote, bobcat, raccoons, opossum…
and a very hungry fisher (or possibly two different fishers — can anyone tell?).
March has been an active month for wildlife — especially after dark. The woodcock returned, and I heard a saw-whet owl calling, too, along with another creature of unknown identity. I captured it all on my portable digital recorder and included it as the first part of a podcast episode I called Creatures of the Night:
Another great game cam moment from Troy and Paula. We’ve had fishers on the mountain for at least seven years now — here’s Marcia’s column about the first sightings — but this is the first video footage (there was one blurry still photo from another game cam earlier this year). The fisher seems simultaneously frightened and fascinated by the swinging deer carcasses that the Scotts used as bait.
Fishers, of course, had been extirpated from the state for over a hundred years, and were reintroduced by the Pennsylvania Game Commission in 1994. Wildlife biologist Tom Serfass, who consulted on the reintroduction, told our Audubon chapter at a program last spring that Blair County fishers were more likely to be from a southern population started by a smaller reintroduction effort in West Virginia a decade earlier.
The West Virginia reintroduction project came to halt due to public concern about fishers carrying off children, something they have never been known to do. The Pennsylvania program, by contrast, was hugely popular, possibly in part because the PGC did a better job in selling it to the public in advance, saying that fishers would help keep the porcupines under control, and thus protect trees. In fact, we did find several porcupine carcasses the winter and spring after our first fisher sighting… but we do still have plenty of porcupines. We are more anxious to see them kill off the feral housecats, which are continually restocked here by barn cats in Sinking Valley. Between the fishers, the coyotes and the great-horned owls, it’s a wonder any cats survive at all, but one or two always do.
Troy and Paula say their next goal is to get footage of a bobcat or a coyote. But who knows — someday maybe they’ll get a cougar on film, too!
In Paula and Troy Scott’s latest trail camera experiment, they positioned an infrared video camera at the intersection of a couple of trails in Plummer’s Hollow and stationed a deer-shaped archery target as a decoy for whatever might come along. I think they were hoping for footage of bucks attempting to spar with it, but instead they got three, 30-second videos of a young black bear having his way with it.
Black bears often attack things that people leave behind in the woods, such as hunters’ blinds and large pieces of trash.
The latest episode of my Woodrat podcast on Via Negativa consists of 35 minutes of natural and anthropogenic sound recorded from my front porch between dawn and full daylight, 7:00 to 7:35 a.m., on Wednesday, October 27 — the music of the mountain. Click through to listen.
Plummer’s Hollow coyotes are a pretty silent bunch, for some reason, so when I heard them calling tonight around 11:00, I rushed outside with my video camera — my only portable audio recording device — to record what I could. They sounded like they were right above the barn.
A mother bear with two cubs on Laurel Ridge, along Guest House Trail, around 10:30 this morning. (Read all about it at Via Negativa.)
Last year around this time, I got a shakey video of a big male that Mom and I ran into on Dogwood Knoll when we were doing our IBA point count, so I called it Bird Count Bear. (What are the chances it’s the father of this morning’s cubs?) Here’s that video:
Finally, back in April 2008, I got a video from my porch of a mother with yearling cubs crossing the road. I didn’t have a video camera at the time; this was shot with the video setting on my regular camera, so the quality isn’t great. Note the cinnamon color of the one cub.
I’m going to try to do a better job of posting wildlife (and possibly other) videos shot on the property. I’ve created a Videos category and added the link to the menu in the header.
I shot this video from my front porch on Tuesday morning, June 8. Pileateds are common here because we have an old forest with lots of standing dead and dying trees full of their favorite food: carpenter ants. They’re really neat birds, and I end up mentioning them often in The Morning Porch. This video doesn’t capture their oddness in flight, but it does show calling, drumming, and excavating.
Plummer's Hollow, Pennsylvania 