Yesterday I put eight of my ten camera traps up. The camera traps are intended to give me an idea of the relative activity levels of different predator species in the habitats used by my tommies. As I said in an earlier post, mother tommies’ behavior should vary according to the predator assembly they are dealing with: if there are lots of large predators mothers should prioritize their own safety, but if there are many small predators mothers might spend more time and energy protecting their offspring.
The camera traps are Scoutguard SG550s ($200.00 retail if you want to put one up in your back yard). They are triggered by heat and movement. I have them set so that when they are triggered they take two photos in rapid succession. Then they reset and cannot be triggered for 30 seconds. Hopefully these settings will strike the right balance so that I am getting good photos of my predators without filling up the memory cards when a herd of zebras or cows decides to camp out around it. We’ll see.
Putting the traps up was hard work. I had the steel casings equipped with hardware so that I could mount them on steel poles that I would hammer into the ground. Problem: the ground is hard and I have the arm strength of an infant. The hammering was probably pretty comical. The poles also tended to go slanted if I stopped steadying them with my left hand, which was inevitable because my right arm was spent after about three and a half swings so I always ended up switching to a two-handed pounding approach. I imagine I looked a lot like some primitive and mentally-impaired primate, only less adept:
Blairopithecus hard at work
Most of the poles ended up pretty cock-eyed, but still vaguely oriented to an area where animals might walk.
I think the angle will give the photos an artsy feel
The four that I saw today were still upright also, so that’s a good sign.
Before I left I tested the cameras in the office and in my back yard. I leave you with a couple photos from the tests. Hopefully by my next post I’ll have some more exotic photos to show off. Come on, aardvark!
4 comments:
I'm eager to see the fascinating wildlife you see every day! I wish we could visit you! I love you and hope you're getting along well.
Love,
Dane
I'm excited for the slanted ones.
The poles and the slanted camera made me laugh. That's how most of mine looked as well during the field season.
Photos from the first three days of trapping are in! I will post them soon, but I thought you guys might want to know that only ONE of them was too crooked to do its job properly. And it wasn't even the one in the picture.
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