Over the past week and a half we’ve had a couple of nice journaling days outside and have also made significant progress building our three bird houses, which we hope to deploy next week before Spring Break.
But we’ve also had a couple of rainy classroom days where we could (finally) dig into the trail camera footage that we’ve captured now that the camera is better situated.
Some of the findings were entirely predictable, though still pretty spectacular. It was no surprise that we have lots of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) on campus. We had more deer triggers than anything other than joggers and dog walkers. Some of the deer even posed quite nicely for the camera.
We were excited to get more coyote (Canis latrans) footage, none more exciting than this next clip, a gift which keeps on giving.
While we have no otter sightings at Otter Pond (in fact, I haven’t seen one since mid-December), we were quite surprised to capture a beaver (Castor canadensis) on several occasions. This little buddy has been a class favorite, a featured subject on many journal pages. Several students plotted all of the beaver sightings onto a timeline to see what we might discover about its movements. Using the camera’s meta-data, we know it doesn’t come every night, but when it does it seems to transit from the pond to the creek somewhere between 2:00am and 5:00am. At first, we thought we might have had two beavers making the same transit within ten minutes of each other, but on further inspection it looks like the same beaver triggered the camera and then sat still for ten minutes before resuming his journey and triggering the camera again.
We also have a set of possible beaver captures that we have left labeled “mystery” because the camera position only captures a sliver of the animal’s back. These shots may help fill in the picture, showing the animal moving from the creek to the pond around midnight. We talked today about how none of us have seen beaver sign anywhere along Nancy Creek; then again, we haven’t been looking, so we’ll add that to our list for the coming months.
Rounding out the picture, we have three different raccoon (Procyon lotor) triggers and one opossum (Didelphis virginiana).
Finally, we have one other animal labeled “mystery” that moves through very quickly and doesn’t return particularly good images. But it’s intriguing—long and sleek and low and moving briskly, quick enough that it has almost left the frame before the video capture begins. The still image captured in front of the video clip is intriguing, however; is this perhaps American mink (Neogale vison)?
Unsurprisingly, the students had a great time looking through the footage. I asked them to pick a focus—perhaps a single species or a single night—and use their journals to make sense of and record their findings. What can we learn, and what new questions do we have? For instance, we have 53 different camera triggers by white-tailed deer, but to what extent do these capture the same individuals on different occasions? How can we tell? The kids made some cool discoveries—like the fact that most captures recorded animals (across different species) moving northbound along Nancy Creek—but their journal pages also lacked a lot of clarity in terms of being observational records that would make sense beyond the moment. The next time we can’t go out, I’ll have a new batch of footage ready and we’ll try again.
postcards from the outback 