Tuesday, October 3, 2017

A trail camera surprise

On Sunday (01 OCT) I retrieved the memory cards from my trail cameras.  It had been a month since I had last checked the cameras.  In that time one camera had recorded over four hundred images.  The other camera taken exactly nine hundred ninety-nine photos.

Of those 1,400 pictures the majority were of squirrels (Fox, Grey, and Red) and White-tailed Deer.  Raccoons and/or Virginia Opossum appeared on camera almost every night.  After being absent for much of the summer, Wild Turkey are again making regular appearances on camera.  A Red Fox appeared several times and a Coyote once or twice.  One image might show a weasel.

The most exciting photos were also the most surprising.


That's a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) coming in for a landing.  If you look closely, you can see that this hawk has something clutched in the talons of its right foot.  I'm not entirely sure what it has, but it could be a Red Squirrel.  While most people associate Red-tailed Hawks with open fields and roadsides, it is not unusual to find them in a forest, especially more open forests with widely scattered trees.


The hawk stayed just long enough to have three pictures taken and then disappeared.  this brings my tally of species recorded on trail camera to at least seventeen.  I wonder what will show up next?


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