The Joy of Trail Cams
All photos and videos in this column are from trail cams on the mountain placed and monitored by the Scotts. (If you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader, you may have to click through to see the videos.)
Almost as soon as they settled into their new home, back in 2009, our caretaker couple — Troy and Paula Scott — installed three strobe cameras. As avid hunters, they were interested initially in monitoring the movements of deer over our square mile of mountain property.
But soon they were capturing other creatures on their cameras, especially at night. Paula quickly became the chief monitor of their cameras, and when the company that produced their strobe cameras — Wild Game Innovation — came out with video cameras, they purchased three of them.
Paula admits that monitoring the cameras throughout the year is addictive to her. She used to dislike winter, once hunting season ended, but now it’s her favorite time of year. That’s because she uses bait to attract a wide range of wild creatures. She hangs a discarded deer carcass by a wire from a tree limb, so it swings a foot or two off the ground directly in front of a camera.
Of course, when bears are abroad, she does not use bait, although she did get a bear on the surprising date of February 27. And that’s what she likes most about the cameras. She learns more about animal behavior especially with the video cameras. In less than two years, she has gotten excellent footage of 15 species of birds and mammals.
Her favorite sighting so far has been of two different fishers that kept returning to the bait. One especially she describes as a “camera ham.” It swung back and forth with the carcass and often faced the camera. Then it turned on its back and rolled with the carcass. All the while it seemed puzzled by this strange source of food.
Both Paula and I have had excellent sightings of fishers in our woods. We’ve also seen tracks in the snow. But the video footage of fishers gave us a whole new perspective on fisher behavior.
Watching two raccoons and an opossum feeding peacefully around the carcass was another surprising behavior observation for Paula.
“I figured they would be competitive and they weren’t,” she says.
She was also surprised that an American crow fed beside five turkey vultures.
And both she and Troy were amused and chagrined when an old hen decoy they had used to unsuccessfully attract gobblers years ago proved irresistible to six jakes at a time. She even has a video of a gobbler displaying in front of the decoy.
Besides the fishers, her other favorite sightings are several photos of a bobcat at the bait at night and a lovely video of a red-tailed hawk near the bait during a snowy day. I’m particularly fond of photos she has of red and gray foxes, despite the presence of coyotes in our area, because coyotes are supposed to prey on red foxes.
Recently they used a camera to find out what was chewing on their new deck at night. As they suspected, it was a porcupine. Instead of killing it, they put a cayenne pepper mixture on the deck and so far it’s kept the porcupine away.
Their original plan, to document deer, also has worked out well. They even have videos of a buck making a scrape and putting his scent on an overhanging limb. Paula cautions, though, that putting the cameras out during deer breeding season gives a false sense of the number of bucks in a hunting area because bucks come in from adjoining properties in search of doe.
When targeting deer, they put the cameras along obvious deer trails, leave them for a month, and then switch them. For other animals, it depends on the time of year and how successful the location is in capturing wildlife footage.
Learning how to obtain good images during the day means positioning them so that the sun doesn’t shine on them, otherwise, you end up with a lot of white footage, she says. You also have to hope that a bear won’t take issue with them. Paula’s brother-in-law Jeff had one ripped off and stomped into pieces, but so far they’ve been lucky. Only two cameras have been pulled down but not damaged.
Paula says in summary that, “these cameras, if you utilize them all year, pay for themselves. If you have a deer interest, as we did, and invest in cameras, you see it’s just not deer out there. It’s a lot of things.”
a bobcat at the bait pile
Discovering what’s out there has tempted folks throughout the world to invest in trail cameras. One writer friend, Ken Lamberton, recently posted on Facebook a beautiful photo of a cougar on a fallen tree in the Mule Mountains of southern Arizona where he and his wife Karen live.
Speaking of cougars, Valentine, Nebraska businessman Kirk Sharp has 16 trail cameras posted around his ranch, which is a half-mile north of Rocky Ford on the Niobrara River in the wild north-central section of Nebraska. One of his cameras, mounted on a wooden fencepost, captured a cougar closely chasing a deer at 11:00 p.m. It was the first authenticated footage of a cougar chasing prey in the state, although since there was a deep canyon directly in front of them, no one knows the outcome.
James Hill III of Waterford Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania wondered what was taking the suet at his feeders. Hill, the founder of the Purple Martin Society, has a 150-acre wildlife sanctuary. Although he figured a bear was probably doing the damage, he put out a camera with a motion detector. To his surprise it was a sow with two cubs sharing the suet with them.
“I was astonished,” Hill says. “I never figured there’d be a family. I’m happy to have them.”
While individuals are enjoying their cameras, and finding out more about wildlife on their properties, so too are wildlife biologists. For instance, two researchers from Texas Tech University — Blake Gresham and Phil Borsdorf — have been studying the endangered lesser prairie chicken at The Nature Conservancy’s Yoakum Dunes Preserve near Lubbock, Texas. By erecting remote video cameras on 15 water tanks at the Preserve, they photographed 800 visits to the tanks by lesser prairie chickens, disproving the belief that the birds don’t need open water because they get enough moisture, except during drought, from succulent plants, insects, and dew. Gresham and Borsdorf found that hens especially needed extra water during nesting time because it takes a cup and a half of water to produce a clutch of ten eggs.
gray fox
Conservation organizations are also starting to utilize trail cameras. A recent article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Biological Sciences entitled “Community Structure and Diversity of Tropical Forest Mammals: Data from a Global Camera Trap Network” recounts the results from the world’s first global camera trap mammal study. It involved nearly 52,000 candid shots of 105 mammal species from seven tropical sites around the globe.
The camera traps, low on the ground, made no noise and emitted no light so poachers couldn’t spot them at night. But in Africa, elephants, like our black bears, don’t like strange objects in their territory and tried to crush them.
Jorge Ahumada, the lead author and an ecologist with the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM) says that “The study shows for us that for the conservation of these mammal species, size matters; …the size of the protected area and the degree of human activity around it have an effect on the …diversity of these animal communities.”
The Central Suriname Nature Reserve in South America had the most diversity — 28 species — while Nam Kading in Lao Public Democratic Republic in southeast Asia had the least — 13 species. The other sites included Uganda and Tanzania in Africa, Indonesia in Southeast Asia, Brazil in South America and Costa Rica in Central America.
The study ran from 2008-10 under the auspices of Conservation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Because of its success, they have expanded it into 17 wilderness areas in Panama, Brazil, Peru, Madagascar, Congo, Cameroon, Malaysia and India. Ahuda says that these cameras “are reliable observers of the state of our world,” and the study concludes that “camera traps are a useful, efficient, cost-effective, easily replicable tool to study and monitor terrestrial mammals.”
They are also useful for studying large raptors. Dr. Todd Katzner at West Virginia University, along with Kieran O’Malley and Rob Tallman of the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, is using them for estimating the size of the wintering golden eagle population in the Appalachians including Pennsylvania. The bait is road-killed deer dumped into a small clearing surrounded by tall trees where golden eagles can perch. The bait should be opened along the legs and abdomen to draw in common ravens and other birds that, in turn, alert eagles. Like Paula’s bait, it must be wired to keep it from being dragged off by other animals. The camera should be oriented to the north because that ensures that the sun is to the side or behind the camera, thus preventing white photos. The study is run from January 1 to February 15, and we are hoping to find a good place on our property for Paula to set up a camera.
Hunters in the United States, who first popularized the use of cameras to monitor deer presence, should feel proud of how useful these cameras have become in wildlife monitoring and conservation.
Ghost Bird
Barred Owl by lezzie5 on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
It’s a cold, crisp morning in early November. Robins call and sing in the sunlit treetops at the edge of First Field. As I head down our woodland road, first one and then a second common raven flies low and “bonks.”
Above Waterthrush Bench I hear the continual ticking of songbirds near or in a medium-sized hemlock tree across the stream. In the still sunless hollow, I look and look and still can’t see any little bird, yet the ticking continues.
Finally, I give up and am about to walk away, muttering about my aging eyes, when I notice what appears to be an odd-shaped piece of wood on a lower branch of the hemlock. Slowly, I raise my binoculars and peer at it. To my great delight and astonishment, a barred owl seems to be looking at me except that its eyes are closed. I speak to it and its eyes blink open. For long minutes we stare at each other. Then I move on, and the barred owl remains on its perch, seemingly unperturbed by the human who has interrupted its sleep.
Still marveling at its calm demeanor and superb camouflage, I wonder how many times I have not seen a barred owl in our forest. If not for the ticking birds, I would have continued on my walk, unaware that what I think of as the “ghost bird,” was nearby.
I remember our first year here back in 1971 when a barred owl sat in full view on a branch beside our road throughout the summer months. We didn’t realize then that the owl would be only a memory for years to come. We often saw or heard eastern screech-owls and great horned owls but never the “who cooks for you, who cooks for you’all” of barred owls. After all, great horned owls are major predators on the slightly smaller barred owls. So are raccoons, larger members of the weasel family, and large hawks, all of which live and hunt in our hollow.
Barred owl in flight by Curtis Ellis (CC BY-NC-ND)
Still, we do have ideal barred owl habitat — a mature mixed deciduous and coniferous forest on either side of a small stream along our hollow road. The barred owl’s favorite food items — small mammals and birds — are also plentiful, especially chipmunks, deer and white-footed mice, as well as birds up to and including ruffed grouse in size.
Knowing all this, I expected to see more barred owls in the hollow. Instead, my absolutely best sighting took place about 20 years ago in the ice-enshrouded woods of Sapsucker Ridge one January afternoon, well within the more than square mile of territory a barred owl pair needs to survive the winter. Two inch long icicles hung from every tree branch and vine that gray, cold, misty day.
This time an American crow was the messenger, cawing and flying up from the trees ahead. Scanning the area it had just vacated with my binoculars, I spotted a large, plump figure perched on a tree limb a hundred feet away. I thought it was a great horned owl because crows had often alerted me to them. Instead, I was surprised by a barred owl — a puffy vision decked out in white, gray, and brown feathers, its horizontal barring around its collared neck accounting for its common name.
It turned its head back and forth on its swivel neck, then bent and peered down at the ground, no doubt hoping to surprise a mouse. I knelt, one knee in the icy snow, and studied the owl for ten minutes, admiring its nearly rounded-off, soft-looking head framed with what looked like enormous fur muffs, and its dark brown eyes accentuated by large, oval facial disks.
At last it turned its back to me, and I could see some black mixed with brown on its stubby tail before it leaned out and slightly down and launched into silent flight, propelling itself out of my sight.
Sleepy barred owl by Signe Brewster (CC BY-NC)
Standing upright at 18 inches, a barred owl weighs a mere 1.5 pounds and its rounded wings stretch 40 inches. Among the owl species, only great horned owls are larger than barred owls in the eastern United States.
Once barred owls (Strix varia) resided east of the Great Plains from the boreal forest of Canada to southern Florida, but recently they have expanded into portions of western North America, including the Pacific Northwest where sometimes they displace and hybridize with the closely related and much rarer spotted owls (Strix occidentalis).
They are supposed to prefer large trees in old forests for nesting, and here in Pennsylvania barred owls do inhabit wooded ravines and “nest in highest densities in old-growth forests of the High Plateau,” according to Gerald McWilliams and Daniel Brauning in The Birds of Pennsylvania. But they are also found in forested swamps, wet, mature woodlands, and even in cities and farmlands. Although they are less abundant than great horned owls and eastern screech-owls, they breed in every Pennsylvania County except Philadelphia.
Barred owls need large trees with cavities for nesting but will use old hawk, crow or squirrel nests too. They will even nest in nest boxes on occasion, such as the barred owl that nested in a box in Loyalville, Luzerne County, McWilliams and Brauning report. Even though they sometimes reuse the same nest for as long as ten years, they have been known to alternate occupancy one year or several years with red-shouldered, red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks and great horned owls in so-called “partnership” nests.
Barred owls also like to inhabit a forest with an open understory because it makes hunting easier for them. In addition, the closed canopy of an old-growth forest provides more regulated temperatures as well as protection from excessive mobbing by small birds. But often they remain attached to an area even as it changes around them, for instance, even staying in a woods while it’s being logged.
Young barred owl yoga by Matthew Paulson (CC BY-NC-ND)
If there is enough food, both the larger female and the male of a pair will inhabit their 695-acre-or-more territory all year. They are presumed to be monogamous and even though they call throughout the year, they call more frequently prior to egg-laying in late winter and early spring. That’s when you are most likely to hear dueting between a pair lasting two minutes and consisting not only of their familiar hooting but “loud and prolonged outbursts of cackling, laughing, and whooping sounds delivered very rapidly and interspersed, as well as ending, with the familiar ‘ho-hoo-ah,’” Massachusetts ornithologist William Brewster once wrote, adding a reference to “a prolonged and cat-like scream.” It’s enough to frighten naïve campers into thinking a mountain lion is nearby.
Regarding their courtship rites, Edward Forbush, writing in Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, recounts how a pair of barred owls perched in low branches over his campfire and “nodded and bowed with half-spread wings, and wobbled and twisted their heads from side to side, meantime uttering the most weird and uncouth sounds imaginable.”
The female barred owl lays two to three white eggs as early as December in Florida and March and early April in Pennsylvania. She also incubates the eggs from 28 to 33 days while the male brings her food. After the eggs hatch, the female broods the altricial young for two weeks and the male delivers the food at the nest in a bill-to-bill exchange with the female. Then she tears up the food and feeds it to their nestlings. She also does a little hunting on her own, but after two weeks of brooding, she does a lot more hunting. Both parents then drop food into the nest and the nestlings are able to eat it by themselves.
When the nestlings are between four and five weeks old, they leave the nest but they can’t fly. They either perch on the nest rim or they climb trees or branches by using their beaks and talons, grasping the bark in their beaks and walking their feet up the trunk while flapping their wings. At ten weeks old, they can make short flights and gradually lengthen those flights.
Barred owl parent and fledgling by Minette Layne (CC BY-SA)
The fledglings stay together and near the nest site for awhile and the adults continue to feed them. That’s when Tom Kuehl, president of the Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology, first learned of a nesting pair near his Murrysville, Westmoreland County home. As he wrote in PSO Pileated, the excellent newsletter of the Society, “I walked out our side door at 6:00 a.m. [in late May]… as I made my way around the house, I started hearing loud hissing noises… I looked up and in spite of many leaves, I quickly found three fledgling Barred Owls… For the next two weeks we [his wife Janet and he] enjoyed the dawn and dusk hissing and antics of the fledgling Barred Owls. More active at dusk, they performed flights across the yard, tree to ground, then tree to tree as darkness approached.” The Kuehls never did see the parents, although Janet was scolded by an adult when she tried to walk on their woods’ trail.
Most documented young barred owls disperse a mile to 38 miles from their nest site, but one young barred owl that was banded in Nova Scotia in 1999 was recaptured in January 2000 960 miles away.
Barred owl in a beech tree (detail) by Michael Hodge (CC BY)
Unlike many bird species, Breeding Bird Surveys from 1966 to 1996 showed a slight increase in barred owl numbers. But that was 15 years ago. Since then the opening and fragmenting of forests has increased in Pennsylvania, providing habitat for the more aggressive great horned owls. In addition to too many roads that have fragmented our habitat for decades, we now must contend with industrial wind farms fragmenting our remaining intact mountaintops and natural gas well pads doing the same in our state forests and parks. Add to that the death of our state tree — the hemlock — from the hemlock wooly adelgids, which destroy the most common conifer in our mixed forest. All of these factors bode ill not only for barred owls but for all the creatures and plants that thrive in mixed coniferous/deciduous unfragmented forests.
Marcia with golden eagle (photo by Todd Katzner)
Marcia Bonta is the author of nine books and over 300 magazine articles. The blog portion of this website includes her popular “Naturalist’s Eye” column from Pennsylvania Game News, reprinted here on the 1st of each month. Unlike typical blog entries, these columns are written months in advance, usually about things that happened during the previous year. Read more…
