Nocturnal

Hedges and Maybe Fledges?

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It’s been a mixed week with the trail cam this last week or so. We’ve either had two happy successes in the garden or one success and one disappointment and we can’t work out which.  The undecided is our baby blue tits.

We’ve been filming the adults going in and out for a few weeks now. They seemed to be doing a good job feeding the babies and we could hear chicks chirping. Then suddenly about 9am last Wednesday the adults started flying back to the box with caterpillars, stopping, peering in and looking confused. We’d had the trail cam on the box continuously and this was a very marked change in behaviour. For the first couple of mini video clips I thought great – because the adults were hanging around outside, clutching the food which made for much better shots. But after the 20th clip of the same thing, we started to worry. We also couldn’t hear the chicks tweeting any more. There was no evidence on any of the films of predation (next door’s cat had been a likely candidate, but couldn’t reach the box with the chicken wire over it). Could the chicks have all fledged and the camera just missed them leaving the box? Have they just died in the box – why would they, when the parents were doing a good job with the food?  Here are a couple of clips of the confused looking adults.

The adults seem to have stopped using the box now, so we could check to see if there are dead chicks in there, but while we don’t know for sure, there’s still hope that they did fledge and it’s a happy ending. The adults are still feeding in the garden and disappear into various trees, so it could be there are chicks hiding amongst the leaves. There’s a lot of general chirping in our apple tree and next door’s damson tree, so fingers crossed they made it.

The definite happy event is that our hedgehog is back! He or she may have been around for weeks, but as we’ve had the trail cam pointed up for bird activity rather than down on the grass we hadn’t realised. So the upside of the end of the bird box activity was that I tried filming downwards at night instead of up! And lo and behold the hedgehog trundled into view.  The first film is a bit blurry – wrong lens or LED setting or something technical (blame the operator!)

Second attempt is a bit sharper and I’d added a bowl of catfood as a bit of a temptation which seemed to do the trick.

Previous years we’ve had a pair of hedgehogs (but of course no trail cam to record them), so fingers crossed we have two this year too. So hopefully more hedgehog action to come.

If anyone can shed any light on the blue tit behaviour – any thoughts would be much appreciated. It will be disappointing if they’ve fledged and the camera missed it, but not as disappointing as if they didn’t make it at all. One final happy thought though – when up this morning before 5am to empty the moth trap and check the hedgehog cam, I spotted what looked like a pair of Long Tailed Tit chicks in the apple tree – so one happy little bird family in the garden at least.

 

Of Mice and Apples

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I decided to play dirty this week in my ongoing attempts to capture wildlife footage with the trail camera, so offered bribes to the mice in the garage. We had a load of apples and some cheapo cake from the supermarket,  so I thought I’d see what the mice made of them. The mice clearly don’t take after their garage owner, as they went straight for the apples first and only ate the cake once all the fruit had gone. They must have been really keen on the apples too, as they triggered the camera within 5 minutes of me putting the food out. The first film shows one determined to drag a piece of prize fruit back to his nest – it took him 4 attempts before he managed to carry one off. I am slightly worried that this now means I’ve got a stash of rotting apples somewhere in the garage, so I hope they eat all they’ve carried off.

The video was shot using the 460mm lens and isn’t quite as sharp as I’d like (having seen other bloggers’ much better images), but it’s not too bad.  I’m still practicing getting the camera set at just the right distance and angle. I did find a very useful video tutorial from Wildlife Gadgetman, which suggested tying a piece of string to the camera, with a knot at the correct distance to aid positioning. A simple trick, but very effective.

The second video I liked just because of the mouse’s nonchalant flick of his back foot as he trundled through the food. Both videos suffer slightly from glare at the beginning of each film as the infrared light flares before it settles down – I have at least seen this on other people’s videos though, so it’s not just our camera!

The third video shows how good (to my mind at least) the colours are on the daytime shots. This clip was taking earlier today on a very grey morning, but the colours are still good. The pink bits are some berry flavoured suet pellets (not sure the colour is entirely natural though) that the blackbird seems to be particularly enjoying.

Today the postman delivered my new 250mm lens, so I have high hopes for better close-up shots. The camera’s out with the new lens as I type, so hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be able to post some better videos and/or photos – although it may depend on what I find in the cupboards to bribe the mice with tonight!

After Dark

/ nrowberry / 2 Comments

So my mission to master the Trail Cam goes on! It seems there’s a lot more to it than just pointing the thing vaguely in the direction of some animals, but I guess if it was that easy, we’d all be professional wildlife photographers!

Latest attempts have been at filming our little mammalian friends after dark. We’ve known for a while that we had mice in the garage (merrily munching their way through the bird food supplies), so they seemed a logical subject for our nocturnal trials.

Hopefully what the garage footage shows is a typical house mouse and not a baby rat! For some reason mice in the garage seem quite cute, but rats are less appealing.

We then turned our attention to the garden at night. Although we do get hedgehogs in the garden they are hopefully still hibernating somewhere and though we’ve seen foxes out the front, we’ve never seen them in the back garden. So the best bet for nocturnal mammals was once again rodents (and next door’s cat) and so it proved to be.

Again I think it is a mouse and not a juvenile rat, but if anyone can confirm either way, it would be much appreciated. The images still aren’t perfect by any means, but I’m hoping that with a bit of practice we’ll be ready to take better shots once the hedgehogs emerge.

So I am making progress and learning a few things along the way, most of which are fairly obvious when you think about them – but clearly I didn’t think about them first. For instance if you leave the camera out to run through a very cold night into the next day – the first few hours of daylight photos will suffer from the dewy condensation on the lens until the sun warms it up enough to clear. I have a lot of very foggy photos of early morning birds due to this! Ideally you need a fair amount of sun (virtually non-existent here since we bought the camera), but you don’t want to be pointing too much up at the sky. Videoing a swinging bird feeder produces (not surprisingly) lots of films of swinging bird feeders, not necessarily with any birds (258 videos one day alone). At night you need to balance the strength of the infra-red light against the distance to your subject – too strong and too close and it’s a white-out; too weak or too far and it’s a blurry image.

Hopefully spring will come soon bringing more photo ops and tempting this fair-weather blogger out into the garden to rummage through the weeds for invertebrate subjects – I’m missing my little spineless friends!