Game Cam

Some recent game cam photos:


A sleek bobcat (Lynx rufus).


Murphy's law of game cameras:
You get mostly southern views of northbound animals. (Coyote, Canis latrans.)


Looks like she barely escaped that bicycle pump. (Virginia opossum, Didelphis virginiana.)


Finally, our first shot of a beaver in action. (Castor canadensis.) Click to embiggen!

We nearly ruined the game cam, trying to get a photo of a beaver. Positioned it too near the creek last spring. The heavy rains came, and... well, it's not meant to be an underwater camera. It still works, but not as well as it once did. The batteries used to last forever; now they need replacing every two weeks or so.

And this was the only beaver pic we got out of that sorry situation:



Smile!

If that's the miscreant who gnawed down the only white-blooming redbud in our woods, I wouldn't be too sad if that flash gave him a mild heart attack. I really miss that tree.

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Sirens from emergency vehicles screaming down the highway roused us in the wee hours last night. Jasmine howled, which she almost never does. It sounded so funny, I couldn't help but laugh, even as I was trying not to wake up too much. But then every coyote in the woods howled too. There are a lot more of them than I'd thought. I had imagined the population somewhat reduced, since our chicken flock has stayed intact for the past year. Now I'm worried.

The better to see you with

Here's a recent game camera shot of a reddish coyote. I still haven't managed to get a better photo of the suspected melanistic (black) coyote. I think this one may be his/her mate. I've gotten a couple of shots of them together, but Red here is always the one in the foreground.

After viewing our previous shots, the local Extension agent agreed that the black canid was most likely a coyote. He advised me to bait the area with meat for a better photo. I'm a little afraid that would attract the wrong element though... stray dogs. There have been a few more of those around lately.

Scritch scratch

Another recent game cam pic. After looking through some of the older game camera photos, I realized that we've had the camera in almost this exact location before.

I'm not sure why it surprised me, when I first realized it... Animals like to walk on clear, open paths just as much as people do.

I suppose I vaguely imagined some sort of I'm an animal! I walk in the woods! philosphy. But no. If we built an asphalt highway through those trees, the animals would be walking on it.

Melanistic coyote?

I'm fairly certain that this recent game gam photo is of a melanistic coyote.

You can see why we've been tempted to buy a new camera with a faster trigger. We get a fairly high percentage of this type of shot (only part of a moving animal).



Here he is going in the opposite direction.



Here's that same photo, lightened up a little.

Without seeing the face, I can't say for sure that it's not a coydog. I don't think those are very common here either, though.

Keep your fingers crossed that we'll get a better photo of this individual in the coming weeks.

Bobwhite

Colinus virginianus

Growing up, I knew this bird as "a Quail". Since there's only one type of quail in Alabama, there's no confusion. I also heard them called Bobwhites, and some people put both together: Bobwhite quail. The standard name is Northern Bobwhite, but you'll be considered an egghead if you go around calling it that.

Our place was so manicured when we first moved here, that we never heard Bobwhites. A few years of "the natural look" was more to their liking, and now it's not unusual to hear them singing. It never fails to make me a little happier, every time I hear one.

Yesterday my husband discovered one walking down our driveway. Between a fogged lens and zero cover between us and the quail, I never thought to get a photo, let alone one this close. But this bedraggled individual seemed almost as curious about us as we were about him, allowing us closer than almost any wild bird I've ever encountered. He wasn't stupid though - he walked off into the brush just as we reached him.

Bobwhites are in decline, and I suspect that their numbers here are probably hurt by the huge increase in armadillos in recent years. (They're ground-nesting birds.)

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Click here to hear a Bobwhite calling. We got close enough yesterday to hear an endearing little quiet chirping noise that he was making.

Visit the Friday Ark.

Gray day swallows

Flighty flibbertigibbets.

Zygodactyl Coccyzus & the cut direct

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus).



Giving me...



The cut direct.

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Cuckoos are zygodactyl, like woodpeckers. Click that link for further bird-foot edification.

Friday Ark.

Long weekend

'Tis the season for baby toads.


Everywhere a nest, nest.


Woodpecker playground.


Top of the previous tree, now on the ground.


Somewhere behind these leaves, many warblers were cheerfully singing.
(Kentucky, Blue-winged, Common Yellowthroat, Northern Parula, Louisiana Waterthrush.)


Happy with "just clover".


Black Knot & the Cherry Tree.

Wolves at the door

The one who was the church clerk

Last week my cousin from New Hampshire was visiting, and we made the genealogy rounds.

Samford University's Special Collections has a treasure trove of old Alabama Baptist church records. In between learning that one ancestor was a church clerk and that another was excluded (thrown out) twice, I overheard this conversation:

"Listen to this. The church has been in two previous locations."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah. It says they had to move the first time because the church was built in a spot with no access to water. The second time, they had to move because of too much activity from Timber Wolves in the area!"

Actually I'm sure they meant Red Wolves (Canis rufus), since there never were any Timber Wolves (Gray Wolves, Canis lupus) in Alabama.

The Red Wolf was declared extinct in the wild in the 1980s.

There are now over 16 million Southern Baptists.

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Red Wolf Recovery Project

Red Wolves of Alligator River

Red Wolf Coalition

This page shows the historical range of the Red Wolf. The subspecies that lived in Alabama, called the Florida Red Wolf (Canis rufus floridanus) was completely extinct by 1930. A second subspecies, the Mississippi Red Wolf, Canis rufus gregoryi, was extinct by 1970, leaving only the Texas Red Wolf, Canis rufus rufus, the species being used in the Recovery Project.

Deer feeding

We have unwittingly set up a deer feeding station in our back yard.


Mother and son

For several years it has been a chicken feeding station, poached by no undesirable critters other than the occasional grackle or bad dog.

But our luck wore out, and it seems that deer have excellent memories as far as food is concerned. They're daily buffet visitors now.


Scruffy deer

Hubby thinks they're cute. "You won't think so after they eat the entire garden," I warn, but he doesn't believe it.

This would be the non-existant garden... the garden we've yet to find time to plant. When I moaned about it at a meeting last week, a man told me that he hadn't planted yet either. "The signs aren't good until Thursday. Then they'll last for about 10 days."

Since it's supposed to rain almost every day this week, I'm not overly hopeful. Instead of planting by the moon, we usually use the "when we're both here and it hasn't been raining buckets" method. And those signs have been terrible lately.

Odd anole

I met this jaunty little anole outside a restaurant recently.



I tried not to stare, but something was definitely odd about the skin on his head.



Has the skin had actually been scraped off? Eww. Or is that just discoloration? An infection? Problem with molting?

He disappeared around a corner before I could probe further.

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Green anole (Anolis carolinensis).

Friday Ark.

There should be a word for it

It happens a lot... you learn something new, then you start to encounter it everywhere.

After learning about Swamp rabbits recently, I thought this log cried out for closer inspection.

Decaying log - check.
Swampy area - check.
Lack of other suitable latrines (elevated flat surfaces) in area - check.



Yup.

This surface really isn't flat at all, but I've been noticing that flat isn't nearly as important as elevated, to a Swamp rabbit.

Decaying isn't that important either - closer to our house (where there are mostly cedars), they almost always use mossy rocks, or rocks where leaf litter collects naturally.

If you become tired while walking through the woods, and think, "There's a good place to sit," well, chances are, a Swamp rabbit has thought that too.

Armchair birding

Female Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius), eating berries from an Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana).



As seen from our living room sofa.



Please excuse the dirty window glass. I don't wash the windows, so that the birds won't fly into them. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

I didn't actually know that Sapsuckers ate berries, until I saw this one doing it.

Animal tracks

I don't even know why I have an animal tracks book.



I'm so rarely able to figure out what anything is.



If I were a dedicated animal tracker, I guess I'd have hopped right down there in the mud, and planted a ruler next to the tracks.

But I wasn't carrying one, it was more than a hoppable distance, and I didn't want to get my good shoes muddy. And it probably wouldn't have helped, anyway.

If you know, please put me out of my misery. I'm to the point of imagining snickering little critters, roaming the creek banks at night. They've painstakingly carved no-such-animal mystery tracks onto the bottoms of their gaily painted miniature stilts.

Poor dear

My husband phoned on his way home from work. "There are two Great Pyrenees in our driveway!"

Not Jasmine and a new friend, as he'd first thought, but a neighbor's dogs. They wagged their tails, but retreated across the ditch when we approached.

We were puzzled, until we spotted the dead deer lying in the water. We figured he'd been hit by a car on the highway, then wandered over onto our property to die. There was a cut near one knee, but otherwise no obvious injuries.

I thought we should try to keep the antlers. As it turned out, we didn't begin the boiling-the-excess-meat-off process (that the internet recommended) until two days later. In hindsight, I probably should have guessed that the process would best be suited to the outdoors at that point.

Oh, the stink. I am not completely sure that I'll ever get that stench out of my nose. It was revolting. Fetid. Malodorous.

I am unable to find a word that means, "my brain clings to that hideously repulsive odor like flypaper, and brings it back fresh (ugh) to memory every time I even think about a deer".

Swamp rabbits

We see this a lot in the woods...



I always wondered why rabbits climbed up on top of things (stumps, logs, rocks) to deposit their scat.



It wasn't until I started writing this post, though, that I learned something interesting.

Apparently, only Swamp rabbits do this.



I was aware of Swamp rabbits (Sylvilagus aquaticus) before, but hadn't really thought they'd be here.

There's bottomland, but it's not really what I'd call swampy.

We've never seen rabbits swimming.

But elevated poo platforms don't lie.



To detect the presence of Swamp rabbits in areas without suitable "latrines", you can make your own!

Now I'm curious how widespread this type of rabbit is. Let me know if you've seen this rabbit sign in your area!

Further adventures in bad bird photography

Once again, my digiscoping skills leave a lot to be desired.



Enough, though, to say about our new yard bird: "Yep, that's a Wigeon!" (American Wigeon, Anas americana.)

When I first spotted him, I thought the Hooded Mergansers had finally returned. (We haven't seen them all season, and usually they've arrived by Thanksgiving.) But a new yard bird is more exciting, even if he didn't stay long.

According to the Cornell birds site, they're a species that's increasing. (They don't say why.) I haven't watched enough Wigeons to say whether its nervous-seeming behavior was normal, or whether this individual was just anxious at being alone. He darted this way and that, in an unsettled fashion, mostly in areas where the water was too deep for dabbling.

Judging by range maps, not a lot of Wigeons winter near here, though I've seen them several times at Wheeler Wildlife Refuge. Wheeler's bird list calls them "abundant". Oh boy, is that right - I remember once searching through what seemed like a million little green baldpates before finding the one little brown one belonging to the Eurasion Wigeon vagrant in the crowd. Then after moving the scope, I never found him again.

While searching for range maps, I came across this site that has transmitters tracking Wigeons. Fascinating! Such a high mortality rate though, so sad. I don't know why I was so surprised that the survivors all returned to the same North Carolina refuge they started from, but I was.

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P.S. Bonus points if you know why this bird makes me think of pineapples.

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Update:
In other birding news, it's almost an all-feathered NFL playoff! The Charger-Steelers game isn't over yet, but no birds there anyway. The others teams in the semi-finals though, will be the Philadelphia Eagles, the Baltimore Ravens, and the Arizona Cardinals. Or as we like to call them, the Arizona Pyrrhuloxias. (They don't actually have cardinals in Arizona, but the Pyrrhuloxia, which does live there, is a close cousin.)

Creative Outsourcing

Hmm, there's something different about the office this morning...



I think they've brought in some outside contractors.



"Umm, your drawings may be a little late...



... we kind of had an incident."



I guess he heard there would be no bonus this Christmas.

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This happened at an office in Birmingham today. Raccoons really did pee on the drawings and poop all over the desks. Animal control wouldn't come, since the racoons were indoors. Did you know that private critter control starts at about $450 per hour?!

(I didn't take these photos - Hubby's co-workers sent them to him.)

Winter thrush

The Hermit Thrushes have returned for the winter. They're silent here, for the most part — you only spot them from their movements.



(Nothing to see here, just a bump on the branch, move along, move along...)

They desert us in summer, breeding as far north as mid-Alaska.

Wood Thrushes have an opposite agenda:
1. Arrive in spring.
2. Sing like a lovesick fool all summer long.
3. Shuffle off to Panama once the days grow short.

Someone once told me: the Hermit Thrush is rusty on his tail, and the Wood Thrush is rusty on his head. I can never recall which is which in the field, though. There are easier distinctions anyway, especially when you aren't usually in a position to be peering down on their heads or tails. (The Wood Thrush's spots are much darker, for example.)

During migration it can get confusing, with the Veery, Swainson's Thrush, and Gray-cheeked Thrush also thrown into the mix. I'm afraid I may have fallen out of practice in telling them apart without having a field guide handy.