Game Camera

Good Morning Ted and Jody:

About a month ago, my son Chris sent me a photo of a bobcat taken with a game camera he set up near his house in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama.  While the photo quality is nothing to write home about, it got me to thinking. We live in the country.  I have seen porcupine, wolf, coyote, deer and even elk on the property, but only deer and the neighbor’s pets of late.  So, while at Costco (one time a few weeks ago when Nancy let me roam the isles unsupervised) I picked up a game camera for under $100 (we were in Oregon, so there was not a sales tax, it was only the $99.99 on the price tag).

Initially I set it up low to the ground off the back porch.  That is a fenced in area and I wanted to get some idea of how it worked.  Since we have bird feeders back there we got hundreds of shots of pigeons, mourning doves, Sterling’s jay and various smaller birds.  We get some rabbits and squirrels also, but they did not take selfies (they probably moved too fast when in range). The camera works both day and night and is triggered by motion.  There is a delay from the time it senses the motion to the time it snaps the shutter or starts a video (there are several settings possible).  At night the photos and videos are in infrared hence, a form of black and white.

While I haven’t had much time to fool with the camera other than see how the various setting work after a 24-hour period I got interested in setting it up out front.  When I dehydrate apples, I have been dumping the peelings and cores in a spot near when my US Flag flies.  I noticed the second time I dumped apple remainders there I could not see evidence of the ones I dumped the day before.  So, I set up the game camera and pointed it the general area where the apple peeling and cores had been.  Walla, the next day, a shot of a deer.

Well, that led me to think I have established a deer feeder.  So, the next night I set up the camera without dumping apple peelings and cores (I had not processed any apples that day, so had none and was not about to share whole apples with the deer, if indeed it was the deer eating them), the next morning I pulled the memory card and lo and behold, the camera had captures some short videos of deer looking for apples (I think).  Unfortunately this no cost blogging plan does not support the upload of videos 😦

Remembering rat lab at IU and how difficult it was to extinguish a rat’s learned behavior in a Skinner box (circa 1963) I figured that deer might be smarter, so I processed apples last night and dumped them and set up the game camera.  Once, again visitors.

Now if I could only figure out how to afford a quality video setup and get some real footage of Bambi and his mother, father and friends instead of these 10 second wonders.

Warmest regards, Ed