Trail Cam No. 2

I have been seriously slacking with sharing my trail cam captures lately. In fact, we haven't had the cam going at all this summer! So you will just have to make due with the best shots from late winter into spring.

For those of you unfamiliar with my trail cam, take a look at the first roll here: Trail Cam No. 1.

Here we go...

We were very excited to discover a North American Porcupine had stumbled into the path of the cam. Did you know that porcupines are the second largest rodent in the states behind beavers?

And now check out this utter specimen of majesty - the Ruffed Grouse, colloquially known as a Partridge:

This here is the crowned jewel of our trial cam trials. What are the odds of this fancy-ass bird strutting his stuff directly in front of our very own cam? Now, elementary biology tells us that this is most likely a male exhibiting a mating display, however, both sexes of ruffed grouse do similar displays, so for all we know, this is a just flashy female. 

Ahh! A brown, mystery snake! Just kidding - this here is the tail of the local forest hound that haunts our proverbial moors. Occasionally you can hear him baying in the distance (or sometimes right down on the river banks) for whatever reasons a forest hound has to bay. 

Racoon butt! It's not that shocking that these are in the neighborhood. A few weeks ago we found a little stash of our personal trash way out across the river. Seems some little creeper, most likely of the raccoon variety, was hauling loose trash bags away for a snack. Don't worry - we cleaned it all up and have been in the practice of locking our trash up more responsibly!!

This little guy on the right of the frame is an American Red Squirrel, less commonly and more ridiculously known as a Fairydiddle.

Eventually we moved the camera back to our side of the river where we were hoping to catch some very local action.

Here is a shot of our river at night in the rain that I thought was pretty neat:

And then... BOOM! MOOSE!! Right in our own backyard! We have yet to see one actually in person so this was a big deal.

We believe this beautiful sheila to be a female moose. And despite the grainy quality of this picture, she sure does conjure up some imaginings about what sort of epic moose traffic we may be missing out on right in our own yard.

I made this here.

Sweet Gif, amiright? I also made this one of the sunlight dappled forest floor as captured by the trail cam:

Very tranquil. And further, we captured these odd creatures aping through the woods:

Ahh! Attack of the tie-dye monster!! Oh wait - that's just me.

Even used intermittently and even though we have to sort through a lot of garbage pics to find the (mostly) gems, the trail cam is an awesome thing to have hiding in the woods. It's so cool to think that these animals are traipsing around the forest, doing their animal thing all the while we are inside acting like humans.

In fact, I'm inspired right now to boot up the ole cam and see what kind of late summer activity we can capture in the yard!