Candid Camera: Using a trailcam to identify animals

Trailcam poised and ready to strike
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011. Do not copy.

Last year, I spent about six weeks doing some volunteer work for a local conservation agency. As a thank you gift, they gave me a gift certificate to the Kittery Trading Post, an outdoor sports and recreation specialty store in Kittery, Maine. With the certificate, I bought a trailcam. A trailcam, for those who have never heard the term, is a camera designed to be left outdoors along a suspected game trail to photograph animals as they pass by. It uses a built-in motion detector to determine when animals pass by. Once the motion detector is triggered it snaps a photo. This particular model works in both daylight and in complete darkness as it has an infrared flash that enables night-vision photos.

The trailcam is an ideal tool to help me capture photos of the animals that live in my yard. It can be set up by a bird feeder to snap pictures of every bird that visits during the day, or it can be used to catch nocturnal or crepuscular creatures that live in my yard that I might never see myself. Today, though, I have set it up to try to catch a shy diurnal mammal that I know lives in my yard.

Stripped pine cones and loose scales mean that something
was eating pine seeds here.
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011. Do not copy.

To determine where to place the camera, I look for clues like the one in the photo to the right. There are several pine cones here on the ground that have been stripped as some animal pulled them apart to get at the tasty pine seeds nestled inside the cone. I found a number of these pine cones around the base of a big tree, with many of the cones and associated debris on a large flat rock next to the tree. The rock makes a great lookout point from which a hungry, but wary little animal might work at the pine cone while watching all around for any threats. At other times it might take the pine cone up into the tree to eat in an even more secure location leaving pine cone scraps all around the base of its favorite tree.

I strongly suspect that this is the work of a squirrel. A chipmunk would also eat pine cones like this, but would most likely eat on the ground and not climb a tree for that purpose. Although it is not above using a tree to escape a predator, chipmunks are ground creatures. Their nests are burrows. Squirrels (with some exceptions), on the other hand, are more arboreal, which means they live in trees. They build nests in the high branches of a tree or a cavity in the trunk and raise their young there. They are more comfortable in a tree than on the ground and are more likely to take their food up into the canopy both to eat immediately and for winter storage.




Trailcam aimed at the base of a large pine tree in my
 front yard where the scraps of pine cones were
found in abundance.
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011. Do not copy.

  Rather than placing a trail cam at any random location and hoping to catch something, finding clues that some animal frequents the spot first helps improve the odds of getting the picture you want. In this case, I set up the camera to aim at the base of the tree, on the side where the flat rock lies. The one thing I don't like about the camera is that there is a delay of a several seconds between the time when the motion detector is triggered and when the picture is taken. This is fine to allow larger, slow moving animals like deer to fully enter the camera's field of vision before it takes a picture, but for small, fast moving animals like squirrels, it can mean that they trigger the motion detector and are long gone before the picture is taken. We'll see how it works.

I'll post an update when I have some pictures to show of whichever animal has been eating the pine seeds. In New Hampshire, where I live, there are four species of "conventional" squirrels: the grey squirrel, the red squirrel, the northern flying squirrel and the southern flying squirrel. I say conventional squirrels because the woodchuck is actually a kind of squirrel as well, as is the chipmunk. I suspect the culprit in this case is either an eastern grey squirrel or a red squirrel.