Is Spring really here? The landscape says yes:
but the weather says no. It’s May and we’re still getting subzero temperatures at night and the occasional snow storm.
Regardless, I put out my old trail cam in a much deeper part of the forest (about a 90 minute trip there and back) with the hope of getting some beasties as they hide away to rear their young. Sadly, my trailcam has seen much better days and now barely functions – the video option has long gone, I can’t access the menu, half the shots are file errors and the temp/time/date display is apparently just random.
As usual, I chose a stream with a trail fording it to set up and then left it for a couple of weeks. Here’s what I got:
Wild Boar
Badger
Young Red Deer Stag
Wild Cat
and the most tantalizing photo I’ve (never) taken…
My trailcamera, as with most, shoots 3 photos in quick succession and then (or at least it used to) takes ten seconds of video. Now it often only takes two or even once photo before giving up. The following picture is from 2 – one containing the object in question and the immediate one following not. Here’s the photo (and Nature laughing at me)
Can you see it? I probably wouldn’t have if I wasn’t used to playing spot-the-difference in order to discern what set the camera off. The object is in the upper left corner of the photo. Here it is in more detail:
Look on the left hand side and you will see the tail of a Carpathian Wolf. I’ve been trying for 4 years with this trail cam to get a photo of a wolf and that’s all I get! I could cry…
I can only presume that the wolf was running and jumped across the stream and, due to the camera’s delay (it has a 1 second trigger, I think), it was out of shot before the burst.
Time to get a new game camera, me thinks… That tail has set me back on the trail of the wolf, though.
