Black Oystercatcher monitoring season is over. The Road's End nest successfully fledged their one chick. I was never able to find any BLOY at Cape Kiawanda so who knows if any nested there. My big toenails fell off and finally healed and have new nails growing in. My hips that were overworked with all this hiking steep trails have improved and only scream occasionally.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, Johnny finished putting up the high fences around our 4 fields, with gates we can open to let the wild things through. I put up a couple trail cameras to see what wild things we have. That has been exciting! Here's a sampling...
Well, I set one up first to catch whatever had been raiding our strawberry bed and eating all the strawberries, even though they were covered with mesh. Naturally, it was a raccoon.
We weighted the mesh down with firewood. That seemed to work. Then the strawberries ended and I moved the trail camera down to a path where we had been seeing little scats full of berries and suspected the gray foxes were back. We got horse and dog and deer... plus eye shine at night from something or other.
I moved the trail camera to the horse paddock which is unoccupied at night, has horse and dog during the day. Eureka! I like the fuzzy antlers on this young buck...
But there was the problem of where to aim the camera to get a low animal like a fox or a tall animal like a deer... and to avoid gates and railings and bushes...
Doing better! But what I wanted was a fox... Camera is still too high...
The reason we love the gray foxes is because they eat rodents... and not chickens. They are pretty small and so eat small things. And they climb trees!
Success! Black tip to the tail tells me it's a Gray Fox
Then I found some bigger scat I could not identify in the arboretum. So I set up a second trail camera along the deer path behind our A field. And captured a spotted fawn. I have now moved that camera to the open gate behind the B field, since that's the only way the deer and everything else can get into that field, thanks to the new very high fences, and jump from there to the A or C fields, over lower fences.
Meanwhile, back in the horse paddock, the fox was still moving through...
And so were the deer...
I look forward to seeing what the trail cameras find in the future. In another month, the bears should start showing up...
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