Are These What I Think They Are?

I set up my camera trap alongside a small tributary to the Thames over the weekend.  After the driest spring for 100 years, it is looking little better than a muddy ditch.  So, I wasn't holding out much hope of filming anything.  It didn't help that the vegetation started springing up in front of the lens after the heavy rain on Sunday.

However, I got quite excited when I spotted these three individuals swimming upstream.

They are otters aren't they?

It's There in Black and White

Having established that badgers were using this site, I wanted to capture some more informative pictures of the sett's residents.  There are at least three individuals, including, perhaps, two juveniles, but I would like to know more about them.  So, having moved the camera into a more open area, where the vegetation had been flattened, I scattered a few peanuts around to encourage them to linger in shot.

And the results?  Well, they are there in black and white.

Brock and Roll

Now I haven't let fourteen years of marriage force me to surrender to disappointment or frustration easily, so within 24 hours I was scrambling through more undergrowth searching for signs of badger habitation.  A friend had been talking about my aim of filming a badger with my new camera to a local farmer, who said that he had seen signs of them on his land.  So it was, acting on this new information, that same afternoon that we found ourselves in a small copse, not half a mile from our original sett, inspecting several badger-sized holes and a large wad of hay filling one entrance.  This seemed a lot more promising.  The camera was strapped to a tree overlooking three of the entrances to the sett.  We left, nursing several scratches and nettle stings.

Brock and Roll.

Ready, Sett..........Oh

I set my sights on buying a trap camera some time ago and the more I researched the market, the more I wanted the top-of-the-range device, with as many megapixels as possible, infra-red, video and photgraphic facilities.  So, last week I took delivery of the best device I could afford (and/or justify) from Handykam.com.  So efficient was their delivery that it was with me within 24 hours of my order being placed.

After a couple of night's testing in my back garden, largely capturing images of our cat pretending to be a fierce hunter, I was ready for a full field test. A few weeks ago my wife mentioned that she had found what looked very like a badger's sett near to where she keeps her horse.  Therefore, last Friday evening we set out to investigate.

Sure enough, there were many of the hallmarks of badger activity at the site.  There was substantial earthworks in the area; what looked like the main entrance had the characteristic D-shape; and there was possible bedding material lying around.  It was certainly worth setting the camera up to see what it could capture.

Eagerly I returned the following morning and was delighted to discover that the camera had been triggered 37 times.  Concluding that my leaving and returning to the site were likely to have accounted for two of those recordings, I calculated that would mean that I would have 35 images of prime badger activity.

Wrong.  I had thirty-four 30-second videos of a some vegetation waving in the wind and one of an out-of-focus insect spoiling his moment of glory by passing too close to the lens.  This seemed an expensive method of photographing the woods at night.