Here are two interesting camera trap videos, one from my yard and one from Arizona’s Sky Islands. The first video shows an alarmed Western screech owl in a birdbath during the day. She was trying to escape the 107 degree temps and her nestbox was too hot. I think a Cooper’s hawk landed on the fence near the birdbath.
In this second video, a black bear cub has a swim with her mom then takes an interest in my camera trap:
Last night was pretty interesting. Lot’s of wildlife action, though most fascinating to me are the screech owl and desert cottontail rabbit interactions. I am so comforted to know my backyard offers an oasis for the wild critters. What do you think?
It’s the time of year between winter rains and the summer monsoon season so natural sources of water for wildlife are running dry. In my backyard I’ve had the pond going for about 7 years and recently I put out a simple small water bowl in another pat of the yard. The water bowl is really the top of a birdbath and works well for the purpose.
Various visitors:
A peccary family:
A beautiful coyote and bobcat:
This morning I checked one of my camera traps and was happy to see it captured a sow and cub as well as a “cinnamon” black bear. According to Wiki, a cinnamon bear is a subspecies of the American black bear. Either way, it was so good to see a black bear cub and also a different color morph of the American Black Bear:
One of my new camera trap locations recently caught an adult female mountain lion and one of her yearling offspring:
When I first started camera trapping, mountain lions were my ultimate goal. It took me a few years to learn to track them and identify the best spots to place a camera in order to catch them in action. When that happened I was ecstatic. By chance, I had no idea I’d also be capturing lot’s of black bear activity.
That said, here are a few clips of black bears in action as captured by my cameras so far this year:
In the last week or so I finally starting seeing Monarch caterpillars on the milkweed in my pollinator garden. I counted about twenty in different instar states. Since then all the leaves of the milkweed have been eaten and the caterpillars have slinked off to find a safe place to hang out and morph into a chrysalis and eventually a butterfly. I was lucky enough to find one of the caterpillars in the classic “J” pose, ready to morph. The first video is filmed at normal speed so you can watch in detail the moments leading up to the emergence of the chrysalis. The second video compresses about 1/2 hour into about a minute and a half. Which ever video you watch, I recommend watching in 4k, full screen.
Camera traps are one of the best ways to observe wildlife behavior that you’d likely not see because it’s either dark out or your presence would alter the animals behavior. I bought my first camera trap around 2005 and was instantly addicted. I had no idea there were such shenanigans happening when I wasn’t around.
Now, in 2019, I have about 10 personal cameras set up in the desert around my home town, Tucson, including my backyard. I also have another 10 cameras set up at Audubon’s Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch near Elgin, Arizona. We use these cameras for long-term wildlife monitoring, recording which animals and how often pass through the research ranch.
In this post I’d like to share some backyard wildlife action my cameras recently captured.
A bobcat:
A coopers hawk:
A bat catching a sphinx moth at a cactus flower:
And a cute little western screech owl:
The Queen and Monarch butterfly season in my pollinator garden was pretty subdued this summer. Not sure if it was the dismal monsoon season with very little rain or other factors. I did manage to catch a couple stages of metamorphosis of a queen butterfly.
First, watch a queen caterpillar turn into a chrysalis:
And the next step is the fully developed butterfly emerging from its chrysalis:
For the third year and second time this summer a Broad-billed Hummingbird raised a new batch of hummingbirds in a re-used nest in my patio. Both the first clutch and the second (seen below) from this summer had two eggs, but only one from each clutch was viable and successfully fledged.
Here’s a photo of the two nestlings from last summer’s clutch:
Here’s a male Broad-billed hummingbird I photographed at one of my feeders, fully displaying his sexual dimorphism.
Finally, here’s a video of the female feeding her one nestling from the last clutch of this summer:
My Earth 