Whilst staying with Ed, at Emery Knoll Farm, Dave and I were soon out exploring the woodlands. With only a week on site, the easiest way to get an idea of what wildlife was around, was to set as many Bushnells as possible, in different locations. We spent a morning exploring and trying to decide where the best locations would be in order to maximise our chance of capturing as many creatures as possible.
We decided to bait some areas with seed to try to draw some species into the area. We set seven Bushnells and, over the week, kept returning to check footage or to move the camera slightly if it was not yielding the footage we wanted.
It is always exciting setting Bushnells in a new area, let alone in a new country with species I was unlikely to have ever captured before! Really, to get a good idea of what might be around, a week was nowhere near long enough… but we were keen to see what we could capture!
As you can imagine, as the week progressed, I had large amounts of footage to look through and process. It was only after I got home, that I was able to try to get it all together in a format that could be shared.
One species I was pretty sure I would capture were deer. The species found in these woodlands is the White-tailed deer; pretty deer that are slightly larger than our fallow and more slender, with a distinctive white chest and tail. I captured lots of clips, some day and many night time ones. Here is a selection….
The other very common mammal is the raccoon. This is the mammal that I captured most clips of… they are everywhere! They visited some of the woodland set-ups to check out the food on offer…
Dave and I also found a small wooden bridge over a stream running through the woodland. I mounted the Bushnell underneath this bridge…. this turned out to be raccoon highway and we had loads of clips of raccoons backwards and forwards!
We also captured this clip of what I think is a mink…
After the success of this camera, we moved the camera to the other side of the bridge, where the raccoons seemed to be moving to….
There are foxes in these woods as well… the same species as here at home…
Spurred on by our success, one of the other cameras in the garden by the compost heap rewarded us with a new species… the rather strange looking Possum!
I was hoping to capture footage of the Southern Flying Squirrel. This small species of squirrel is nocturnal and Dave had captured a short clip on one of his cameras. It took us until the end of the week before we captured some clips! After numerous clips of grey squirrels, I was thrilled!
If I had had longer, I would have created some set-ups in this location, with the 60cm lens. It would have been good to try to capture some close-up clips of these mammals!
We also managed some woodland bird clips on the Bushnells. The woodlands here are not dissimilar to our UK woodlands…. but the background bird calls give away the location !!
A week of footage gave us a good idea of what was around, but I did not capture any ground hog or possible skunk or porcupine… but I was pretty happy with what we had captured and I certainly could not have seen all of these species without the cameras!