It has taken me far too long to realise that most of the fine trail cam video that is posted on Facebook doesn't happen by accident. Those badgers and barn owls didn't happen to be just wandering past and decide to stop in front of the camera..Of course not! The space in front of the camera is baited with food - and the price of a free dinner is to have their photo taken. Up until now I've been using the trail cam to try and find out more about the life of the wood when we're not there. I've been interested in tracking the movements of deer and other creatures, and looking for patterns, rather than getting close ups. The results have been informative - see this post from 2018 but not particularly visually interesting.
In the first week of August the camera finally caught a snap of the badger - the first sighting for a couple of years. I decided to change tack and see if I could get a better shot of him. I set up the trail cam as a camera trap with a lovely bucket of windfalls scattered on the ground in front of it, and waited to see if he would be attracted to a free apple meal.
Unfortunately, three buckets of apples later, all I have been feeding, are deer. I have endless shots of fallow - and the occasional roe - happily munching apples.
They scoff the lot as soon as we've gone, and leave none for badger who only comes out at night.
So I think I will stop this particular experiment, as we definitely don't want to encourage any more deer.
The other experimental trap is more lethal - a high tech self-resetting squirrel trap. Despite the efforts of the stalkers, the squirrels are still shredding the beech trees, and so we've invested in a new trap to try and help keep the numbers down. The trap is new to the UK and was developed in New Zealand, based on the design of a successful possum trap. A small CO2 cannister powers a bolt which zaps any squirrel who sticks his head in the cylinder to take the delicious chocolate nut bait. The dead squirrel falls to the ground and the body is scavenged by foxes or buzzards. A digital counter records how many times its been fired.
Well that's the theory. I've checked it every week and the killing counter remains stubbornly at zero. I thought I'd encourage the squirrels to find it by baiting the area around the trap, and have been scattering around a pound of maize kernels from the pet shop. These have been disappearing fast enough, but judging from the number of small holes nearby, I have been feeding - mice.
So not so much a tale of two traps as a tale of unintended consequences.
In the first week of August the camera finally caught a snap of the badger - the first sighting for a couple of years. I decided to change tack and see if I could get a better shot of him. I set up the trail cam as a camera trap with a lovely bucket of windfalls scattered on the ground in front of it, and waited to see if he would be attracted to a free apple meal.
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| Rare shot of the badger |
They bring the babies for a free meal.
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| Is there any more? |
So I think I will stop this particular experiment, as we definitely don't want to encourage any more deer.
The other experimental trap is more lethal - a high tech self-resetting squirrel trap. Despite the efforts of the stalkers, the squirrels are still shredding the beech trees, and so we've invested in a new trap to try and help keep the numbers down. The trap is new to the UK and was developed in New Zealand, based on the design of a successful possum trap. A small CO2 cannister powers a bolt which zaps any squirrel who sticks his head in the cylinder to take the delicious chocolate nut bait. The dead squirrel falls to the ground and the body is scavenged by foxes or buzzards. A digital counter records how many times its been fired.
Well that's the theory. I've checked it every week and the killing counter remains stubbornly at zero. I thought I'd encourage the squirrels to find it by baiting the area around the trap, and have been scattering around a pound of maize kernels from the pet shop. These have been disappearing fast enough, but judging from the number of small holes nearby, I have been feeding - mice.
So not so much a tale of two traps as a tale of unintended consequences.
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