At the very end of 2020, I bought a game camera just for fun. For those who might not know, a game camera is a waterproof, automatic camera designed to make photos of wildlife. When the camera detects movement, it makes four or five photographs. It does this day or night, using an infrared flash at night.
I experimented with the camera around the yard and then in March of 2021 (i.e. about a year ago) I strapped the camera at chest height to a tree “down back”. The lot that our house is situated on slopes back away from the house and ends in a beaver-made wet meadow about a quarter mile from the house. The tree I strapped the camera is located on the edge of the meadow and the camera was pointed out on the meadow.
Our property, which ends about half way across the wet meadow, abuts the roughly 2000 acre NH Audubon sanctuary at Willard Pond. This sanctuary is contiguous with another roughly 5000 acres of forested land, most of which is conserved. There are no public roads (only logging roads) in this area. In other words, there is a lot prime wildlife habitat behind our house. I was interested to see what we could capture with the game camera.
After setting up the camera, I promptly forgot about it, until today! I retrieved the camera this afternoon and was interested in seeing how long the batteries had lasted. The batteries are still just fine, but the memory card ran out of space after seven months (i.e. in November 2021). There were six thousand photos on the camera! Most of the photos were “false positives”… that is pictures of just the vegetation.
However, over the seven months the camera was active, there were forty frames that contained an animal. These documented twenty different “encounters”. Of these encounters, eight were deer, five were moose, four were bear and there was one encounter each of coyote, racoon and turkey.
None of the photos could be considered “art”, but here are seven of the most visually interesting. The monochrome images were made “in the dark” under infrared illumination.
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