Camera Trapping

Morning wallaby conference.

Hmmm, what IS that?

   One of the cooler things that we get to do out in the bush is set up camera trap arrays. The cameras are fantastic (and expensive) pieces of technology, using infrared technology to detect motion and snap 3 successive photos. This is all well and good when an animal walks by, but as we found out these past few weeks, sometimes the cameras are too good at detecting motion.  The cameras we brought in back in April had been out somewhere else since February, and we were to offload the pictures and get them ready for the first big deployment of the year.  It didn’t take long to realize that some of these cameras were actually taking pictures of nothing, every few minutes, for weeks. This was because of their proximity to grass and other plants, and every time the wind blew it tripped the sensor. This means that we sometimes had over 11,000 images on ONE camera, mainly of grass blowing in the wind. And of course, we had to go through every image to see if there was anything significant caught on camera. As we scrolled, rapid fire, through the photos, we could literally see the grass growing. Out of those thousands of photos (probably near 60,000 from that session), we probably got a couple hundred animal sightings. Suffice it to say; we have resolved to completely clear ANY vegetation in the future that might trigger the camera. So far, our arrays have not yielded the thousands of pictures that we got previously, mainly due to the fact that we bulldozed a helicopter pad around the cameras.  That’s an exaggeration…we do value nature, but sometimes our sanity is also important.

Busted...

Another fun element of camera trapping are the photos of animals trying to figure out what that camouflage box is that’s strapped to the tree. More often than not, these are dingoes, birds, or wallabies (as you can see from the photos provided). Unfortunately we had one that got chewed and broken by a rather rude dingo. Normally this doesn’t happen, so you get pictures of mouths or noses right up close to the sensor, sniffing and licking.  Some of the camera sites also have lures attached, such as feathers, bits of CD, and our favorite, the ‘meow-meow’. These sophisticated black boxes emit a constant ‘meowwwwwwwwwww! Meowwwwwww!’ once you flip the switch. It sounds like a slightly tinny, wailing cat trapped inside a box. It is without surprise, then, that dingoes and other animals are curious about what that ridiculous noise is out in the bush. So far, we’ve had one stolen by a dingo that we think was bent on shutting it up (see photos). Luckily, it was found only meters from the camera. Sometimes the occasional human is even caught on camera...a rare and threatened species way out here. Other than the occasional curious creature, not a whole lot exciting was found on the cameras from this first deployment. However, this is an ongoing project, so stay tuned for further developments.  

Figuring out if the meow-meow is food. 

Sounds like a cat, must be food!

A species that's difficult to ID...