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Annual Guide 2009: Growl, You're on Candid Camera |
Growl, You're on Candid Camera
Backyard surveillance has never been so simple
By Dennis Aprill
Clockwise from top left: A moose, fisher, black bear and coyote captured by the author.
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At the crack of dawn on an early June morning back in 1978 I walked anxiously toward my trap. I felt like one of those old mountain men going to check his first beaver set, but instead of fur, I hoped I had captured an animal's image.
I approached my homemade device: a Polaroid camera with a Popsicle stick glued to the viewfinder and a roofing nail set over the shutter-release button, to which a fish line was attached leading to a ham bone I placed as bait. As I got closer, I saw that the bone was gone.
I took out the film and waited 60 seconds for the black-and-white photograph to develop. When it did, there was the face of a black bear, bone in mouth, glaring at the camera. The set was only 70 yards from my back door in the northeastern Adirondacks. That Polaroid would be the first of many shots of creatures roaming my neighborhood. With my primitive trail camera setup, I went on to photograph more black bears, skunks and raccoons, though not as close to the house.
The limitations of such a rig were obvious: it worked primarily with carnivores, it took just one picture at a time and it had to be covered in inclement weather. Even so, I thought I was a genius to dream up such a contraption. Years later I learned that in the early 1900s George Shiras III, a one-term Pennsylvania congressman and conservationist with a keen interest in wildlife photography, had developed a system using a trip wire, box camera and flash pan to take remarkably sharp pictures of animals at night—so sharp that in 1906 National Geographic magazine devoted an entire issue to his work called "Hunting Wildlife with Camera and Flashlight." It was expanded to a book in 1935.
By the 1980s manufacturers catering particularly to hunters who wanted to know where that big buck was hiding were developing trail cameras using modern technology. These devices had infrared beams and automatic plungers set on a camera's shutter release that were triggered when some kind of movement broke the beam, but you still had to provide your own camera. In the early 1990s TrailTimer, a Minnesota company, came out with the complete package in a plastic waterproof box. It consisted of a Samsung camera attached by wire directly to a solenoid, which powered an infrared beam that set off the camera when something passed in front of it. The TrailTimer spawned many clones.
By this time I had moved my operations to my 104-acre woodlot down the road. I set up a TrailTimer a quarter-mile back in the woods near an old logging header to avoid attracting stray dogs or cats. For the next seven years, from this location and a nearby tote road, I photographed more than 40 species of Adirondack wildlife—bobcats, fishers, deer, ermine, coyotes, turkey vultures and wild turkeys, to name a handful. I also put the camera at a beaver pond on the northern end of my woodlot, baiting the sets with fresh cut poplar, and snapped winter shots when the beaver, hard up for food, emerged from a hole in the ice to forage on land. I quickly learned about the fauna inhabiting my extended backyard.
I noted trends. For two winters I set out the trail camera with bait, usually my family's dinner leftovers such as chicken bones or a turkey carcass, and got mostly photographs of fishers. To break this rut, I put the bait on a leaning dead white birch, turned my camera on its side and snapped the animals climbing the tree.
In recent years fishers have given way to raccoons. Almost every roll of my film is dominated by them, often with as many as five in each frame. But sometimes there are other, more unusual sequences. Like the time my camera caught a bobcat at the bait, followed by the next shot—an angry-looking bobcat closer to the lens. There's no third image; I found my damaged camera the next morning.
I've learned about the realities of survival through my trail-camera photographs. I have a picture of a fox carrying a snowshoe hare, a nighttime one of an owl in flight with a grouse in its talons, even two ravens with their mouths open, as though they're talking.
For the most part, I still collect my animal photos the old-fashioned way, on film. But last year I invested in a state-of-the-art digital trail camera. Mine is a Moultrie Game Spy I-60, with 6MB of resolution. I added a one-gigabyte flash card. The advantages of a digital are obvious: instant viewing, easy deleting. Lower-resolution models start at about $100 and can be purchased from sporting-goods stores.
Whether you use film or digital, there are basic points to consider: Animals, even deer, look taller than they really are, so set your camera low, a couple of feet off the ground, to get a variety of creatures. Just about all trail cameras can be attached to tree trunks with straps or bungee cords. I've found there is no need to camouflage them; most wildlife get used to stationary objects that appear non-threatening.
My pictures amuse and amaze me with their proof of how so many animals live in our midst. It's only a matter of time, given the popularity of trail cameras, before someone puts rumor to rest and catches the most elusive of Adirondack carnivores, the mountain lion.
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