Ermine

One reason I put up with the crappy image quality from Melted Browning #6 is it still can tell me about something totally unexpected. I have it pointed at my shed on the off chance that a bear or a moose wanders by. Or a white weasel, aka an ermine. There he is at the corner of the shed on Dec. 18. The winter of 2022-23, voles under the snow chewed up my lawn, but it wasn't so bad last winter. Maybe this is why. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance says, "Female ermine are smaller than the male and will use their size to fit perfectly into vole tunnels, the ermine’s preferred prey." I usually don't crop trailcam images, but the ermine is so small that I did it with this one.

In other news, there are four deer, more or less, who wander through the yard. The most recent trailcam images from Browning #11, mounted on a steel post in the middle of the back yard facing northwest, captured them jumping over the fence a couple times. The latter one from Dec. 14 was excessively blurred, but the ones shown here from Dec. 12 had better light.

A fox runs past the camera every few days and usually is severely motion blurred with exposure time of 1/15th of a second, but here he paused long enough for the nighttime camera to get a decent shot. The Browning #11 has two cameras, color for daytime and B&W for night. Unfortunately, the B&W images still suck, but maybe they are better than the older #6, which only has one camera.

When I put #11 in the middle of the yard on the metal post, I was concerned about it swaying back and forth in the wind, and for the most part that has not been a problem. But we had some high winds last week and it registered more than 1,800 false triggers in 36 hours.