It's called a birdbath, but the deer seem to think it is a drinking fountain.
Where did all the water go?
Meanwhile at the nest box, the bluebirds are in their never-ending struggle against the tree swallows, and against egg stealers. And the camera also captured some more fence leapers.
I put the ancient #6 on the bluebird box just to see if the bluebirds are around. They are, but the camera was too close to the box and the images were blurry. However, it was the perfect distance to get this:
Earlier that morning the camera also captured this. At first I thought the two dots above the deer's shoulder were some other critter watching from a distance, but the dots are there in other nighttime images and I think they are lights in a distant house.
This is one of the least-blurry bluebird images.
Here's something the bluebirds have to worry about. I find this neither cute nor funny.
Meanwhile, just a few feet away at the little birdbath, I set up the closeup camera Guardepro #14 to see if the flickers are coming around. Not yet. I have seen a skunk a few times in the past few years, but the appearances seem to be getting more frequent.
As I have said many times before, I do not use the infostrip on the Guardepro images, but this is from the day before the fence jumping. And no flickers, but plenty of magpies and blackbirds.
I currently have five cameras in the Custer National Forest, three Reconyx and two Brownings. Four are spread out along a trail, with the two in the middle back to back. The fifth camera is along a side trail. On April 27, I got images of a coyote at the two end points and on the side trail. Somehow he/she avoided being seen on the two middle cameras.
It was the first real test for the Reconyx 19. Neither of my older Reconyx can shoot video, but this one has a setting that takes both stills and video. What that means is it shoots the stills, then it shoots the video. I think the 4K video is pretty good, but Blogger forced me to compress it before it would load, so the version here really doesn't do it justice. Maybe I will reduce the number of still from five to three to get the video started a bit quicker. On April 22, two coyotes showed up on the new camera, but these were nighttime shots that weren't as good because they were too close to the camera. If I could get the critters to stand directly in the middle of the trail and look at the camera, that would be optimal.
The two coyote stills are straight from the camera, no color processing. It is apparent on the video that I don't have the time set correctly on #19, about seven hours slow. There are a lot more options on the #19 menu screen compared to #2 and #7. The bad news is the menu print is tiny and very hard to see when the camera is strapped to a tree. I usually look at the images on my little laptop while I'm out there, but this time I wanted to put in a bigger card so I just did a quick swap. So it will be a few weeks before that gets fixed.
Reconyx #2 at the west end of the trail
Reconyx #19 at the west end of the trail
Browning #11 on the side trail
While I was out there, I decided to send the mini drone up to see what it could see. I was afraid to do more than go straight up because it doesn't have a collision avoidance system. Here's a couple, the first looking northeast along US 212 back toward Red Lodge, and the second facing southwest toward the Beartooth Pass and Yellowstone. These are processed. The mini's camera is OK, but I can tell the difference in comparison to the Hasselblad on the Mavic 3 Pro.
