June On Juniper Hill

 Although I've only posted fox den videos recently, I've been doing other camera trap/trail camera sets. As usual, one of my favorite places to set cameras is Juniper Hill (the forest that surrounds "blocks" preschool, and stretches along a stream to St. Georges Cemetery, on Cherry Street. The forest gets lots of animal traffic, mainly whitetail deer, grey squirrels, coyotes, turkeys and the occasional raccoon or fox. 

My first set of June was mounted to a tree in the middle of a game trail. The trail had clearly formed from the frequent passage of whitetail deer. There were deer tracks and scat scattered along the trail. My main hope for the set was to get video of a fawn with its mother. Instead, all of the videos were of adults running past the camera...

                                            

    Notice that the buck's antlers are covered in velvet. Velvet is a layer of fuzzy, dark gray skin that covers the antlers of deer, elk, moose, and caribou. On whitetail deer, antlers begin to grow underneath the velvet layer as cartilage. The antlers grow underneath the layer from March to the beginning of the rut (in September) when the velvet dies and falls off, exposing the tough, sharp, fully grown antlers so they can be used in fights with other bucks. The antlers then are shed in the winter, and the cycle repeats. The deer's fur also changes over the course of the year: brown in the fall and winter, and pinkish orange in the spring and summer. Comparison below shows what I think may be the same buck, from a set in January, and a screenshot from the second video above... 

 

Antlers in June                                                Antlers In January         

I put my a second trail camera in the same woods, about 100 feet north. There was no deer path, or signs of deer. I put it in that spot because I had seen a fox bed near there about a month earlier. I haven't been baiting my sets recently, but I did this time. I left a slice of meat lovers pizza in front of the camera. I then let it all sit for two nights. I was disappointed to see that all I had gotten was a common raccoon. 

I guess it stopped by on the first night, sniffed around, fed a bit, and left...

...And then it made another visit in the morning. I'm disappointed to only get a raccoon. I never even got good footage of the raccoon enjoying the pizza. The raccoon might be a female trying to feed a litter in a hollow tree nearby. There is actually a tree maybe 50 feet from the spot of the camera where I suspect a raccoon family is living during the day. Maybe I'll put a cam on that at some point soon.