January 5th and 8th 2012

Spent an hour in the woods this morning. Still snow-free of course. Since the last visit there's been a cold snap followed by a warming trend. Overall conditions on the ground are much more favorable for finding scat than tracks, and the point-and-shoot pics bear that out. I also moved the scouting camera, more on that below. First, checked the camera in its spot alongside the stream. Four shots, all in the pre-dawn hours Thursday morning:

raccoon walking along the log

pair of deer walking through - note the erupting antlers on one of them

Spent much of the time checking out the eastern edge of the SVT property. Probably off the reservation at times as well. My primary interest was in checking out a cluster of pine trees that had been used as toilets which I had noticed earlier in the fall. On my way there though came across two scat samples, both of them deer I think but one of them doesn't look like any deer scat I've ever seen:

Amongst the pine trees were the scats that I had noticed a couple months back. Not sure what left them but the placement's no accident. Also at the base of a couple of trees are healthy sized piles of sunflower seed shells. Probably from a squirrel, and most definitely taken from a birdfeeder in one of the nearby backyards on Clark Road:

these two piles have been there for a couple of months at least

this one has been around even longer in all likelihood

piece of a feather and seeds in this pile

sunflower seed shell middens - new since November

two fresher scat piles (raccoon), each with lots of seeds throughout. 

The fresher scats (last two pics) and the one with the feather in it are almost certainly from a raccoon; not so sure about the other older scats though. I had been thinking about putting the camera in this area when I first came across the numerous scat piles in November, but even then those piles were old and dried up, so not sure how frequently whatever had left them was passing through. However, the fresher raccoon scats made it a no-brainer to move the camera. This will be the view of the scouting camera for the next few weeks:

That's one of the raccoon scats at the base of the tree, with an older pile on the other side of the tree. There's a sunflower seed midden on the other side as well. We'll see what if anything the camera picks up here. I'm guessing raccoons and squirrels, hopefully some of the animals that hunt them as well. 

Finally, big day for deer ticks as I found a total of 18 crawling on me, mostly females including one that had attached itself to my neck. Definitely a drawback to this camera site in that getting there requires passing through prime tick habitat. Did I mention the stand of trees is right next to a well-worn deer trail? YTD total for ticks is 19.