March 16-April 4 2012

Slim pickings of late after moving the camera back to the stream, a site which has been productive in the past. I actually visited the site last weekend at the end of the month, there were no pictures on the camera and the batteries were just above the level of being ready for replacement. Not having spares with me I let it be, but in hindsight I should have swapped them out because when I came back this evening the battery level was too low to preserve images. The one and only wildlife picture from the last three weeks is this rather unimpressive shot of a deer at night, barely in range of the flash:

More interesting than that solitary image is the scat I discovered on the bridge over the stream. It appeared too large to be from a fox or fisher.

of course I forgot to bring the sharpie pen with me for scale but the main cord is a good 3 inches long. Dissassembled, a large chunk of bone and various berry skins are quite apparent:

Bone on the left (couldn't have been fun to pass that), berry skins above it, matted fur in the middle

No way this came from any domesticated dog. Quite tempting to think it came from a coyote, they have to be around. After discovering this scat in late March when I put the camera back by the stream I had hoped whatever left this would be photographed, but no such luck. Some other pictures from the point and shoot, taken in late March:

 deer tracks next to the stream

 raccoon tracks where it walked under a fallen tree - the camera is set up directly above this spot

 raccoon on the left, deer on the right

the largest of many skunk cabbages sprouting

The weather was unseasonably warm the week after St. Patrick's Day, then returned to more seasonable temps (and wind) after that. A few rainy days but no real gullywashers. As mentioned before I made more than one visit over the past three weeks, only one of them resulted in tick exposure but it was a doozy as I stepped in the wrong spot and came up with 8 of them crawling on the back of my leg. Brings the YTD total to 55.