February 15th-19th, 2012

Plenty of pictures with the fresh batteries in the scouting camera. I also changed the capture settings, disabling video for the time being to go easy on battery life. From the tracks in the stream bed, I figured raccoons and deer would show up and I wasn't disappointed in that regard:

 peek-a-boo

 these two appear to have plenty of ticks on them

Poked around the area I had the camera set up last month, near the trees that raccoons have been using as toilets. Noticed a half-buried shoulder blade which I think might be from the deer carcass that was here a year ago:

I dug it up before taking the picture

also noticed a nearby tree with a couple of gouge marks:

I'm guessing those are from a deer

And some fresh raccoon scat:

Having visited what is most definitely a raccoon latrine area multiple times recently, it was quite disturbing to find out about raccoon roundworm which is just nasty. While I haven't been sniffing or certainly touching any raccoon scat, I'll be a little more careful about where I'm stepping back there. In fact I'll probably give the general area a pass for the time being.

Speaking of infection vectors, with warmer temperatures I picked up a grand total of 23 ticks on this visit. Most of them latched on in the denser undergrowth in the latrine area. YTD total almost doubles as a result, to 47.