Notes from a Temperate Jungle: Trail Cameras

I have recently become more in favor of using trail cameras to learn more about what animals are in an area. Trail cameras are those hidden cameras that take photos or videos when something moves in front of them. They have become extremely popular with hunters, biologists, and both professional and recreational photographers and are not too terribly expensive offering a wide range of image quality and photographic features. Most people I know use them for hunting purposes which I had always felt like was a little too close to cheating until I realized that seeing a trophy buck on a trail camera is much different than seeing it in person.
Last year I attended a presentation by a well known Alaskan naturalist and photographer who really opened my mind to their uses for photography both in the image that could be captured on the trail camera itself and in the information it provides on where a photographer might be more likely to shoot an animal with the camera possibly saving hours and hours of time for nothing.
Biologists use these cameras more and more to collect information about an area or specific animals that they are studying, once again saving possibly hours and hours of field time with no collection of data.
Last deer season I spent a lot of time in an area that I had not spent any time in previously and came across a small pine tree in a muskeg that was obviously a tree used by bears as a scratching post/marking tree. It was obvious by the sections of smoothed bark, the claw marks, and the strands of bear hair caught in the rough bark and the sap extruded from the old claw marks. I decided over the winter to purchase a couple trail cameras and use this tree as my first subject to hopefully capture something interesting.

These rather ragged shedding does were the first animals to be caught on the camera. The bear tree is the small tree in the center of the photo. This tree is about 7 feet tall and 8 inches in diameter.

I also caught this black bear on the camera doing exactly what I had hoped to catch one doing. The branch sticking out to the left of the tree is a few inches over my head so is probably about in the 6 foot one or two inch range so you can see that this bear's head sticks up passed it by half a foot or more so he is a pretty nice size bear with a nice coat as well. I have been back to this spot since getting these pictures 3 times now with both a rifle and a camera with the hope of shooting it with one or the other. I have mentioned in other posts that I am not an avid bear hunter but I would like to get one nice spring bear with a pretty coat so that I can make use of the meat before the bear spends the summer eating fish and so I can make a warm, natural bedspread out of the hide. I truly like bears and enjoy them for the magnificent animals that they are so really only want to get one that meets all of my standards.

These remaining photos are from a different day but of the same bear I think, sometimes I think this bear looks smaller than the one in the above photos but then other times I think they are the same. In the above photo, you can just make out part of its eye in the bottom corner as it was checking out the camera. I'm surprised but relieved that it didn't get any more interested in it!