Some time toward the end of last summer Ron and I were watching some wildlife activity in the backyard, and he mentioned that if we had a trail cam set up back there we might capture all sorts of interesting doings. Since he is a notoriously difficult person to buy gifts for, I filed this information away, and for Christmas he received a brand new trail cam, which we finally got around to setting up once the weather warmed up.

A few years back we enjoyed a YouTube video titled The Log and its sequels which was simply a compilation of trail cam videos depicting various animals using a fallen tree as a bridge across a creek. While we do have some fallen trees in our backyard, we didn’t have any that were set up as a bridge, but we tried to pick a good spot to set up the camera where we hoped to capture some wildlife activity.

There are all sorts of trail cameras out there (which I learned when I went shopping for one!) Some send the videos to your phone while others simply record to an SD card. We have one of the SD card models, and so we set up our camera with the card inserted, and decided to leave it up for a few days to see if we managed to record any of our backyard visitors.

Now, on just about any given afternoon we’ll look out in the backyard and see anywhere from a couple to a dozen deer chewing away on the grass. So, we both figured that when we sat down to watch our first recordings from the trail cam we would be seeing deer, deer and more deer.

We retrieved the camera card, popped it into an USB reader and popped that into the Roku and sat down to watch the show, and much to our amazement there was not a single deer video. Besides the videos of ourselves leaving and returning to the camera, there was a video of a squirrel:

and a video of a raccoon:

We returned the card to the camera, and left it in a little bit longer. Our second and third time viewing the contents went a little bit more like how we expected our first watch to go as we saw nothing but deer.

Since then we’ve also seen a fox and a rabbit. The rabbit was spotted shortly before Easter so perhaps it was the Easter Bunny. To be fair we’ve also seen a lot of videos of branches blowing in the wind. Especially windy days lead to a whole series of branches videos. The camera has a motion sensor with a delay set. (It can be adjusted.) It records a short video, and if motion is still detected it will record another short video.

We’ve also noticed a few blank videos that judging by the the leaf-crunching noises we heard were probably that squirrel we spotted in the first video, moving so fast that he was gone from the frame by the time the camera started recording. Likewise we’ve seen another few blank ones that we suspect might have been triggered by birds who have flown away before the camera starts recording. So we may play around with the settings to see what else we can see.

In the meantime, we’ve been enjoying spying on our wildlife neighbors, and this most relaxing reality show.

— Alissa

This Week’s Inspiration

What I’m Reading: Cabinet of Curiosities: A Historical Tour of the Unbelievable, the Unsettling, and the Bizarre by Aaron Mahnke with Harry Marks

What I’m Watching: Big Boys

What I’m Listening to: “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band