Here you can see the tracks of the two otters heading north between the cameras. The tracks are washed away after a few hours making it easy to check whether anything has recently been through.
The extra water flow made it very slippery as you can see in this video - again two versions of the same event.
Last week we had heavy rain so I moved the cameras higher by putting blocks on the sides of the culverts as supports and it worked well. The water rose high enough to cover the block and the clamps but didn't reach the cameras.
The otters found it quite hard going against the flow after the rain. When it was shallower they could walk and if it had been deeper they could have swum. Their solution was to zigzag - first mother & pup and then the dog. You can see here that the cameras are a bit slow to pick up partially submerged wet otters moving away from them, probably because of a weaker heat signal to trigger the sensors.
Negotiating the culvert was easier again when the water had subsided a bit. Here is the dog.
Both my cameras are adapted with a closer-focus lens and a rain hood to protect the extra lens, fashioned from a plastic milk bottle. The downside is that it provides the spiders with somewhere to spin a web - it has been more of a problem in the higher camera position. If you watch carefully towards the end of this video a second (white) spider abseils from the roof about half way along the culvert and then retreats when it realises it has hit water. I don't know how well this will show up after the video has been downsized by YouTube but it it very clear on the original. The extra lens works very well here.
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