Stoatally different

Since first seeing a weasel in my camera box last month I have had four cameras watching, one in the box and three outside.  The other day one of them saw a stoat investigating the pipe leading into the box.  Unfortunately the stoat thought better of it and turned round and came back out.

You can see in the photos above, and in the video below, the straight border between the stoat's brown and white fur (in the weasel it is wiggly) and its long black-tipped tail.

When I first made this camera box I used old Victorian land drain pipes as entrances and in retrospect they were too small.  There was one very brief visit from a weasel but otherwise the camera has seen only shrews, mice and voles.  As soon as I used larger pipes last month the weasels were in.  Although a weasel can fit in a very small hole I suspect it is more comfortable exploring a hole in which it can easily turn round.  The same is probably true for the larger stoat, so when it saw the smaller entrance at the far end of the pipe it gave up and left.

As soon as I saw the video I spent the rest of the afternoon making a new camera box.  This one is again made from a plastic under-bed storage box but now the larger pipes fit inside the box and there is nothing smaller inside.  There is a still larger pipe on one side.

I have lined the box with slates so it looks OK inside.  And the next day a weasel came to check it out.  The weasel moves so quickly that it was already behind the camera by the time recording started - there is a 400ms (0.4s) trigger delay.

I have been hoping that the stoat would return and enter the new box but so far that hasn't happened.  A weasel has been back, and again it was in so quickly that it caught out the camera. It is difficult to see in the video because of the speed of movement but the weasel has a quick wee on the floor to leave its scent mark - that accounts for its hunched spread-legged posture. It is probably done as a message to other weasels and stoats and doesn't seem to have deterred nocturnal visits from the small mammals, although they now don't appear in daylight.  This time we get a good view of the wiggly border between the brown and white fur of the weasel.

Stoats are part of the natural world here but on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, where there are no native land mammals, they are a non-native invasive species.  Early European settlers took rabbits to New Zealand and when the rabbits got out of control they brought in stoats to control the rabbits.  It probably seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect it was a predictable disaster.  The stoats devastated the native ground-nesting birds and there is now a stoat eradication plan.  (There is a similar problem, and similar plan, on Orkney.)

I read on a New Zealand website that stoats are partial to mayonnaise so I thought I would give it a try.  For good measure I added a bit of peanut butter.  And look who turned up to take the peanut butter - our own non-native invasive species, an American grey squirrel.

The mayonnaise was eaten by bank voles and wood mice overnight so that plan didn't work either.  Next morning I put in a few sunflower seeds for the voles but of course, now that it knows there might be food in the box, the squirrel turned up to eat them.

So I think the plan at the moment is to put in no food and hope that the weasels' and stoats' curiosity will attract them to the camera box.

Late summer dragonflies

It has been a funny old season for dragonflies, warm and sunny in June, cool, cloudy and wet in July and August and hot in early September.  Good for early and late species, less so in mid season.  Even now it is still relatively warm and there are hawkers and darters on the wing.  Here are a few of my sightings in the past few weeks.

A male common hawker at Cragside.

An immature male migrant hawker at Gosforth.

A mature male migrant hawker at Gosforth.

A male southern hawker at Gosforth.

A female migrant hawker at Gosforth.

Migrant hawkers at Gosforth.

Common darters at Cragside.

Black darters at Cragside.

Male common darters at Hepple Whitefield.

A male ruddy darter at Gosforth.

A male black darter at Gosforth.

Younger and older emerald damselflies at Hepple Whitefield.

That's probably it for the season although common darters and migrant hawkers will be around for a while.  It will be six months before I see a large red damselfly next spring.

The wide-angle lens on OtterCam

After my initial success with attaching a wide-angle lens to one of my trail cameras I was encouraged to fit another to my newest camera.  As I wrote before, trail cameras have a fairly limited field of view and in the places I put them to watch otters I can't set them any farther back. The wide-angle lens offers an improved depth of field as well as the wider field of view.  I put the new one down by the water's edge near a popular scent-marking spot where the otters sniff to see which has been there recently, as well as leaving their own calling card.  It has been a success and works well despite being only a foot or two away from the otter.

The cameras also recorded a visit from a young fox.  The focus is pretty good despite the fox being close to the lens.  Most foxes don't like trail cameras but this one doesn't seem too bothered.

I moved one of the cameras to a new position in the roof of the culvert, where the wide-angle view again works well.  This is more behaviour I haven't seen before.  I think the dog otter is probably catching tiny fish - sticklebacks or fry - as I see them in the water when I check the camera.  The episode lasted for 10 minutes, not always in view, but I have edited it to be much shorter.

Exactly 24 hours later the otter was back for a repeat.

The sluice gate is also a popular fishing spot for a moorhen and a water rail who triggered over 100 video recordings!  You can see the otter's footprints on the gate.

I'll carry on experimenting to see what else the wide-angle trail cameras can reveal.

The spider wraps her lunch

The dragonfly had just landed in the spider's web and was struggling to get free.  I had already rescued two from apparently abandoned old webs but this one was active and the spider pounced. The dragonfly is a teneral common darter and the spider a female cross orb-weaver (Araneus diadematus).  In the first couple of photos the spider was subduing its prey with a venomous bite.  Then it proceeded to wrap it in silk.  When I came by half an hour later the dragonfly had gone, presumably carried into cover to be devoured at leisure.

Fox News

Good news and bad news.  First the bad news.  The beautiful blonde vixen is dead.  By a bizarre coincidence I found her body on the south side of Gosforth Nature Reserve, 1.6km (1 mile) from here as the crow flies.  She was instantly recognisable from her colour and her torn left ear and had been killed by a dog, or possibly by another fox I suppose.  I had seen her here the night before and had noted how she didn't even bother to offer a submissive gesture to the dog fox when he came to join her.  He is much more gentlemanly and less assertive than his predecessor.  Here are the two of them a few days before the vixen died.

It is interesting that she was that far from here.  I don't know where the den was where she had her cubs but it can't have been far away as the foxes were usually here before sunset in the middle of the summer.  The dog fox has continued to turn up here every night.

Now some good news.  At long last there is a cub in the garden, the first this year.  I got a glimpse three nights ago and saw that it was already nearly full grown and had a black tip to its tail.  The next night I was ready with the camera when it turned up.

After only a couple of minutes it was aware of another fox and crouched down in submission.

Moments later it ran to meet the new fox, meaning it was family and not a stranger.  The new fox trotted over to the food - it was my regular dog fox.

The cub stayed back and lay down to wait half way across the garden.

I am astonished that the camera can get those photos in the dark.  This is how it looks to me with the cub in the distance.

Eventually the cub was bored with waiting and disappeared.  Last night neither of the foxes turned up before I went to bed but I hope to get a photo of them together soon.