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.

News from WeaselCam

The camera first picked up a weasel in my weasel box on 1st August, one month ago.  Since then a weasel has appeared on the cameras nearly every day and I occasionally get a glimpse of one near the house.   I think the weasels are probably living in, or at least camping out in the weasel wall and I frequently hear the "ground predator alarm" from small birds in the copse behind the wall, mainly wrens and robins.

Here is a little montage of some of the activity over the past few days.

I thought the weasels might be becoming less interested in the camera box, still occasionally dashing through but not stopping to explore, so I moved it into the wood and it rekindled interest from the weasel I call no 3 (it was the third one to appear).  This is one of the two smaller animals.  It initially seemed very wary and still is by the look of it, although it eventually had a good sniff around.

There have been 29 weasel sightings on the cameras in 31 days, not counting multiple cameras recording the same event.  The weasels are strictly diurnal, never appearing before 07.00 or much after 19.00.  Although the numbers are small I have been able to chart the time of sightings, with about one third being between 1400 and 1600.  If they stick around I'll be able to refine the graph further.

It is interesting that the box now rarely sees a small mammal (vole, shrew or mouse) in daylight but they are there in numbers at night.  I expect the box smells of prey to the weasels and smells of weasels to the potential prey animals.

And a surprise.  One camera also got a glimpse of a stoat a couple of days ago.  It was brief so I have added a slow motion replay.  A stoat is larger, has a longer tail with a back tip, and has a straight dividing border between the brown fur on its back and the white belly.  It is not really darker than a weasel but here was in the shade.

Despite being comrade villains in The Wind in the Willows, stoats and weasels don't mix.  A stoat could kill a weasel so the weasels usually stay clear of trouble.  I hope this stoat was only passing through.

Garden ladybirds

Not my garden, but my mother's, in Northamptonshire.  I had a look at the apple trees and found seven ladybird species and dozens of individuals.  They were:

2-spot Ladybird

7-spot Ladybird

10-spot Ladybird f. decempunctata

10-spot Ladybird f. bimaculata, one I haven't seen before

10-spot Ladybird f. decempustulata

14-spot Ladybird

Harlequin Ladybird

Cream-spot Ladybird

And the biggest surprise, Pine Ladybird

I don't think we have ever noticed anything other than 7-spot Ladybird before.  It goes to show, if you don't look you won't see.

The weasel wall

I built this wall three or four years ago, between the copse and the meadow in my garden.  It was inspired by Robert Fuller's walls for weasels and stoats in his garden in Yorkshire.  I built it deliberately badly, with gaps and holes and hollows and I built into it a couple of weasel nest boxes, each made from a small plastic storage box with a weasel-sized hole in the end and in the central partition.  I have occasionally seen a weasel in the garden since but I have never previously seen one near the wall, although I haven't often set up a trail camera to watch.  Since finding the weasels in my camera box a couple of weeks ago I have had three other cameras watching the wall.  At least one weasel seems to be around nearly every day but I am not sure whether any of them is living there.  It would be good to think they are living in the nest box.

Weasels hold large territories - up to 50 times the size of my garden - so it is unlikely they are here much of the time.  I have again seen all three individuals in my previous post, one larger than the other two.  I wonder if this is a female with two well-grown kits, rather than a male and two females which seems less likely.  Here one of them visits the camera box next to the wall.

This is one of the smaller weasels in the wall.

This the same animal, not knowing whether it is coming or going.  The whole episode was recorded within one minute.

This is the largest weasel exploring the box.  It doesn't like the smell of my fingers on the camera.  This is also within one minute.

I saw a weasel run across the drive a few days ago when I was standing only about 5m away. Next time I'll try to make some mouse noises in the hope it will stop and look.

Developing OtterCam

Over the last few years I have had some wonderful footage on OtterCam but I am always looking for more.  I enjoy the challenge of getting better videos, both technically and in content.  One of the limitations of trail cameras is their restricted field of view, so aiming them and predicting where the subject will be can be difficult.  I now put close-focus lenses on the front of the cameras routinely but it occurred to me that a wide-angle lens would both increase the field of view and the depth of field.  So I splashed out on a clip-on wide-angle lens for a mobile phone (£6 including postage) and sawed off part of the clip with a Dremel.  I glued a bit of wood to the top of the camera, clipped on the lens, put on an outsized rain cover and set it up to try it out. Here is the set up, with a standard camera (plus Blu-tac and close-focus lens) on top and the wide-angle lens on the camera below.

And here is the result.  I sort of had an inkling there might be something going on here but never thought it would be as good as this.  Imagine how frustrating this would have been if only the top camera was in position.  Its contribution here is just to get a slightly better view of the departing otter.  The otter really looks as though he is enjoying himself.  Is it my imagination or is he playing to the cameras?

Two nights later he was back for a repeat performance.  You can see that the field of view is now slightly wider than the light from the infrared LEDs but that doesn't really detract from the image. It also improves after four seconds when the top camera switches on so using a second camera routinely may be a good plan.

Otters have dense waterproof fur and spend a lot of time looking after it.  This rolling behaviour helps with grooming but I have never seen it before.