creatures of the night

We invested in one of those motion activated waterproof cameras I was talking about.  It turns out they are called trail cameras, and there is a whole internet community chatting about them and posting pictures of nocturnal animals.  Deer, wild boar (not in north Essex), all sorts.  You can set it to do time lapse photography as well, and short videos.  A new world of technology and wildlife spotting beckons, once we've got the hang of it.  We put the camera up by the chicken house, and I was convinced that the fox would go past, but all we got were a couple of shots of the cats wandering out in the early morning, and one blackbird (we're going to train the camera on the cat door one night, and see if any of the rodent operatives bother to stir themselves outside after we've gone to bed).  Then due to an error in setting up the camera it ran continuously and the batteries went flat before it could capture anything.  Last night, getting anxious to see something, we put it by the far end of the wood.  We got lucky.

A fox did go by.  I knew there were foxes, given they've taken several chickens over the years, we've seen them (I kicked one once, but that's another story), we hear the vixens call, and something had the carcass of last week's roast out of the dustbin.  It was running fast, so only stayed in camera shot for one picture, and that's blurry, but it's quite clearly a fox (photo).

There were also muntjac, two in fact, so they hunt in pairs (photo) .  Again, I knew we had muntjac.  I've seen them, and heard them bark, and they come into the garden and eat the leaves of the evergreen shrubs.  We need to use the camera to work out where they are hippity-hoppitying over the wire, then I'll raise it, and pile brushwood outside to make it the muntjac equivalent of a Grand National fence.

There was also a badger (photo).  I'd never seen one before in seventeen years, but thought they were around.  They are very fond of peanuts, so if we regularly set bait out for them we should get some more photos.  Badgers are clean animals that rather than soil their setts create latrines for themselves at a distance.  I once heard a R4 interview with someone whose job required him to monitor the territories belonging to different badger setts.  His method, which he had been using for about twenty years, was old-fashioned and low-tech science, as he cheerfully admitted.  He fed the occupants of each sett peanuts, laced with a mixture of golden syrup and non-toxic coloured plastic balls, a different colour for each sett.  Then he meticulously recorded which coloured balls appeared in each badger latrine.  I think we'd better skip the golden syrup.  With the beehives on the premises I don't want to encourage these badgers to develop a sweet tooth.