Volunteer Perspective: Trail Cams near Crosby

This week's Volunteer Perspective (and awesome wildlife photos!) come from Jenny B., better known on the classification pages as @bigbluestem. 

Why we love our trail cam and are deploying four more

Blue jay in the early days of camera trapping

We bought five acres of raw land on County Rd 11 nine miles west of Crosby, MN, in September 2015. The southern line is 265 feet on the Pine River, 3/4 mile above where it joins the Mississippi. We slept in a tent with an air mattress at first, but that was awful, and we realized we're too old and cranky for that. In desperation from lack of sleep, we purchased a 1971 Apache Mesa pop-up camper, which we loved, then we purchased a 1974 Apache Ramada that was bigger and a little more comfortable for two people and two dogs. Patrick remodeled it to have big clear windows and a clear roof. We call it the Glamper. We didn't want to make too big a footprint on the land, and both the campers can be easily hauled out. Just after we closed on our place in 9/2015, we saw our first ever eastern hog nosed snake right by our place! It acted just like a cobra, hissing and puffing up its neck!

Hognose snake pretending to be a cobra

We got a trail cam because we saw so many signs of wildlife, and because Patrick was worried about teenagers hanging out and partying in our camper, which is what would have happened when we were kids. So with different motivations (me, wildlife, Patrick, intruders), we pointed the trail cam at the Glamper. Since 2015 we haven't had any pics of people, but we've had hundreds of pics of deer, turkeys, squirrels, a raccoon, a fox, a bluejay . . . And then one amazing day in June 2016, a mom bear with a cub following, then the next image captured that same mom bear with six cubs (yes, we zoomed in to make sure there were six) right in front of our camper!  I asked the DNR about it because I thought they only had two or three. They said that six is possible because bears have six nipples but they'd never seen more than five documented. Sad though that the life expectancy for cubs goes down the more of them there are. We found out later that other people in the area had spotted two moms with eight cubs total, so it was maybe bear day care? We got a follow-up pic of her, and one other bear at night, and then we haven't seen bears on camera since, but still hoping! 

Mama bear with her cubs

I have to say I have never seen more than one species at a time in a photo from our trail cams, until recently. We finally saw two species together: a deer looking at what looks like a raccoon near our camper!

Just recently - deer looking at a raccoon near the camper!

When I checked out the Cedar Creek project and found that the volunteer activity consisted of determining what wildlife was in the pics the trail cams had taken, I was immediately interested. Figuring out what activity had triggered our cam was for me kind of like the "find Waldo" or "find the hidden item in this picture" puzzles that I always loved as a kid and still love: one of my favorite games! Also, after a long cold snowy winter indoors in Minnesota, it was lovely to see pics of northern Minnesota in the summer and autumn months. The bison at Cedar Creek are awesome! Caitlin and Emma have been so great helping me to understand how to classify the pics, and I learned there was a relationship between bats and deer. So very cool! I wish all the best to the project!

Want to share your experiences on the project or with your own trail cam set-up? Email Caitlin (caitlin@umn.edu) and Emma (bubli018@umn.edu) with your text and we'll help fill in the images!