Day 121 - Fantastic Mr Fox

handsome chap

Check out the fantastic Mr Fox!

Our trailcam up by the badger sett didn't catch as much activity as we expected...but it did catch a single, perfect shot of this handsome chap.  It's supposed to take 3 pictures, 10 seconds apart...however, often, photo's are missing or corrupt, or 0 bytes in size... 

But in this case, we got this single shot at 2.30 this afternoon...

The slightly chunkier look, dark boots and ears, and the clear, creamy white underside mark him out as a big, healthy country fox - much better looking than his suburban cousins.

The photo is a little dark I suppose - another little bug in the camera software I think...no other daytime photo's are this under-exposed. 

The night time photo's are quite dark, obviously.  There is an infrared light on the camera which illuminates the field of view.  

Unfortunately, the badgers managed to stay out of the centre of the shot, passing through the background instead, where the infrared doesn't reach so well.  

Here's a badger passing by...the photo is grainy due to high sensitivity, and blurry due to long exposure time, so the quality is poor.

brock and roll

There were several shots of badgers passing along the same sort of path as this one...tomorrow, we'll move the camera onto this route, and see if we can get a bit more up close and personal.   We might adjust the sensitivity settings, see if there's anything we can do to improve quality...

Overnight tonight, we've set it up to take a minute of video, with sound, whenever it's triggered...I'm quite excited to see what it's going to capture!

I will of course post anything interesting here.

We've not tried the video function before, so we'll find out how the video quality compares to the photo's.   Most of the daytime photo's are pretty good, but you really need lots of light for the best images.

By way of demonstration, here is Mr Woodpigeon again...he seems to be sneaking into my blog with mildly disturbing regularity.

photobomb

In other news, I'm really sore after all that climbing yesterday!  My ankle is stiff and swollen...my hip seems to be suffering from the impact too...and as the day wears on, the DOMS is setting in everywhere...lats, pecs, abs, biceps and triceps...

And my fingers are a bit stiff...

And my feet...

Otherwise, I feel fine - it was totally worth it!

B-)