Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A rainswept night by the pond proved too much for my trusty trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD.
Despite the rugged rubber armour the damp appears to have got into it.
Let’s hope that Browning can help me get it into action again.
We haven’t recorded a fox at the end of the garden on the trail cam for weeks now so, as we’ve recently trimmed back around the pond and scooped out the duckweed, I’ve set up my Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam there. This morning at 10 it recorded a dunnock (above) followed a few minutes later by a house sparrow.
Ten minutes earlier this greenfinch had been down at the pond’s edge.
It looks as if it’s drying itself off after bathing but, if it had been, the camera didn’t catch it. I need to clear out the last of the duckweed to give the birds better access.
At eleven o’clock yesterday the inevitable wood pigeon waddled by and a squirrel bounded along, slightly blurred on the photograph.
With a closer camera angle and a bit of stage management of duckweed and pebbles, this could be the perfect spot for a back garden stake-out.
We’ve been leaving our new trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD, at the end of our garden, strapped to the compost bins.
Not much to report from last night apart from the usual dunnocks, house sparrows and a juvenile blackbrd.
Rain seems to be enough to put off foxes from wandering around our garden, but we caught one on camera yesterday at quarter past four in the morning.
What appears to be the same fox had wandered through a few hours earlier, at 11.30 p.m.
Testing my new Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam yesterday in the back garden: at night in infrared mode on red fox and in daylight on grey squirrel, juvenile blackbird and dunnocks.
We think there may be two foxes; the first, with a bushy tail appears at 10.13 p.m., then ten minutes later there’s a similar-looking fox crossing the screen and finally, at 10.26, a fox with an apparently thinner tail with a lighter tip to it appears to notice the infrared light and it heads off.
The following night we recorded no fox activity, so I hope that we haven’t put them off with the infrared.