It’s been a while to see deer in the trail cams, but this morning, I saw a whole bunch!
These were the first to come by.
It’s really hard to tell, but there is a third deer on the other side of the fence. They like to slip between the barbed while in this spot.
The little one nearer the fence, which would have been born this spring, went through, but the adult in the foreground ended up waking off towards the driveway.
Then this guy showed up…
A handsome three point buck!
What a catch! I rarely use image enhancement on my photos (mostly because I don’t know how and don’t care enough to learn), but I did use the auto fix in my software on these ones, so you could better see the deer jumping the fence.
The “light” behind him is actually a reflection. That’s our driveway marker, which shows up in the infrared flash looking like a bright light.
In previous years, we would be buying deer feed and including it with the bird seed at the feeding station outside our living room window, but with our mild temperatures this year, there has been no need. We’ll probably start supplementing them once there is snow on the ground that stays. Which may not be until mid-November, if the long range forecasts are right!
Well, this is one way to tell the temperature are getting chilly at night.
And that I need to change the batteries in the newer trail cam.
Until the camera warms up enough, it starts recording things in pink!
Also, during night shots, the infrared flash stops working and the files have a red law battery warning across the bottom. I’ve taken down the white string lights that had been along the top barbed wire on the fence, as they were getting pretty damaged and burnt out. There is now a solar powered string of lights long enough to reach from the gate to the corner fence post. When the infrared flash doesn’t turn on, they are quite nice and bright! :-)
I’ll have to head back out later with some fresh batteries. :-)
Today is supposed to be hot again, so I wanted to make sure to get the garden watered early in the day, while it was still cool. I started with the soaker hose at the squash tunnel, then went around checking the melons, squash and gourds.
I was extremely disappointed to find this.
Our one and only Teddy winter squash was gone.
Et.
Munched.
Masticated.
The two Teddy plants are blooming, and there is even a female flower developing, but that one baby squash had grown so much after the rain, I was really looking forward to watching it develop.
This is one of the nearby Little Gem winter squash. There were no developing squash down here to be eaten; those are much higher on the trellis. Still, it means energy will be going to recover from the damage, instead of into developing squash.
Thankfully, that was the only damage here. The melons and gourds had no critter damage. I did find one of the nearby Dorinny corn had been gotten into, the remains of a cob on the ground. The corn may have been a deer, but I figured the squash was a groundhog. The deer don’t go along that side of the garden beds, preferring to walk through the open areas in the middle.
I was wrong.
When I checked the garden cam, I almost missed the shadow moving in the darkness. It was a huge raccoon! So big that, if it hadn’t turned at the end of the bean bed and I could make out its tail, I would have thought it was a bear cub.
I continued checking the beds, and was so disappointed to find this.
A deer got into the Montana Morado corn. In the above photo, several stalks in the outermost row are gone.
I found corn cobs scattered on the ground, each looking like they had only a single bite taken out of them.
Hoof prints left no doubt as to what was responsible for this damage.
The deer had traipsed right through the middle of the corn block, leaving damaged plants and nipped corn cobs in its wake.
These are all the cobs I picked up off the ground.
I think it would bother me less if the deer actually ate the corn, rather than taking a bite here and a bite there. and leaving a trail of damage.
On checking the cobs, you can see that a couple of them were almost completely ripe, if poorly pollinated. When ripe, the kernels should be an even darker purple.
One cob is looking like it was going blue, instead of purple!
Several of the cobs had been beautifully pollinated, full of developing kernels.
I am so incredibly unhappy. Clearly, the flashy spinny things around the corn block are no deterrent.
Not even our purple beans escaped damage. The purple beans are lusher and bushier than the green and yellow beans – except for at this end of the row, where the leaves have been thinned out by nibbling.
And here is the beast that did the damage – nibbling on a sunflower!!!
I. Am. Not. Impressed.
I even added bells to the lines around the corn and sunflower beds, but the deer came from the other side!!
Venison is sounding very good right now.
What a disappointing way to start the day.
Other things went well, though, and I will save those for other posts!
My morning rounds were shorter today. I did not water all the garden beds this time. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the weather radar, and we might actually get rain!
Yesterday evening, I grated a whole lot of soap to scatter around in the old kitchen garden. It either worked, or we didn’t get any critters visiting last night.
This morning, I raided our spice cupboard. The newly planted beds of radishes, chard, kale and kohlrabi have now been treated with a hot spices, and when I ran out of that, I started scattering black pepper, including the perimeter of the corn and sunflower blocks. I checked everything carefully, and there were no new nibbles among the corn and sunflowers, that I could see.
Before heading back inside, I was able to gather some summer squash.
It’s been a while since our first harvest of 2 green zucchini and a Magda squash. This morning, we’ve got 5 green zucchini (3 of them from one plant!), 1 Magda squash, and our very first Sunburst squash!
Later, I was able to grab a few garlic scapes, too. We still have a few left to grow more before we gather them.
These will be on today’s menu, for sure! :-D
Once settled inside, I checked the trail cam files and saw this on the garden cam.
I was not expecting the deer to cross through from that side! And there’s no way we can rope things off on that side, without it causing access issue to other beds.
At least he didn’t stop for a snack along the way.
I did put black pepper across the open side of the garden beds, and down some of the bigger paths between blocks. I hope this will convince the deer to go around the garden, instead of through it!
Thinking ahead with the girls, I remembered that the Whiffletree catalog has a wildlife tree package. We’ve been talking about planting things away from the house to feed the deer, so they’ll have less reason to go for our gardens. We don’t want to get rid of the critters. We just want them to stay out of our gardens! I went looking through the catalog and found an item I’d highlighted but forgot about. They also have a Wildlife Plot seed package. There are enough seeds to cover 2000 sq ft with things like turnips, forage kale and other tasty plants. If we get a package like that and plant it in the outer yard, that could do a fine job of keeping the deer – and the groundhogs – out of our garden beds.
I hope to order the seed package this fall, so we can use it next spring. :-)
Part of my morning rounds has been to check the garden beds for deer (or other critter) damage. Since we lost several Mongolian Giant sunflower transplants, there has not appeared to be any more damage in that area. In the main garden beds, there has been little more than a few spinach that the row covers aren’t long enough to cover, showing signs of nibbling. That’s it.
As for the garden cam, it’s been getting video of cats going by lately, and that’s it.
This morning, I saw no new damage to the garden, though one of the support poles holding the rope and twine in one of the sunflower transplant rows was fallen down. It had broken and is a bit shorter than the others. I’d tied a plastic grocery bag to it and the rope at the top, but with the winds we’ve been having, it was no surprise to find it fallen. Those bags sometimes act like sails! When my daughters first set this up, the middle support poles were simply slipped through the divided strands of the rope, rather than tied, so for the shorter pole, it would have easily just slide off.
Other than that nothing else was amiss in the garden beds.
Then I checked the garden cam.
I’d say we are very fortunate that there was no damage this morning!
Yes, that is a deer and her fawn off in the distance!
I saw in earlier files that the support pole was already down before they came by, so it was not them that knocked it over. That grocery bag hovering near the mama is hanging off the rope the fallen support pole had been holding up.
In the next file, I watched as the mama casually ducked under the rope, which is what it’s in the middle of doing in this image.
Clearly, the ropes, poles, and flappy noise makers are no longer acting as a deterrent!
There was one last file, and then they moved on. You can just see the spots on the baby in this image!
Watching the files was interesting. While they did snuffle about, they did not try to eat anything in the rows. There are so many miscellaneous plants coming up here that, other than the sunflower transplants, they’d have to seek out individual seedlings in between the weeds. So… the weeds are basically protecting our seedlings right now!
They also very gingerly stepped OVER the rows. Which makes sense. The soil in between the rows is harder, so their hooves won’t sink.
Another thing I noticed is that this pair came from a direction I did not expect. We will need to keep that in mind as we increase our deer deterrents.
There was one more night time file after this; Nicky the Nose making his way between the rows!
The girls and I will move the trail cam again, later today. I want to try it at the opposite end of where it is now, and further away from the beds, so it will cover more ground. Since this camera is not a wide angle camera, it missed a lot where it is sitting right now.
Though it did a great job of capturing these deer!
Setting the trail cam on the saw horse did work; several files were captured.
First, the good news.
Nothing was eating the tulips last night.
The camera did catch a few critters, though. I took some screen caps from the videos.
There was only one night time file, and it looks like the first definitive sign of raccoons. The critter passed too close to the camera to be fully captured, and it just walked by. All I can say for sure is that the tail looks too fluffy to be one of our cats. It did not go any closer to the tulips.
We did get a couple of deer passing by. They showed no interest in the tulips, and both ended up running off towards the gate by the fire pit.
The final capture was this cheeky little robin hopping around.
Whatever critter has been eating our tulips didn’t show up! I’m okay with that. Hopefully, it will stay away and the remaining tulips will have a chance to bloom, and the chewed up ones will be able to at least grow new leaves.
Well, I’m certainly glad I decided to switch memory cards on the trail cam over the tulips after I finished my last post.
With this camera, if it happens to be recording when I pull out the memory card, I have to manually turn it back on again after putting in the new card. This time, it wouldn’t turn back on again. After much fussing, and even loosening the camera so I could reach things better, I finally got it going again.
When I checked the card, there was nothing on it. Whatever happened that caused it to turn off and stay off, happened while I was positioning the camera in a new location.
So I went back, made a point of triggering the camera so I would have at least one file from it in position, then switched cards again.
I then went back and forth between re-positioning the camera, switching cards and checking the files, several more times.
There were a couple of problems. The first was, no matter how I positioned the camera on various parts of the apple tree, I couldn’t cover all of the tulip area.
The other problem was physically moving the camera. It is held in place by a long strap. One end has a gripping clasp that the other end is woven through. This is great if I have to put it on a large tree and leave it there. It also doesn’t make much difference when it was on a fence post, as I could just loosen the strap and lift it off the top of the post. To move it from place to place on the tree, the strap needed to be pulled through the clasp, every time, then placed around the trunk, reinserted into the clasp and pulled tight again. Meanwhile, the strap runs through slots in the back of the camera that grip nothing, so the weight of the camera itself kept causing it to slide around and swing.
Since it was still on while this was being done, I had a lot of videos that were very hard on the eyes to watch!
In the end, there was simply no place I could put the camera that would cover the area needed. And there were no other trees in suitable spots that I could attach the camera to.
I could see where the camera needed to be set up. What I needed was something there I could attach the camera to.
I found something.
I grabbed one of the old sawhorses. We have three, and this one is the odd sized one, so it doesn’t get used as much. I set it up on its end, and attached the camera to the cross bar. The bonus is, now that the camera is strapped onto it, making adjustments is easy. I just shift the saw horse instead of trying to move the camera. With the camera mounted so low to the ground, I can switch the memory card more easily by tipping the sawhorse onto its side, then popping it back up again, without shifting its position. If I check the files and find that it does need to be shifted, it is much, much easier to do so now, then trying to do it on a post or tree trunk.
I already have a file of Creamsicle Jr. walking past the camera!
This should work out just fine.
And yes, I did move the string of bells and plastic spinner to the sides, so that they wouldn’t trigger the motion sensor in the wind!
On the one hand, I hope to capture the critter that’s abusing our tulips. On the other, I hope the critter never shows up, because there aren’t many tulips with flower buds left. We have not found other materials we can use to protect them (the fence wire I was thinking we could use would not stop a skunk), and won’t be able to buy anything until at least tomorrow. We’ll be making our monthly bulk shopping trip to the city tomorrow, but I’m not sure if we’ll be able to find anything useful. Now that we’ve added Canadian Tire to our list of places to shop at, to get the stove pellets we’re using for cat litter, I’m hoping to at least be able to find some chicken wire or something like that.
I found quite a surprise at our gate when I checked the trail cam files!
Four deer, hanging out on the driveway and road! They stayed there long enough that I found about a dozen files (stills and video) of them!
Looking at the time stamps, they came to the driveway after visiting the house.
They weren’t very nice to each other!
One of them stayed in the trees and never came to the feeding station. What I found interesting as I watched it, is that it completely avoided the area closer to the feeding station and went around to the side.
They definitely prefer to go through the cleaned up areas in or under the trees, rather than out in the open.
This next image from the trail cam isn’t very good, but it is dramatic!
I almost didn’t see it at first!
In the next few files, I could see that there were actually two deer out there, just on the edge of the infrared flash.
Very cool!
Also very cool was having Rolando Moon show up yesterday, and still being here this morning when I went out to feed the outside kitties. It almost gives me hope that Nostrildamus and Potato Beetle might still show up again, though I realize the chances of that are very low.
Their food bowls were completely empty again – even the heated water bowl was completely dry – which suggests the skunks came to visit, too.
We’re actually seeing a lot more than usual, for this time of year. Particularly at our main gate. With how dry this winter had been, I suspect they are hunting for water sources.
These ones were caught on the trail cam a couple of evenings ago.
Can you spot all six of them?
There was a seventh one, but it jumped the fence on the far side of the gate before the last three reached the road. They won’t jump the gate, though they are clearly curious about it. They much prefer going through, or over, the barbed wire fence.
This next image was captured just this morning.
The arrow points out the second deer going through the ditch. In the video file, taken after this still shot, a third deer is seen in the trees in the background, jumping the fence from inside the old hay yard. Not far from there is where there is an old dugout that would normally have water in it, this time of year. Which is why I think we’re seeing more deer because they’re searching for water. There isn’t even mud there right now. :-( There is an old dugout on my brother’s property, across the road, not far from his gate. I suspect there isn’t much water there, either.
An interesting thing I’m noticing about the new trail camera. The camera’s internal temperature readings can be very different from the ambient temperature. For example, in the second photo, it reads -8C/18F Our overnight temperatures did not get that low last night.
The Re-Farmer 