Trail Camera Project – Mancos, Colorado

I was inspired to do this little project after seeing a trail camera video “A WILD YEAR-BANFF NATIONAL PARK”  that was produced by parkscanada.gc.ca.  A years worth of trail camera pictures compiled into a 4-5 minute video…pretty cool.  I grew up in a small town in Southwestern Colorado and my folks have a little bit of land so I thought it would be neat to see what we could get in a year on their property. I did quite a bit of research on several fronts before I started the project.  First, I had to find a camera that would best fit the job.  I knew I wanted to leave the camera out for a whole year and I wanted to stay away as much as possible so I would need a camera that had great battery life, the ability to withstand extreme temperatures, decent file size and no visible flash.  After many reviews and speaking with a couple of friends that had actually used trail cameras in the field I selected the Reconyx HC600.  It has the ability to run for many months on one set of batteries and it’s advertised to operate at temps from -20° to +120° Fahrenheit.  It also uses an Infrared Flash system that will range up to about 50 ft.  It seemed to be perfect for the job.  Next, I had to spend some time roaming around their property to find that perfect location where I thought my chances would be best at catching a variety of wildlife.  I finally settled on a location just above a small wooded draw with intermittent stream flow and a decent game trail that passes about 10 yards in front of the camera location. Lastly, I had to mount the camera and run a few test to make sure I was going to get enough area to capture as many critters as possible.  It took a couple of trips back to the house to download the images of me walking up and down the trail at a variety of distances to get the proper mounting angle…but I think I finally got a pretty decent setup.  Now all I had to do was sit back and see what roams by.

It’s been about 30 days…I set the camera up on Thanksgiving day and returned on Christmas day to check the camera and replace the card.  I was really excited…there’s quite a variety of wildlife around I knew I would get mule deer for sure but what else would the camera capture.  I was just like a kid at Christmas when I downloaded the first batch of images.  The camera ended up shooting about 600 images with lots of mule deer roaming about but the coolest images were snapped around 11:45 pm on December 1st… about 6 images of a  single mountain lion.

They are not the best images in the world but it was a MOUNTAIN LION…that was and still is the one animal that I am hoping to capture.  There have always been quite a few mountain lions in that part of Colorado, in fact, I’ve been fortunate enough to see 7 or 8 while I was growing up in the area.   But I’ve always wondered just how often and how many travel through the property.  It’s not exact science but it will be a neat snapshot experiment.  I’m also hoping to capture black bears, foxes, bobcats, mountain lions, cottontail rabbits, jack rabbits, coyotes, elk, turkeys, squirrels, racoons, and who knows that elusive bigfoot just might saunter down the trail some time.

I probably will not go back to switch the cards in the camera until this coming spring but you can be sure I will put up another video post showing the results.

This video is only the first 30 days but it looks promising.