Having a few acres of property in the California foothills, with 1/3 of it left wild to provide wildlife habitat, I thought it would be interesting to set up a couple of game cameras out back to see what made use of the land. Adding some impetus to that was seeing and later capturing a feral kitten doing everything it could to survive raiding my barn cat's food bowl on the front porch at night, and even sleeping with the barn cat on the real cold nights. After capturing and domesticating the feral kitten I later discovered she was one of an identical appearance twin pair. The second is a male that has not left the property for long. So that's the reason for having game cameras. Feeling guilty over not capturing and domesticating both of them is also part of it.
In any event, I set them up a few months ago to cover over lapping approach and departure angles around a shed out back. The set up sort of followed ISR tactics learned overseas
Everything worked out pretty well until a few days ago. As i usually don't download images for a few days at a time I didn't think twice about the set up after making a couple of changes. Where the cameras had faced into and under the trees I didn't consider the impact how shadows and foliage movement could impact camera function if they were re-positioned to be under trees facing outwards, the reverse of what they had been. The cameras were set to medium sensitivity, three 16mpx images in series 5 seconds apart, followed by a 15 second video using 32gig SD cards. The process would repeat until the card was full then overwrite the card from the beginning until the batteries died.
So we had a couple days where it became a little windy but no big deal, right? After 4 days I went out back to collect the SD cards for download only to find one card had captured over 3800 images and videos while the second card had captured over 1000. Turns out shadows of tree branches moving over the ground would trigger the shutter, and do so every successive second the shadows were in motion. During darkness movement of taller grasses on the ground would trigger an IR image. Made for an awful lot of image review to discard a couple thousand useless images.
Turns out the batteries will hold up a lot better than I thought. After being in constant use since late March they are still holding a pretty good charge. Me thinks I'll dial down the trigger sensitivity a little. For anyone interested, the wildlife is about what we would expect; birds, quail, turkeys, raccoons, possums, fox, cats, and deer. There's a nice fork horn in velvet roaming out back. With any luck he'll get to live long enough to develop a big rack and sire lots of fawns as he won't be bothered here.
In any event, I set them up a few months ago to cover over lapping approach and departure angles around a shed out back. The set up sort of followed ISR tactics learned overseas
Everything worked out pretty well until a few days ago. As i usually don't download images for a few days at a time I didn't think twice about the set up after making a couple of changes. Where the cameras had faced into and under the trees I didn't consider the impact how shadows and foliage movement could impact camera function if they were re-positioned to be under trees facing outwards, the reverse of what they had been. The cameras were set to medium sensitivity, three 16mpx images in series 5 seconds apart, followed by a 15 second video using 32gig SD cards. The process would repeat until the card was full then overwrite the card from the beginning until the batteries died. So we had a couple days where it became a little windy but no big deal, right? After 4 days I went out back to collect the SD cards for download only to find one card had captured over 3800 images and videos while the second card had captured over 1000. Turns out shadows of tree branches moving over the ground would trigger the shutter, and do so every successive second the shadows were in motion. During darkness movement of taller grasses on the ground would trigger an IR image. Made for an awful lot of image review to discard a couple thousand useless images.
Turns out the batteries will hold up a lot better than I thought. After being in constant use since late March they are still holding a pretty good charge. Me thinks I'll dial down the trigger sensitivity a little. For anyone interested, the wildlife is about what we would expect; birds, quail, turkeys, raccoons, possums, fox, cats, and deer. There's a nice fork horn in velvet roaming out back. With any luck he'll get to live long enough to develop a big rack and sire lots of fawns as he won't be bothered here.
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