It seems that very little is documented about the courtship and mating behavior of northern raccoons (Procyon lotor) other than the fact that mating occurs in the spring. So, while I’m not 100% sure what is happening in the video below, it seems likely that these behaviors – posturing to each other, grooming, etc. – could be associated with courtship. Prior to April 14, I’d captured quite a few video clips of a solitary raccoon circling the perimeter of this…
I recently pulled the memory card from my trail camera, and in addition to the expected eastern cottontail rabbits and “normal” white-tailed deer, the area in front of my camera was visited numerous times by a deer with an abnormal antler formation. I have never encountered anything like this before, and some brief googling regarding abnormal antler growth produced a fascinating array of bizarre antler shapes and forms, but nothing that quite resembled the drooping club of an antler that…
I’ve had a lot of white-tailed deer around my recent trail camera placement. In fact, after almost a month, with the exception of a couple gray squirrels that scampered by, the deer have been my only visitors. Having placed the camera down by the edge of a river, I’d hoped to get more animals passing by to have a drink. The deer, however, have certainly kept me entertained. They’ve come by singly or in groups as large as 5. Although…
Although most people are deep in a Christmas planning mode right now, we’ve just finished up a late fall pumpkin party in our backyard. What do you do with your old Halloween pumpkins? Typically we just toss them in our compost bin, but this year after cutting the pumpkin in half to expose the seeds inside, we set it out in our back woods and trained our trail camera on it to see who would come to partake. Over a…
Northern raccoons (Procyon lotor) are mainly nocturnal, so we seldom get to observe their antics outside of their exploits with residential trash cans. But I recently captured an entertaining scene of two young raccoons, called kits, chasing each other up and down a tree in a local tupelo swamp on my game camera. Females typically bare between 2 and 5 young, which are born blind and only lightly furred, although even in these first moments their “masks” are already visible….
Perhaps second only to coyotes, fishers (Martes pennanti) are often vilified and blamed for a whole host of occurrences and noises. Fishers get a bad rap as “aggressive” or “dangerous” animals. They are predators, so these animals probably seem fairly aggressive to rabbits, squirrels and mice, but they generally want to keep to themselves as far as humans are concerned. Although often referred to as “fisher cats”, that name is incorrect; these animals are not closely related to cats at…
Despite a healthy population of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) on Cape Cod, and seeing considerable signs of their presence out in the forest (e.g., scat, tracks, hairs that had fallen off where the deer bedded down, etc.) this was the first deer I’ve seen on my trail camera after having it out and about for almost 3 months. To be fair, however, I was targeting coyotes with this particular location, and for that I have been relatively successful in catching…
I spend a lot of time in my yard, or at least a lot of time looking out the window at my yard – probably more than most people. But even so, there is so much time when I’m not able to observe the comings and goings of animals on my property. This is particularly true at night – when I’m asleep and many of our local mammals are more active. I can only watch for so much of the…
That’s what Punxsutawney Phil said anyway. I say 6 weeks and 4 days, since the official first day of spring (the vernal equinox) is March 20th. In early March after we’ve had a few pleasant days and folks start remarking that “spring is here” I’m always the first one to chime in and remind them that winter (i.e., cold, snow, nor’easters, etc.) is not over yet. In fact, sometimes it refuses to go away even after the official first day…
I love the way everything looks immediately after it snows. The freshly blanketed world becomes a blank sheet of white paper and the animals and birds get to write the first lines of that day’s story with their tracks. Unfortunately, the snow on Cape Cod is long gone after a couple 50-degree rainy days last week, but I was able to do a little bit of exploring while it lasted. I encountered tracks of numerous species just within my own…