Studying wildlife with trail cams
Special emphasis on deer, using motion-sensor cameras for both story-telling and quantification. Presentation to the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, Juneau chapter, Feb 2018. This slide show was followed by short examples from Bob Armstrong and Hank Lentfer,
PS 2025:
Apologies if you found this vimeo-link broken recently. I’ve re-uploaded for streaming from JuneauNature. Although motion-camera technology has evolved a bit in the 6 years since Bob, Hank and I gave this talk for AWA, I still find the 21-minute condensed version to be a solid summary of the art, applications and terminology. In fact, the NAMING of these devices still hasn’t settled onto a single, obvious choice. Steve Rinella noted recently that hunters tend to call them trail-cams, while researchers mostly prefer camera traps. I’m not a fan of either, for reasons explained in the intro, and for now will stick with motion-cam.
How big is a deer?
Discovery naturalists McLain and Maggie are working on a middle-school deer lesson, and asked for some basics on how tall a mature Sitka black-tailed deer is. McLain wrote: ” . . . we don’t really have a good idea of how large our deer are locally (in terms of height and length, weight is well documented). After a lot of digging on the ADF&G website, I found an estimate for 30 inches at the shoulder, but it didn’t specify male or female, and it didn’t give any other dimensions. ”
Remembering that I’d addressed exactly that question on this (briefly evaporated!) slideshow, I decided it was time to fish it back out of the archives, thus the vimeo you can hopefully play, above. Scroll to 19:30 on the slider for a 60-second take-down of hunter tall-tales. But maybe, before you do that, look at female deer height on this page. The scale bar is in feet, and that mature doe is quite a bit shorter than 3 feet, so, yeah, pretty close to 30 inches.
But your big-rack buck had to be way taller, right? Sure felt like it, anyway, by the time you got him back to the boat. Riding him like a horse, your feet would’ve been well above the ground, right? Well, play the slideshow. . . 🙂
