Unable to wait an entire week and with a beautiful Sunday to kill, I headed back into the mountains for the day. It’s beginning to look like the game cameras are going to provide me with more questions than answers. I did get one deer shot out of this batch.
The date and time on these photos are wrong. The date is two days off, the 10th should be the 12th. The time is a couple hours off as well. I changed the batteries the last time I reset the cameras and didn’t check the date and time and since I didn’t notice it till I got home, they will be wrong next time to.
If you’ve read my last post or two, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say the photo above was taken by the camera looking across the strip mine shelf. The mystery comes with the camera looking along the shelf. First of all it took these two photos a few nights ago.
I’m assuming the light that gets closer is actually a reflection of the camera flash in the eye of an animal. There is definitely no other lights where this camera was located. Since these were the only two photos that night I’m assuming the animal never came closer or if it did, the camera missed it. That was the first small mystery.
The larger mystery apparently started sometime yesterday afternoon. The camera first took the following photo.
Not quite two hours later it took this photo.
Sometime between the first photo and the second, the camera managed to get itself in this position.
I probably wouldn’t have found the fact the camera was open or it aimed differently odd if that were the only thing. I don’t have locks on the latches and I can easily see a curious bear or raccoon getting it open. What I did have a hard time figuring out is the memory card for the camera was no longer in its slot but was instead lying at the base of the tree.
Those memory cards don’t just fall out. And I can’t see a bear getting it out without smashing the camera. The irony is that a camera was being assaulted and it didn’t get a look at the perp, not the first picture.
I can think of a few possible culprits, a mischievous albeit honest Joe or simply a mischievous bear or raccoon. I ended up bringing that camera home because after the memory card was removed it took seven photos and stored them to internal memory. One of those was a chest shot of me the other six were ground-shots like the one above. I find it curious that something can interact with this camera for the length of time it would take to figure out how to open and explore the contents once it is open and not get its picture taken in the process.
I left the camera looking across the shelf so hopefully it will get a photo of whatever it is moving around up there.
