The Dogs Made Me Do IT

Not much have been happening recently at the camera traps. The Moultrie had a strange malfunction where it almost completely drained a new set of batteries in just 6 days without taking a single picture and the Bushnell filled its chip with a slightly moving twig on the first day... So, I thought that I'll compile a post with some "interesting" odds and ends in it.

Firstly, I have always wanted to create a time-lapse movie from the images when one of the cameras go into a picture taking frenzy. While I was recently busy processing the images from the pond (during February), I stumbled upon a sequence that was short enough and also interesting enough to try. The Bushnell Trophy Cam can fire away at a fast rate if there is something that triggers it constantly (1 photo every 3-4 seconds with a slightly longer delay between the sets of 3). I used PhotoLapse and VirtualDub (Xvid to compress) and then uploaded it using the (old) blog interface.

The movie might be a bit fast, but I wanted to keep it short enough... The video has about 170 images squashed into 11 seconds and spans about 30 minutes of activity.

Video: 30 minutes at the pond in 11 seconds

Another interesting thing that came my way recently was these pictures of White Blesbok. My parents saw them in the Eastern Cape. They are apparently bred for hunting. I felt its relevant enough to mention it in this blog because of my previous post on the species (consisting of the subspecies: Bontebok and Blesbok), over here.

A White Blesbok photographed by my dad in the Eastern Cape

Wonder why the youngsters aren't also white...

I also threw together a report for the camera trapping I did at the pond during February. I had both cameras near the pond from 7 - 17 February 2010. From the 17th I kept the Bushnell in the area but I set it to only take photographs at night. The Helmeted Guineafowl, Egyptian Goose, Blacksmith Lapwing, and Cape Francolin are severely underrepresented in this chart. These birds where so common that I didn't bother to add every sighting.

The letter to the left of the animal's name indicate Mammal, Bird or Reptile.

Then lastly and totally unrelated to camera trapping but I'll try my best: We went away on a short holiday this weekend, with the dogs, to a nice farm close to Ceres. I just had to post some pictures of the two spoiled brats in action. (I'll try to keep it remotely relevant to camera trapping...)

Unfortunately animals aren't allowed at Tygerberg because I found that dogs are really good with sniffing out signs of other animal

They were inspecting everything that looked interesting - this helped to draw my attention to some scats, etc.

At closer inspection this pond didn't appear to be a good camera trap location (although I didn't have any cameras with me anyway)

Taking a power-nap

Side-note: The Doberman is Ralf. He is 11 years old and have played a big part in everybodys lives on my part of the family over the years. I can write pages about  all his stories... The Dachshund-cross-something is Mushu. Sonja (wife) and I adopted him a year ago from the SPCA. I think he was still very young (about 9-12 months) when we adopted him (nobody knows for sure because he was a stray). Again lots of possible stories (mostly about how horribly cute he is)...

We love these two a lot :)