Welcome to the new Northern Woodlands Game Camera blog! We were inspired by all the great game camera pictures readers have sent us over the years, so we got two game cameras of our own and set them up outside the office. The goal of the project is to capture images of the wildlife living in our backyard, then share the pictures with you and the lessons we learned trying to get the shot. We’ll update the content once a month.
We set both our cameras up at a pinch point in a small stream where a bunch of different habitat types converged. To the west was an overgrown flood plain; to the east and south mixed woods; to the north agricultural land, both hay and corn. It was a good spot for a camera in that it was an area that would be frequented by many different animal species. The variation would allow us to cast a large net, and being new at this, to fine-tune our technique.
We set up the cameras on August 5, and on August 8 captured this young, male black bear. You can age a bear like this by noting his lanky appearance – adults will appear much stouter and rounder. Also note how big his head looks in comparison to his body. As he matures, this disparity will even out. If someday he gets really big, his head will seem small in comparison to the rest of him. Bear cubs are born as their mother hibernates, and they stay with mom through the first year of their life. The following spring or summer they strike out on their own, meaning our best guess is that this bear is about 18 months old.
When we set up the Browning camera we paid attention to the long-distance framing of the shot, but didn’t consider the foreground closely enough. We should have anticipated that the animal would have his nose to the ground, and adjusted the camera angle accordingly. It’s a lesson we’ll try to learn from.
The Bushnell camera was set up with a 460 mm lens, which is designed for close-up shots, but if you click on the close-up shot of the bear’s face and look closely you’ll see it focused on the blade of grass and not the bear. We’ll try to keep the foreground cleaner in the future to avoid this. We were happy with the haunch shot, though. At first we thought the adolescent bear was mooning us, but then realized it was just his flank. Clearly his curiosity towards the camera was a bigger driver than his fear of lingering human scent.