Trail Camera News

A few days ago I finally gave in to temptation and put a trail camera at a small spring about two hundred metres from the house. Actually it’s a leak in the village water pipe that’s been there for years but to everyone that uses it it’s a spring. The reason I hadn’t put one there before was that every day at least two herds of goats go through and a herd of cattle loiter… so not only would I have to sort through endless cow backsides there was some danger that it would get ‘lifted’. However I thought by now the local shepherds were pretty familiar with my cameras appearing in odd locations so worth a try… The first night a Wolf came through.

The third night a Caracal, and since then we’ve had two Wolves through one night and a Wild Cat too. And of course a few thousand cattle and goats pictures… I’ve not put any of the images here as they are rather poor as the camera is quite distant from the spring. However the same night the two Wolves went through here they were also captured further down the valley in a hurry to get up here. The images of a Wolf in a hurry is of one of them rushing past the trail camera…

Further down still in the pine forest the camera caught the daylight Wolf image pictured here. It wandered right past the camera at close range before going up the track and returning twenty minutes later. It was a particularly strong broad-backed animal. The cameras are showing foxes to be both busy and efficient predators/scavengers as many of them have prey in their mouths and images of one show it to have a cub in its mouth! Another trap camera down in the pine forest caught this Long-legged Buzzard coming in to land. After it landed it jumped in the water presumably after a frog? We couldn’t tell from the ‘flying away’ images whether it had caught anything or not.

A final surprise this last week was a new animal for us in the village. A Golden Jackal. It was interesting to see this on the camera as it is an animal that is common in some spots in the general region for instance in the sandy inland dunes northwest of Kalkan, but seems otherwise to be largely absent. Was this one moving through the area or is it resident? Back to the trail cameras…