My wife had been puzzled by something eating some of her plants in her plant nursery; she thought it may have been pigeons but netting the plants had no effect on the losses. So I set up my new wildlife camera to run overnight to see if we could find the culprit. I had to scan through over 5,000 photos but I did see the culprit:
In this first frame I have put an arrow pointing to a leaf on a plant. These frames were being taken at the rate of 1 every 5 seconds. The next frame showed a little furry creature, circled, climbing up the plant:
In this frame, although it is difficult to see, it looks like a mouse or possibly a shrew that is reaching up the stem of the plant to reach a leaf. Reading up indicates it is more likely to be a mouse than a shrew. In the next frame the leaf has gone:
There were other frames showing the creature scurrying over the plants in the foreground, but this was the only set showing the ‘crime’ in action. We now have to work out what to do!
I hadn’t anticipated using the camera as an investigative tool, but it is proving useful device. The more I use the camera, the better I am getting at exploiting its abilities. Although it is a 5 Mpixel camera I find the resolution a little disappointing – I suspect there is over-compression of the jpg files. But for the money…