The remote camera seemed like a good idea in the beginning. We could simply set it up on a trail (or a likely stream crossing, or a wolf den area), leave it alone for a while, and come back to wonderful wildlife footage unhindered by our presence. Wolf pups would tumble and play in front of it, whole packs would come trotting down trails right over it, elk would cross rivers within its frame, bears would fight over carcasses completely unaware of its presence. Right.
So far, in our year and a half of owning the thing, we have been successful exactly once. Yes, you read that correctly: one time. It was spring of last year, and we set the thing up outside a wolf den and miraculously (though we were only vaguely aware of this fact at the time) filmed three wolf pups, two black and one gray, playing and running around outside the den hole. It was great. But those were the last animals we ever filmed with the thing, excluding the occasional bird or insect.
Mostly we have since filmed an entire library's worth of waving grasses, fluttering leaves, and patches of bare ground, heated by the sun and therefore giving off invisible signals to our camera's remote sensor to film, film, and film some more.
It has alternately become a source of extreme frustration, and (less frequently) humor, as we struggle to find the perfect settings so the contraption will capture animals (preferably the larger-than-bird types) and not simply heated, waving leaves.
Just a week ago we found an elk carcass, freshly killed, on the edge of a stream near the town of Stanley where we had gone to check-in. Rubbing our hands together in anticipation, we excitedly set up the remote camera, carefully placing its infrared sensor and combing the scene for mischievous grasses that could wave their fronds and set off our camera unnecessarily. We had high hopes of wolves or bears coming in to dine: the thing was barely touched, only one hind leg gone when we found it. We even found a set of wolf tracks nearby, and knew they would no doubt be back soon for the rest. And if they weren't, then a bear would surely smell the decay and B-line in to eat and snooze intermittently until the carcass was done.
Two days later we returned, sneaking the camera out of its weatherproof housing, and retreating a distance to watch our amazing footage. Forty-five, minute-long clips later we had seen nothing more than, yep, you guessed it, grass dancing in the wind around a quickly rotting elk body. Beautiful.
Only minorly fazed, we re-set the camera, left it over-night, and re-checked. This time, not only did we get no animals, but midway through the blank footage, the carcass simply disappeared. Not slowly, as if it had been eaten by unseen carnivores, but quite suddenly. One clip it was there, laying pungently in the afternoon sun, and the next it was nowhere to be seen. We stared at each other in disbelief. How could an object the size of an adult elk, move (at least we assumed that it did not vaporize) out of frame, without our ever-so-sensitive sensors (which seem to love the minute movements of grass tips) turning on the camera?
The only possibility was that the confiscation had happened during the sizzling mid-day hours when we had set the camera to not record, as it would look terrible, and we (wrongly) assumed that our target animals generally lay low during that period. As well as, this carcass was near a road and we thought cars passing during the day would keep them shy. Apparently we were wrong on all counts.
We will keep trying, but our patience in waning. If we ever do film anything else with it, it will surely be cause for celebration. We did find the carcass again, about twenty yards away and nearly gone (all that remains now is one single upper foreleg, and a bunch of bones and hide. We also found wolf hair at the scene. But apparently our camera did not think it was noteworthy enough to open its one eye and record.
We will learn?
A couple days later:
Yahoo! Success! We returned to pick up the camera just yesterday morning, before heading back to McCall for a few days of needed truck repairs (another story entirely), to find we had actually recorded wolves at the scene! Amazing...
We approached the site, thinking nothing had changed. The carcass remained virtually the same as it had been when we left it a few days prior. There was perhaps a tiny bit of the last remaining segment of meat on the foreleg, missing, but it was so little it could have easily been bird pickings. After our last bought of failures, we were in the mindset of simply picking up the camera, and tossing the hours of footage of waving grasses that were surely recorded.
Back on the road and heading home, I sat in the passengers seat, mindlessly rewinding through the clips as Isaac drove, watching little more than the sun shifting position over the fly-ridden elk ribcage, when all of a sudden, there in the corner of the screen, was a huge wolf head. I stopped and let the camera play forward in disbelief.
"I think I just saw a wolf head?" I said cautiously to Isaac.
"What?" All disbelief.
There is was, staring straight at the camera from about five feet away. Then it was gone, and then it re-appeared and walked carefully over to the ribcage, glancing around nervously before grabbing onto the foreleg and giving a good tug at the meat.
"We did it!" I yelped, "It's a wolf!"
Isaac swerved to the side of the road and peered over my shoulder. We watched another wolf enter the frame and circle around, more nervous than the first. It was broad daylight, eight-fifteen in the morning, in fact. The wolves were both nice looking and healthy, and both wearing GPS collars, which had us scratching our heads. They clearly were not from either of the packs we had suspected would be in that area.
That was it. It was about three minutes of footage. But it was enough. We were (are) hooked, totally ready to continue blithely onwards with the remote camera. We drove on towards home, planning all the set-ups we wanted to try next. We were in the game again...
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