Here’s some daylight-ish trail cam footage of a couple of Roe deer behind the house. They’re nowhere near as wised up as Red Deer – they’re basically overgrown rabbits. Compared to Red Deer, Roe are very cute. Perhaps I’m being specist but I’d rather eat Red than Roe merely because of the latter’s cute factor.
Continuing from the infrared-aware observations, I don’t think Roe Deer can detect it, unless I just happened to pick a particularly dumb specimen….
It is man’s nature to kill, for he is the enemy of all animal life.
AR Harding
Recently, I’ve been reading up on wolf trapping techniques. I have no plan whatsoever to trap wolves but the skills required are virtually the same for using a trail camera. While I’ve already managed to ‘capture’ most of the medium and large mammalian species in my area with my Redleaf RD1000 game camera, there are three species which still elude me – the bear, the raccoon dog and the wolf.
The bear is an occasional visitor and, as they have immense ranges, is almost impossible to catch on a game camera that has a 5 metre range, unless it’s right up next to its den. With the raccoon dog, I ask local hunters, foresters and wildlife photographers for its location but it appears that they’re not using the den they used last year (after 2, perhaps the breeding pair, were shot in the same evening).
I’ve no idea how large the wolf pack in my village is this year, after they were decimated a couple of years back. Last year, in summer, I saw three running up the hill at the back of the house but haven’t seen any since. There is evidence that they’re around again, though. We’ve seen two carcasses of young deer (completely stripped to the bone) in the back fields and, for the last few weeks, the deer and boar have been avoiding the area at the back of us, where normally they graze in large numbers – signs that there are predators around. It’s possible that the large lynx killed the fawns, or even boars, but the herbivore herds have moved and that suggests wolves.
Wolves are extremely intelligent and wary animals, and any sign of human scent will send them running in a different direction. I’ve tried different baits for the camera and, thus far, it never works as intended. Therefore, I decided to read up on the old techniques for trapping these large canids.
Firstly, it is really important to understand that wild animal welfare is a very, very new concept in the history of humanity. It’s like that change in our thinking when the jungle became the rain forest. If you go back to any period in history before the late 1960s then prepare yourself for an extremely different way of viewing nature and its inhabitants. I despise animal cruelty in any form but our forefathers didn’t see their actions as being such. Their concept of political correctness regarding the animal kingdom didn’t stretch farther than:
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1-26:28, KJV
The actual skills described in books such as Wolf and Coyote Trapping (1909), by AR Harding, are extremely useful and eye opening, and it is amazing to what lengths the old trappers went to disguise their scent or set bait, but their overall view and manner of interacting with the canids they hunted is stomach churning. In one paragraph, Harding quotes a trapper describing the joy and beauty of watching a group of pups playing in the long grass on a hill side and, in the next, his own joy and thrill at climbing into their den and ‘raking’ each pup out with a nailed stick.
Bizarrely, professional trappers still believe themselves to be the guardians of the natural environment and that what they do keeps the ecology in balance – even though most do their job to protect invasive human-introduced sheep and cattle ranches. A good modern example of this philosophy is in the life of Norman Winter, featured in the film ‘The Last Trapper’. It’s a beautiful semi-documentary film but as it never actually shows him trapping or killing, it makes his life seem in perfect harmony of nature. He lives how many, including myself, would like to live, but I wonder if we’d feel the same if the film showed the reality of trapping an animal’s leg for several days until it starves or freezes to death?
I’ll continue my studies as I really want to catalogue the local beasties and I need to upgrade my skills to do so, but this delving into historic and traditional lore is really not easy going. No wonder we are on the verge of the next great extinction.
This morning, whilst driving around Lake Domasa, I saw what I thought to be a dead boar on the road. a forestry officer pulled over in front of it, and me in front of him. It turned out to be an extremely large beaver. Sadly, this is the first I’ve seen and it happened to be dead.
I was stunned at just how large it was. Much larger than a badger.
Since someone high up made the idiotic decision to redirect all truck traffic around Lake Domasa, thousands of Polish and Romanian lorries plough along what was once a beautiful country road. The wildlife doesn’t stand a chance.
We went for a walk with the dog last night along the abandoned road close to my house in the village. A few hundred metres from home, as the crow flies, I came across this pile of wolf scat. Due to the inordinately hot weather we’ve been having it was too desiccated to calculate how long it had been there, but its size shows that it was a large wolf.
Interestingly, I always find wolf scat on the outside of the forest and never in it – wolves definitely mark their territorial boundaries.
This morning I found a nice small round hole in my leg where I’d obviously scratched a tick off in the night. With this heat, we’ll have loads of them this year.
The weather here at the moment is extreme. We go from bright sunshine to blizzard and then back again every few hours. Because of this, the snow covering on the trees doesn’t last long and its evapouration causes a cloud layer.
Many visitors to the forest here are shocked to discover how similar it is to a rain forest due to its damp conditions.
It’s Easter and I really thought Spring was here at last. I was wrong…
Still the grass and bushes are bleak, with the remains of bird-eaten berries decaying on the twigs. The blue skies have gone and the overcast has returned, making it feel more like late Autumn again – especially following the snow shower last Sunday.
I really hope Spring kicks in proper at some point.
With the amount of rain we’re having, and then the consequent evaporation, the woods look like a rain forest. Beautiful to look at but the constant damp really puts me off sleeping out in the bush.
