I used to have a Bushnell trail camera that I’d leave out in the forest from time to time in a nature reserve a few hours from home. One time I set it out, intending to come back and get it in a few months. I’d done that before without any problems. Fast forward a few months and I retrieve the camera. I open it up and… the eight AA batteries had gone flat within a few weeks of my setting the camera up, and had leaked all through the device, wrecking it. 
I don’t know what I was thinking—I foolishly had put the cheapest alkaline batteries into it.
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I took this very agile large dog for a hike in the mountains. That dog has one obsession: hunting snowballs. He would jump so high, flipping and catching any snowball thrown around.
Of course when I found a research trail camera, I could not resist throwing snowballs in front of it.
I wish I could have seen the staff reaction when they saw the blurry pictures of a mysterious giant flying mammal.
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My first day/night having a trail cam yesterday was productive. Although birds set it off some yesterday, I did get some really cool photos of foxes and 'possums, both yesterday and early this morning. So far, it’s terrific!!
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It does pay to carefully consider the location where you plan to put a trail camera. I’ve discovered that if you set it in an area with herbaceous vegetation during the growing season, you’re likely to end up with 90% of your shots being of waving grass. In one such spot, I would bring along a small scythe and do some mowing of grass and forbs in front of the camera each time I visited to replace batteries or switch cards. That helped. Even locations that included shrubs at some distance from the camera could be a problem during wind storms when the waving shrubs would trigger the camera.
Few things are more mind-numbing than paging through thousands of images of moving vegetation to find the handful of pics that include an animal.
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Lol! Bigfoot! ;-P
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Is that why there are no photos of korora on iNaturalist?
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How do you mean; there are 1700 or so obs of kororа̄? They are in general quite hard to observe, only coming ashore at night, being rather sneaky and mostly living on offshore islands, so many of their obs are their tracks or dead wash-ups unfortunately.
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Ha-ha! I must have had my place filter on for my Canadian province when I clicked your link.
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Baboons!!! They love to fiddle with the camera and sometimes even get it open, leaving it exposed to the elements, and then try to eat the batteries. I’ve also seen video of Kea attacking a trailcam in NZ, almost as destructive …
One time we’d put out a pile of cabbages as bait for bushpigs - I was excited when I picked up the cam and saw there were hundreds of photos taken. I rushed home to check them out - turned out my horses and donkeys had escaped in the night and there were zillions of pics of them noshing cabbages.
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Lol! That is pretty humorous!
The very first night I mounted mine, a racoon attacked it! In the video, I can see one big eyeball!!
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Haha!
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I’ve got a few camera trap photos (not yet on iNat) from a small pond in SW NM which show a black bear taking a bath. The next image shows nothing but black fur and then the camera is pointing at the sky. The bear apparently did a post-bath back rub on the camera tee-post and there was a clump of black fur on the post when I recovered the camera, which had been knocked awry. The fur sample was actually useful to an ongoing study of bear genetics in my area and I delivered the post with sample still attached to the appropriate biologist.
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Turns out my first cam, was a lemon. Wouldn’t take pictures at night cause the IR sensor was bogus.
It was a stealthcam. I can’t recommend them at all and the customer service is no good. I sent it back to cabelas as stealth cam did not answer my emails and replaced it with wild game innovations cameras and they work without any issues at all. Lots of night pics of coyotes, foxes and other things now.
2 months wasted and loads and loads of bait. Can’t imagine how much action it was missing. Before I realized the sensor was bogus.
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I’ve an Apeman H70 that I set up in my garden mainly for hedgehogs and urban foxes. I sent mine do short videos and then save the best frames as .jpgs on VLC for iNat entires.
Annoying moments include leaves, grass, wood pigeons, my boarder collie, the wife leaving for an early morning bike ride, me in my jim-jams walking out to collect it in the AM.
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I had a fox yesterday that approached the cam, then just sat down and stared into it. He HAD to have heard it!
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I think I did something similar. I was walking a trail where I had a camera trap or two and stopped at a place where I knew my cameras were not so I could relieve myself. Then I noticed another camera (not mine) on a tree about 20 feet away, aimed at the spot where I had been standing, and that had been recently installed as part of another wildlife survey project in the same area. Sometimes it starts to feel a little crowded and invasive out there in the woods.
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About 5 years ago. some colleagues of mine were running a camera trap project in an area that had public access. Apparently they did not lock their cameras and although few or none were vandalized or stolen, they did have one surprising incident. While reviewing the photos from one camera they found an image of a fake Bigfoot in the middle of their photo stream. The background in the Bigfoot photo was different from all the other images on the memory card. Presumably someone had pulled the card from the camera, inserted a picture of Bigfoot, and then replaced the card.
I kept the Bigfoot pic:
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Lol, that’s funny!
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Has no one disguised themselves as bigfoot and ran around the forests triggering trailcams?
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