Where the deer and the deer play

I have a new found love of the video on camera traps.  It is so fun to see behaviors when the critters are kind enough to demonstrate them in front of the camera.

These two young bucks play sparred in front of the camera for about 2 minutes, although they were in the area grazing from about 2:30 a.m.-3 a.m..  As they are leaving, 20 minutes after the first tussle seems to have ended, they start rough housing again near the outside range of the camera.



For me, the best part of getting these two on film, is that I have other photos of them together from earlier this year, but not from this set.  These are the same two deer as in the Odd Odocoileus post from June.  In the video, you can see that one of them is missing the right antler, and the other has distinctive ear injuries, visible in the thumbnail of the image below (although they seem to be healing).  The photos from May and June were taken about a mile away from Location B, through quite a bit of residential development and steep topography.  It is exciting to be able to document part of the range of these individual deer through their physical abnormalities.

The tarsal gland of the deer with both antlers is clearly visible in a few of the videos (one of which is below).  There is no similarly visible patch on the one antlered deer.  Apparently more dominant deer have larger and more active tarsal glands that subordinate deer, and I wonder if that is something we are seeing here.




References:
Lee Rue III, Leonard . The Deer of North America. 1997. 
http://www.fieldandstream.com/articles/hunting/2009/11/how-whitetail-glands-work

Bobkitten

I just checked the camera up at Location B. It had just been 4 weeks since the last check.  Overall, there has been a fairly consistent run of deer, raccoons, coyote, and occasionally a bobcat, so I was flipping through the images expecting more of the same.  We did get more of the same, but with a nice twist on all counts.  It is things like this that make watching the preceding 100 videos of trees-in-wind still so exciting from the anticipation!

The first video is a healthy looking coyote cruising the trail in broad daylight.  It is unusual for this location, the vast majority of triggers are after dark.  This was taken at about 8 a.m.. Lovely animal.




The next video is a sweet scene of a Bobcat kitten leading it's mother up the trail. Towards the end of the video, the adult cat turns and looks towards the camera, and there is a moment of eyeshine.  I would have loved to see them coming back down the trail also, for some face shots. However, this cat always seems to be heading this direction on this trail. It might be time to flip the camera.



More on the other visitors to come soon.