Deer Detection Diversion 3 – Wildlife!
Posted on Thu 25 September 2014 in Wildlife
I’ve been taking pictures for several weeks for my Deer Detector, to keep track of murderous deer. While I haven’t seen as many as I thought I would, I did see a lot of other animals. So, without further delay, here are some of the wildlife photos from the yard!
The Main Event – Murderous Deer
First of all, here is some proof that those deer actually exist:
Our deer fence is enough to keep them out. They typically brush their noses against it, and then get discouraged.
One night, I was awakened by a thumping sound from the backyard. I had a flashlight nearby and spotted two bucks banging their heads together! What a racket at 3:00 in the morning! Definitely don’t want to get too close to these guys at this time of year!
Early one morning, one of the deer decided to plunk down for a little nap in the backyard. I think it was just standing guard while the other one tried to pick our lock at the front door (note the camera change to a different window – the bottom left hand corner is the towel I use to cut down on the glare in the window... I eventually fixed that).
The deer sat there for about 40 minutes until something spooked it off.
Sneaky Raccoons
There are also a large number of raccoons that travel through the yard each night. They come in various sizes, so I think there are a number of different families that visit the yard throughout the week.
They really, really, really like eating our blackberries! Can’t say I blame them, they are delicious!
The Raspberry Pi NOIR camera also catches them at night. They usually appear around dawn or dusk, but sometimes will be active at 3:00 am.
They also like climbing our apple tree, below you can see a small guy about to climb the tree. They will sometimes pull apples off of the tree (although the deer perform that trick more often – they usually take a bite out of an apple, spit it out, and then grab a fresh one - strictly one bite per apple - grrr... wasteful!).
Cool Cats
There are several neighbourhood cats who have established some form of highway on our lawn as well.
I’m not sure what the one below was staring at – it is looking right at our back door where the basement exit is. That cat sat there for about 5 minutes just looking at the door. Waiting for Basement Cat perhaps?
Wrapping Up
That’s just a small sample of some of the wildlife in the backyard. We’ve also seen birds, and the occasional dog as well. Tune in next time when I’ll try using color vision to detect raccoons, and hopefully use the neural network to start detecting deer!