Petra, Maine Wildlife

Here are a few more photos from my wildlife cameras, taken from a couple of clearing in our woods. Here are a few from one clearing.

 

Here's from another clearing. This is the busiest clearing in my woods, since several animal trails cross here.

 

These are from the same clearing as the last one.

 

While I was out in the woods, I heard a woodpecker hard at work. I followed the sound and, while the bird flew away before I could get a picture of it, here is what he was working at.


It's not a dead tree, but the woodpecker could tell that it had a hollow inside and that there are apparently bugs to eat there. In fact, I can see a bug in the picture, to the bottom left of the hole that the woodpecker made.

Here's an older one, a little further up on the same tree.

 

When we lived out in the country in north Idaho, we would see deer on a regular basis, and now and then a moose would wander through. Sometimes, they could get on the highway and stop traffic until they felt like moving again.
Coyotes would come up really close to the trailer house, so we had to make sure that no animals were outside after dark.
Even in the day, I lost one of my little dogs to a cougar that was right in the back yard and killed him. It was awful !
It was on a Sunday morning, and I was getting ready for church, and had let the dogs outside to go to the bathroom before we left, and then they started barking. When I ran out right away, it was already too late, and my poor little Tonka was lying there in the snow dying.
The vet said from the size of the teeth marks, it had to have been something large like a bear or cougar that killed him. Since it was winter and deep snow, the bear should have been in hibernation; so we thought it had to be a cougar.

 

The person in charge of lynx management in Maine for the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife told me a few weeks ago that when Canadian Lynx are accidentally caught in a trap intended for a fisher or some other trappable animal, they sometimes ask the trapper to simply release it if is unharmed. She said that they are not aggressive animals and that there haven't been any reports of anyone being harmed by a lynx while releasing it from a trap. They are fairly common in northern Maine, but are still on the endangered list. They mostly eat snowshoe hares, and we have a lot of them on my property. Probably eighty percent of the pictures that my cameras take are of snowshoe hares.

 

Black bears are not prone to disease, and we don't have mountain lions or other natural predators that would be likely to take a bear cub that is in proximity of its mother. There is plenty of food and water, so my guess would be one of the more common predators of bear cubs -- other bears. Mom might have difficulty protecting all three of her cubs from another bear so I'm just guessing of course, but it might be that another bear killed it. It could have been hit crossing a road somewhere but the only road is a couple of miles away, and that's not the direction I'd imagine a mother bear would take her cubs, since it involves crossing some large potato fields.

As a child, we also didn't have to concern ourselves with whose land we were on, with only a couple of exceptions, and the state didn't worry one bit about kids fishing without a license. Times have changed.

 

I drove up north again this morning to put a few more cameras out so I picked up the disks from the three cameras I had set up a few days ago. The bear came and at all my apples but did so at night, and the pictures aren't very good. This is the best one.

 

These are from a few years ago.


Shortly after I set the camera up in a tree in this clearing...

Look who shows up.

 

Here's a few more.


After setting up the camera and cutting some of the ferns away, I returned to the clearing to leave some apples, not knowing that the bear had been there.

This last one is from another camera in another clearing. Same bear, though.