Les Jones

Photos > First Wildlife Pictures from the Moultrie Game Camera

Last month I bought a Moultrie game camera to capture pictures of animals on our property. The game camera is a weatherproof, motion-activated camera with a flash for photographing nocturnal animals and bungee cords for attachment to a tree.

At first I was trying to catch the dogs or whatever that were getting into our garbage cans. They stopped coming as soon as I set out the camera and have never been back.

Next I tried using the camera in the lower part of the property. No luck there, either.

Finally, I moved the camera down the tree close to the ground with the bottom resting on a log. Using the built-in laser pointer I aimed the camera at a small rise a dozen feet away. Then I baited the rise with oranges, stale bread, and grease from the turkey fryer I used at Thanksgiving.

That did the trick. In this first batch of pictures you can see a possum, a raccoon, squirrels, and a cardinal that seems to be curious about the camera. The dog in the pictures is our Chow-Corgi mix, Shorty.

Mouse over pictures for captions. Click on any picture to see a larger image and enter the slideshow.

There's a mystery animal in that last photo. It must have been just inches in front of the camera lens looking away. I think it's a mammal, probably a squirrel or possibly a chipmunk, but it could be a bird. There's something on its head that almost looks like plumage. What do you think? Here's a full resolution crop:

Camera notes

• The camera seems very waterproof. I left it outdoors for a month with no condensation or leaks.
• Picture quality is nothing to write home about. I used Picasa to adjust the contrast and apply sharpening, but the pictures still aren't terribly clear. Given that the purpose of the camera is to confirm the presence of game animals and when they're active in the area I guess the quality is acceptable. If you're hoping to capture stunning wildlife photos, look elsewhere.
• The camera took 35 pictures over the course of about five days, the best of which are shown here. At that point the onboard 16 MB of memory was full. I've now dedicated a 256 MB SD memory card to the camera so it won't fill up again.
• After a month the batteries still had 50% of life remaining, though if the camera had taken more pictures the batteries would be more depleted.
• The order in which the pictures are downloaded from the camera is not always the same as the actual chronological order, as seen on the timestamps at the bottom of each picture.
• I'd prefer the camera to be camouflaged so that people would be less likely to see it and steal it. (The suburban animals in my yard didn't seem to mind it.) The camera is separate from the waterproof housing, so one possibility would be to apply camo tape to the housing or paint it a camo pattern.