A Bear Takes Nice Pictures

Earlier this year I had a surprise when I arrived to swap memory cards in my new trail camera (in the field less than 2 month). It was lying on the ground pointing face up. I quickly saw teeth marks on the bottom corner and assumed it was a black bear. I also thought I should have opted for the security box. Here are a few pictures of what I found.
1. Bear grabs camera.
2. Bear puts camera on the ground.
3. Bear picks the camera back up and it triggers 2 pictures again. This time it gets pictures of a different bear. Notice the logo is upside down now.
4. Doe checking out the new placement of my camera.

While pointing to the sky, my camera took 9,000 photos of leaves and clouds in 1 month. I’m still using the same set of batteries.

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While elk hunting in Utah last year the locals were saying that the bears would rip trail cameras off from the trees and chew on them. A security box might not be a bad idea if you are in bear country. I think the critters and deer have a greater awareness of tail cameras than we give them credit for! I have had does stick there face right up to the cameras.

My deer are scared of my cameras….

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Yes, I’ve heard bears grabbing trail cams is a problem.

Bears seem to be very willing to grab something and chew on it for a while just to see if it tastes good. It seems to take them a lot of chewing before they realize that something isn’t good to eat.

Case in point, I left a plastic can of bad gas out at my property. It was 2 stroke mix that had sat in an outboard tank for too long, but I put it in an old plastic can so I could use it as fire starter for brush piles.

I show up one day and the can is missing. I find it all tore up and full of bear teeth marks about 50 yards down the trail. Apparently, it took the bear about an hour of chewing before he realized that 2 stroke oil isn’t a good condiment.

Years ago we had a bear in Canada that grabbed a bottle of motor oil and ran off across a clearing and sat there and ate the whole bottle and licked up all the spilled oil off the ground. I’ll bet that bear didn’t have any constipation issues for a while, he probably operated like a well oiled machine.

Grouse

4walleye wrote:

I think the critters and deer have a greater awareness of trail cameras than we give them credit for! I have had does stick there face right up to the cameras.

I moved my camera to a different tree last weekend while hunting. I wanted to have a better angle for the sun to help with picture quality. This put the camera pointing more up and down the trail. Later I had a doe come up the trail from behind and stop just short of walking past the camera. She looked back and forth several times at the camera and then the trail in front of her. She chose to go wide and make her own trail for a bit. She didn’t trigger a picture. She hung out milling around for a while before leaving. Not sure it was all visual for her or if she was picking up some scent I must have left on the camera?