Friday, August 15, 2008

Wildlife Images by Camera Trap

A few days ago I posted 'Five out of Five!' This post included a few highlights of one of my very few Big 5 drives one of which was of a very large male leopard that killed a fully grown zebra.

Now as leopard sightings in Madikwe are very special this scene drew a lot of attention during the few days that the leopard kept on returning to the carcass. Obviously everybody wanted to get a view of the beautiful cat and this in intself caused a lot of traffic in that particular area.

So here goes with a slightly different take on that specific sighting.

Bradley Leighton, who is one of the Photo-Africa photographers, works at Tau Game Lodge and emailed me a few of the images they were able to capture with the camera trap they set up at the carcass. This little unit captured somewhere in the region of 140 images of various animals as they passed by the camera. This is a brilliant tool for research and to view the behavior of animals in their natural environment.
Here are a few of the images the camera captured.
The leopard on his kill.

Staring at the camera in the middle of the day.

Feeding late at night.

A curious Brown Hyena checking out the camera trap.

Elephant passing by.

It would be great if we get more of these images onto the Blog and delve a bit feeper into the behavior of some of the nocturnal and skittish species. Hmmm... some interesting reseacrh / photographic articles coming up??

Thanks again to Brad and Tau Game Lodge for forwarding the images. You can view his work on Photo-Africa by clicking here. If you like this kind of thing, you can also visit the Webcam at the watering hole outside of Tau Game Lodge by clicking here.

I have the High Five images ready to go but have to get down to the lodge now. Our new guests are alomost here (large family for an 80th birthday for the whole weekend) so I will upload the weekly High Five later tonight or early tomorrow morning! Make sure to check back soon!

As always I look forward to hearing from you!

Until next time.

Gerry

1 comment:

Mike said...

Great post Gerry, must be so interesting and exciting to collect the images from the camera and go through and see what you caught, gives a good idea of what you would normally miss.