Phantom Red Squirrel, Pine Marten and Red Deer.

Fast moving Red Squirrel travelling right to left.
Shutter speed was 1/25sec which was too slow to catch
anything other than the squirrels tail.
Notice the blond tail which is a fairly common feature of
red squirrels in this area of Scotland.

End of last week I collected several camera traps that had been set on forest deer trails. Red Deer are regularly culled to help forest regeneration in this area, which makes them nervous and elusive.

I was hoping to get an idea of how many animals were regularly in this section of forest and the video clips below follow on from my post a month ago.

Co-incidentally I discovered two obscure but identifiable reasons for apparent false triggering.

The image on the left is of a passing squirrel, which I nearly missed and the following video shows three frames taken with an Acorn 5210A camera trap, which captured a moving stick in the ground vegetation. Each frame is a centre crop of the
original at full resolution and these are preceded by the original, un-cropped frame, to show the location and relative size of the detection area.

The reason for the camera triggering wasn't immediately apparent and you'll probably need to view the clip more than once to catch it.

It's a good illustration of why it can sometimes seem that a camera trap triggers (false triggers) with no cause. Why this stick was moving, I have no idea, but there was obviously a moving heat source involved which the camera managed to detect.  I'll see if there are any clues, next time I visit the location.