Pine Marten taken with an Ltl Acorn 5210A using Infrared light

Pine Marten taken with an Ltl Acorn 5210A Trail Camera using Infrared light.

This image takes current pride of place in my close-up test results.

The Marten's nose is about 35cm from the lens and the original image has been 

cropped at the sides but not top and bottom.

The image is full size within the crop and has not had any noise filtering or sharpening.
You can download the image to enlarge to full size but please remember that the image is my copyright and can only be reused with my permission.

Red Deer Hind spooked by infra-red LEDs on trail camera.

I moved the trail camera from the Badger Sett a few days ago to investigate a couple of deer trails and this clip is one of the early results.


This Red Deer Hind was heading towards the trail camera in early morning light; which wasn't bright enough to prevent the infra-red illumination from switching on. Like Foxes, Deer seem to be made very nervous on sight of the red glow from the LEDs.

Trail Camera

I started to experiment with a trail camera a few months ago but what with moving house and fixing the van I didn't get time to do anything serious with it until recently.

Last Thursday I got it out in the forest in an area where I'm  surveying Red Squirrels, using Peanuts and Sunflower seeds as ground bait.

Nothing happened on Thursday but at 0543 on Friday a Brown Hare passed by and was caught on IR.

Nothing else until 0610 today when a Pine Marten arrived and spent about 12 minutes making a pig of itself.

Then at 0829 a Red Squirrel turned up briefly and shot up a Norway Spruce about 2 minutes later and wasn't seen again. What suprised me was how soon after first light it appeared. At this time of the year and at the sub zero temperatures we've had for over a week now I would have expected it to be foraging a bit later in the day. I think maybe there was still Pine Marten scent hanging around which is probably why it didn't stay or return.

At 1042 a suprise visitor was this Jay which stayed for about a minute.

No more after that until I collected the images at about 1430.

I've left more bait and will be going back in a couple of days.

All the images are shown original size with cropping. I'll talk more about trail cameras at a later date.