Pondguru vs Nature #1

I'm basically going out normally, inter-remotely, and I'll be identifying where animals have eaten a meal, or come through, or somewhere where they've gone under a hedge, or something. Basically identifying the cam, and I'll be putting what animals I'm going to get on the field cam. I'm going to leave it for four to five days and nights, come back, have a look at the footage, and then see whether I have won, or nature has won. It's that simple. If nature has won, it doesn't mean to say I've lost. Because if nature's won, chances are I'll learn something to see as this series goes on, what I mean by it. Now of course I could just make a bait station in the woods, but that would be way too easy. If I set a game cam there, I would know exactly what I'm going to get, and the same through a bird table in the garden. Yes, I might get some fantastic footage, but it'll be very predictable, and I won't learn anything from that. What I'm trying to do is learn something, and if I'm learning, hopefully you're learning. Now as I get further down the line in these series of videos, I'm going to be reviewing these various cameras that I'm using, so look out for that in the... Now just at the top of this very steep valley here, we've got a gorge. Nothing can climb up the sides of that, so where I've walked up the stream, everything kind of gets funnelled to this point, and I've identified quite a few trails coming down off the bank side, below the gorge, and this is the first crossing point animals will have from one side of the valley to the other. I think it's a good place and as I was coming up the stream I noticed a foxy smell and I'll show you what I've just spotted. There's a few shadows so it might not come out very well but hopefully you can see there's a wet mark on there just here and it has been raining so you'd expect you know raindrops to run down but that across here is not a natural watermark so having identified that particular thing as being out of place and also noticing a smell The next thing to do is to smell that, and as I'm talking I can actually, I can taste the smell of that, it's fox, it's dog fox, absolutely reeks. Basically the fox has come up the stream in front of me, piddled on here to mark its territory, and then disappeared off up the valley. So I'm going to set the camera up, and I'm going to get a picture of it, and possibly some video. Now because it's been raining, there isn't any footprints to see, they've all been washed out. And this ground's pretty hard so the fox that came through hasn't left any sign apart from that pittle on the tree where it markets territory. So the trail goes across the stream here and up the other side and there's a few fallen branches that haven't got any debris on them at all, they're very clean so obviously something is going up here. So there's our trail going across the river, there's our very very steep gorge, I don't know whether you can see there, that is a very very steep bankside, it's a sheer cliff basically. So we've got a trail coming down here and we've got a trail coming down on the other side as well, just next to that tree. Very steep but it comes down through here and across the stream. There's also another one which comes from out of the field down the wood and meets up with this one. Therefore we've got at least four or five good trails all converging at this point. One, two, three, five, yeah five possibly six trails meeting at this point where the fox marked its territory. This is a strange one. At first I thought this, on that confluence point, was somewhere where deer had been rubbing their antlers, and it still may be, but there seems to be deep scratches down here, almost like something's been sharpened on its claws. Yep, that's been made in an upward motion, because I can see the barks gathered here, so that's gone up, so that's deer, it's not, say, like a big cat or something, scratching its claws, definitely deer, but that's on the path. Right, we've got the scratching post right next to the camera, we've got the pittling post right behind me. That's where I'm going to put the camera to take both those features in. We'll come back to this in a week and we'll examine the footage. Because I came up this stream and I identified that confluence point of all those trails, I'm actually going to leave by the stream as well. I'm not going to follow one of the trails. I don't want to leave any more scent or any more disturbance than is absolutely necessary. So I'm going to go up through the gorge, climb up the waterfall and hopefully won't leave any scent or any disturbance for the animals to find that I was actually here. I've got high hopes for this one. And I can say without any shadow of a doubt, nature has won. And, no dear, I've noticed they're not coming through there, I didn't get them on the camera. And one thing I've really learned from this video is... It's those badgers in the woods. I didn't realize that beforehand. But the main thing is... On the right hand side of a lot of those bits of footage where those squirrels were running across. That's a blatant squirrel run, just to the right of that. There's a fallen tree across the river. It's an obvious crossing point, but obviously I can't set the camera up there now, because I know that to be a crossing point, so I've definitely learned something from that video. I didn't spot that. I went straight to the more or less obvious thing, where the deer are scraping at antlers, and where the foxes mark their territory. Nature won. One nil to nature.