A flying rabbit, and a few lynx

It's been a tough month, with deep snow and extreme cold.  Unfortunately, I took me the whole month to discover that when a camera freezes down to 30 below, it doesn't "save settings" so it no longer functions optimally as a camera trap.  Oh well.  I've got a ton of snowshoe hare pictures, however.  This one is about my favorite.  Looks like it's flying!

Here's another of my many snowshoe hare pics:

 This is a lynx captured in Isabella.  Lynx are around in unprecedented numberrs.  You can see it's tracks in the background.  Their feet are so big, it looks like they wear snowshoes.  You would be especially impressed if you tried to snowshoe yourself.  It's deep and very fluffy!

 Finally, there's this shot of a hind end of a lynx.  One of the ways you can tell a lynx from a bobcat is that a lynx's tail looks like it was dipped in black paint.  Unfortunately, it is going in the wrong direction, but I still like it.  They are sort of ghosts silently padding through the woods!

This week my cameras come in, as next weekend it the firearms deer season and I'm afraid of theft.  The beaver logging site was pretty quite.  Just one beaver skidding a log.  It's funny because there is plenty of trees down and waiting to be processed.

Then, this timber wolf showed up.  Sure glad it isn't going on the couch with those feet!

Lots of wildlife is attracted to beaver ponds.

Beaver ponds are a focal point for wildlife.  Of course there are plenty of wood ducks.

And various birds, like this gray jay.

Otters are pretty common, though hard to photograph well.

And finally, a bobcat came snooping around the beaver logging site.

Beavers

I set a camera up on a beaver's skidding trail, and got a LOT of pictures of them going back and forth.  I compiled them in a video.

Then, I moved the camera to point at what I thought was a likely looking tree, and sure enough, the beavers cooperated.

TIMBER!!!

False alarm!

Success!

Now the work starts!

The moose rut starts.

Things start picking up in the fall.  I got two bull moose just a few days apart.

This young bull just shed his velvet.  You can see the reddish tinge to his antlers, and see chunks of vegetation stuck to them.

Mysteries

Set up a motion activated camera, and you get a lot of dud pictures, sometimes of parts of animals.  Here's a few of my favorites.

I THINK this is a bear's ear.  Looks like it might even have a tick.

Then there's the swamp thing.  Just can't decide what this is.  Duck?  Woodchuck?

Then this is my favorite.  The camera is set up on a blowdown at about waist height.  It looks like some critters chin in the upper left.  Moose?  Bear?

The camera takes 3 shots in row, and here is the second shot of that event.  Whatever it was is gone.

Bears!

Bears started showing up later in the summer.  This little guy was photographed in Isabella.

Another Isabella bear:

There were bears north of Duluth as well.  This one came buy just a few hours after I had set up the camera.

A few miles away, I got this shot:

But the funniest thing was when a bear managed to get a camera off of a tree.  The camera got knocked to the ground.  This was taken on the way down.  

No the cam is on the ground facing the sky.  The culprit!

I think the bear is mooning me!

The rest of the pictures looked like this.  Maybe bats were triggering it.