Camera Traps

Saturday, September 28th, 2013

Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London and Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society have been using camera traps for six years to monitor Amur tigers in the Lazovskii State Nature Reserve in Primorye in the southern Russian Far East. They recently caught a different predator at work:

“I saw the deer carcass first as I approached the trap on a routine check to switch out memory cards and change batteries, but something felt wrong about it. There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died.” said lead author Kerley, who runs the camera trap project. “It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Golden Eagle vs. Deer

“The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits — their regular prey — to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub.”

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    Earlier today I stumbled upon something akin — Jaguar Attacks Crocodile:

    When a jaguar pounces, sometimes one bite is all it takes to get a meal. National Geographic has exclusive video of a jaguar taking down a caiman in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands.

Leave a Reply