A January update from the Yorkshire Pine Marten Support Programme…

By Ed Snell, Yorkshire Pine Marten Officer

When we’re going through camera trap footage from the colder months of the year we generally expect to see less activity as the inhabitants of the forests on the North York Moors become less active over winter. This certainly hasn’t been the case in our camera trap surveys running towards the end of 2018, we’ve been spoilt for choice on footage share in our most recent camera trap highlights update! Perhaps this is in part because it’s not really got that cold until the middle of the month…

In order of appearance we have: Green woodpecker, great spotted woodpecker, great tit, wren, nuthatch, jay, tawny owl, sparrowhawk, goshawk, red deer, roe deer, stoat, shrew, bank vole, badger, red fox.

This footage has been compiled from selected video clips from two of our camera surveys, so you’ll notice camera footage from the same locations popping up numerous times. It’s great to see a range of species visiting our cameras year-round.

Due to the static positions of camera traps, the footage they capture can be really useful for comparing similar (or not so similar!) characteristics of species. We were lucky enough to capture 3 fascinating comparisons in these surveys:

1. You’ll see we’ve had a sparrowhawk and goshawk land on the same tree stump. We get plenty of camera trap clips where it’s difficult to distinguish between the two species, but when you put the clips side by side the differences are clear as day, even in the black and white night footage mode.

Those clips again…

2. The difference in size between red deer and roe deer is quite something to behold, the red stags we caught on camera tower over the little roes! (4:53 – 5:22).

3. The charismatic green woodpecker and great spotted woodpecker took turns to pose on the same fallen tree (0:00 – 0:29).

If you’d like to help us identify the species we capture on camera you can do this over at MammalWeb. Just sign up as a ‘spotter’ and select ‘NatureSpy – North York Moors’ in the menu. Happy ID’ing!