Success!!

About 30 minutes after dark a single Badger appeared and began snuffling and digging around in front of me.

Fortunately I can use my Little Acorn camera as a standard camera when I want to sit and take pictures and the night vision facility means I can take pictures in the dark.

It was only there for a few minutes before moving on.  I am waiting for a new fall of snow so that I can track it back to its set.

At another location in Nattavaara a Brown Bear had killed a Moose calf.  I took some pictures of the tracks and measured them.

They were 16cms wide and so this was quite a large bear.

 

5 days at my cabin – day 5

I had left my Little Acorn camera out overnight at the cabin to see if any animals came to visit.  I was surprised next morning to see that a Reindeer had been to visit in the middle of the night.

Myself and Erik walked in the forest.  We eventually decided to stop and make fire,

and cook coffee and some lunch.

Close to where we made fire, we found a couple of really nice Birch burs.

Later during our walk, we found a site where a fox had killed a Capercaillie.

I could not understand why there was a lot of mouse droppings in one are, but then realised that this was actually the crop contents and that this bird had recently been eating Birch leaf buds.

We spent the afternoon fishing but again did not catch anything.

At 6pm we loaded our kit in the valp and Erik gave me a lift to my car.  As we drove along the track I had walked to the cabin on, I spotted fresh bear tracks.

The tracks were from the previous day and it was not a particularly large bear that had made them, so if we had travelled in the opposite direction the previous evening we might of seen it.

5 days at my cabin – day 4

I spent the morning gathering wood and splitting logs.  Late morning I heard a vehicle and eventually my friend and neighbour Erik appeared.  He had been ploughing the road to our cabins with his military valp and it was nice to see that I would have some company.

He drove up to his cabin and made fire to get the cabin warm and then came to join me for coffee at my cabin.  Later in the afternoon we decided to try and walk across the marshes to another large lake.

There was still a layer of ice under the water so I wasn’t too difficult to get across to the lake.

As we walked back across the marsh there were quite a few Wood Sandpipers, Spotted Redshanks and Greenshanks feeding there.  This Green shank sat up in a tree watching us.

We spent the evening fishing, but did not catch anything.

Later in the evening we drove around in the forest (the Valp will go just about anywhere!!) looking for birds, Moose or bear but we only saw a Capercaillie.

New bird species for the year were a pair of Smew on the cabin lake, a Dunnock and a Rustic Bunting singing at the cabin.