Playing With A New Toy

Terry and I are booked for an Alaskan Cruise with Royal Caribbean next month. We'll fly out to Vancouver, BC and board the ship there. It'll be nine days up the coast with stops at Sitka, Ketchican, Juneau, Skagway, among other ports with the final stop in Seward. We'll take a train from Seward to Anchorage and then fly home from there.

All this has been booked by our nephew, Brian who will be accompanying us with his wife, Vicky, and their little one, George.

This will be our first cruise and I'm looking forward to it. I am NOT looking forward to the long flights to and from our starting and ending points, however! At least they will be on Alaska Airlines.

Not wanting to haul my big camera and lenses with me through TSA checkpoints, I went and purchased a Nikon Coolpix P900 which is an all in one point-and-shoot, with a lens that goes from 24mm to 2000mm (!!), nothing short of a miracle camera. I also purchased a dandy little guide on how to use it. (Photographer's Guide to The Coolpix P900 by Alexander S. White) While you can pretty much take the camera out of the box and take some really good pictures, that guide book helps you utilize some of the amazing features of this camera. It also shows you how to use features you probably never, ever even considered.

Anyway, I've been toying with the camera for about a week now and still have a whole lot to learn let alone master.

American Goldfinch

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Tufted Titmouse

First Violet on the lawn.

House Finch

Spring Beauties

Deer in the woods.

So, last evening, before we had a bruin visitation, I set two game cameras out in the woods behind the Aerie. These are older 1.3 megapixal models from Moultrie. I also have two 2.1 megapixal and one 3l1 megapixal models but they are up at the Bolt Hole right now where Mark is using them to photograph bears. All the cameras have taken a lot of pictures over the last few years and some of them are starting to show their wear and tear. The flash doesn’t always go off when it’s supposed to and sometimes the camera sensors don’t work properly. Occasionally one will go crazy and shoot pictures every two minutes no matter whether there is something to photograph or not. Then, once in a while one will simply seize up and not shoot at all.

The two that I put out last evening had been working okay. But today I discovered one of them is suffering from old age. The other did quite well, however.

After the bear showed up in the yard last night, I fully expected the cameras to have bear pictures. That would have annoyed me. I wanted some pictures of the deer that were in the yard on Wednesday. When I went out today, one camera had 35 pictures and the horse food I had put out was nearly gone. The other said it had taken 75 pictures and the battery needed changing but the food pile was pretty much untouched.

I switched the memory cards and changed the battery in the second camera only to have it seize up on me and not go into auto shooting mode. It also would not test the laser aiming device nor would it do a self diagnostic test. *sigh* I left it in the woods but will bring it inside tomorrow and see if it will mysteriously recover in a dark closet.

Getting back to the Aerie, I found the 75 pictures it had taken were of absolutely nothing. I couldn’t even see a mouse or chipmunk in any of the frames which were shot 2 to 4 minutes apart. But the other camera….aaah, the other camera did quite well. All 35 pictures were from this morning from around 9 AM to 11:30 AM and each contained pictures of deer.

There were two doe travelling together.


(Hey, the place is called “The Aerie” for a reason. The only flat areas have no trees on which to hang the cameras.)

Then there was a single 6-point buck; quite possibly the one that was in the yard Wednesday with a doe.





And then the stars of the show appeared: A doe and her twin fawns.


This is the only picture in which you can see all three together. The several others of this group only show Mom and one of the fawns at a time.



What’s particularly interesting to me is that I was at this camera less than an hour after the last picture of the doe and her twins was recorded.
I’m happy to see the deer here.

It’s legal to feed deer but not bears in PA. Just across the border in NYS the opposite is true. You can feed bears to get them to come to the cameras but you’re not supposed to feed deer. (Of course, the deer eat much the same bait as the bears so you do get some pictures of deer as well.) In both states, the feeding must stop several weeks before the hunting season begins. You can keep the cameras going, you just cannot put any bait out to attract the animals.