Ready for their close-up

By offering stalkers insight into quarry behaviour, trail cams improve the chances of success, says Will Pocklington

- Will Pocklington

Four sharp ‘pinks’ from a blackbird and she froze, ears strained, tongue flashing across her nose. Then she was off. A minute later an unfamiliar man lumbered into view, trampling clumsily through the thick bankside grass. The nearest footpath was a few hundred yards away.

It was one of the more eventful — and frustrating — clips I’d viewed on my phone at the breakfast table, morning coffee in hand. While eating my first round of toast, I’d enjoyed watching a green woodpecker pecking about in the bare earth at the base of an old hawthorn. Badgers, hares, grey squirrels, a fox, a roebuck and several muntjac had also made an appearance — all in that same spot at some point during the week. Perhaps they were nearby when the lost rambler spooked the split-eared roe doe from her patch by the brook.

The previous day, a friend had downloaded the latest footage from several trail cams we’ve been using for a while now on a local estate. They’ve added a new dimension to our reconnaissance. I say ‘our’ because there are three of us who manage the deer there, and we share anything interesting from the cameras on a WhatsApp group.

There’s little doubt these tools have become a real asset in recent years — to gamekeepers, stalkers, ecologists, you name it — but they’re far from a modern concept; records of unattended ‘camera traps’ go back more than a century. Many credit the American George Shiras as the first to use them. He employed tripwires, sometimes baited, to trigger cameras with flash units at night. They were cumbersome but they worked. In 1906 a selection of Shiras’s wild game stills were published in National Geographic.