Red Fox Rendezvous

I am putting the final touches on some graphs, charts, and tables that show the results (and how-to's) of my red fox survey between the months of this March, 2013 and March, 2014 in park lands and private lands of Northern Virginia.

Results include current living foxes, foxes that have been hit by cars (or died by other means), foxes that have moved out of the area, and fox kits

Here is a very watered-down and simplistic version of my data:

In a 24 acre plot, there were 3 individual red foxes

In a 60 acre plot, there were 4 individual red foxes.

In a 350 acre plot, I've found that there were at least 7 individual red foxes.

In a 430 acre plot, there were 9 individual red foxes.

In a 600 acre plot, there were 9 individual red foxes.

I get this data by comparing camera-trap images of different cameras set up in each park.  A red fox that appears at one camera (under normal circumstances) cannot be the same red fox that appears at another camera 1 mile away, 30 seconds later.  BAM!  That's two individual foxes.  Some red foxes look completely different from eachother, others are a little more difficult to recognize.  Figure in more parks and a heck of a lot more cameras, and results like this pour in to my computer on a daily basis.

A Shenandoah Hike and a Fairfax County Camera Check

Today was a great day for hiking and camera checking.  The trails of Shenandoah National Park were calling my name and I had to get out there on this day off of work and school.  There was still some snow on the ground from previous storms but today was about 58 degrees and decently sunny.

It was a great hike that led us down the trail to a great basalt rock formation. . .

. . .and a large ice formation left over from this winter's coldest days.

It was a good day to just get out and enjoy the outdoors.

Another highlight of the day came from when checking a camera-trap in Chantilly after the hike.

Cats, dogs, coyotes, cardinals, humans, red foxes, and raccoons all came by the camera.

Here's the best picture of a Chantilly Coyote.

Fur Bearer Mystery

What animal does this brownish, gray fur belong to?

It's from a camera in Virginia a few weeks ago.

Raccoon, deer, squirrel, coyote, domestic dog, and domestic cat are my top suspects.   What do you think?

Woodpecker Identification

Here's a post that comes from the Chantilly/Centreville area of Fairfax County, Virginia.  There's a lot of land in these places, both public and private, where I am camera-trapping.

The camera was originally placed to see the medium-sized to large mammals roaming around, but another species flew by and landed right in the camera's view.

It's a new species for me (at least for my camera trapping), but the problem is, I don't know what species this is.

It's either a downy woodpecker or a hairy woodpecker, but which?

Whenever I have questions about species I first try to identify it myself.  This is tough on this one, so I emailed and texted the pictures to my colleagues that have jobs and experiences such as birders, wildlife biologists, natural resource managers, and naturalists.

Some of them say hairy woodpecker, others say downy woodpecker.  So far, all of us think it is one of the two, but conversations of sapsuckers have also arisen.

I'd really like to solve this mystery.

Other important information that may be necessary to note is that the camera's date stamp is incorrect, and that this was in Fairfax, Virginia.  The correct date stamp should read, "11-19-2013".  The pictures in this post are the only pictures I captured of it.

What bird is this?

Comments below are greatly appreciated.