Sometimes it really is better just to let technology take over. The rescue cubs do not extend their fear of me to fear of the trail cam, as we've already discovered, so I decided to try a different experiment today: leaving the camera (safely tied to the door!) on still photo mode.

It took 567 pictures of which these are my favourites! (I'm quite pleased with the quality really, for a 2mp camera with no ability to adjust the focus!) Given how difficult it has been to get "real" pictures of them with my Canon, I find these rough trail-cam pictures quite intriguing.

Who's watching?


Who's hiding?


"How come we're in here, unlike that big wild cub?"



Tina being dwarfed



Kitty panting



And finally, one "normal" picture (back to the 30D) - a local rabbit.



I saw him this evening while walking home from the valley where I see so many wildflowers; it was just starting to rain, followed by a single peal of thunder, and a wide double rainbow eventually broke out over the sky. Brief but refreshing summer storm.

Competition in nature is one of those concepts lectured upon at university but that gets a limited deal in popular wildlife shows, especially compared to its twin natural processes of predation and mutualism. In a world where resources are finite, the theory goes, species that require those resources will compete against other, until either the weaker competitor goes locally extinct or one species finds a slightly different niche from its rival, defusing the competition.

But there is a third way. In my post the other day I mentioned about yellow rattle and how it sort of mediates the competition between wildflowers and grasses. Tonight I went to another meadow and found some rattle that is already ready to rattle These are the seed pods.



If a predator (or parasite, in the rattle's case - it apparently gets some of its nutrition from the roots of its neighbouring plants) is inclined to go for the most powerful competitor, the weaker species will, of course, benefit. This seen all over the place in the natural world. I guess I've probably mentioned this before on here but there was a study in Texas a while back that looked at how coyotes were influencing the diversity of rodents. Obviously, coyotes kill rodents...but what initially looks bad for rodents is actually very good for most of them. In an area kept coyote-free, the number of rodent species dropped from eleven to one as coyotes, through preying on highly dominant kangaroo rats, had been keeping competition in check. Predation is good for those that don't get eaten, as the saying goes

(I can never pass up the opportunity to put a coyote photo on my blog Needless to say, this is from Alberta last June.)



Anyway...back to the North Downs, and the point of all this is to explain why I found so many pyramidal orchids Anacamptis pyramidalis in the meadow where rattle had reduced the grass density



A couple of other shots: the foxcubs are still being themselves



And this is a slightly shy male bullfinch who visited the front garden a couple of mornings ago.