It’s been a long, dry summer here in and around Cowra and on my place, up in the hills of Woodstock, there’s not much feed or water around. As depressing as that sounds, it’s also a great opportunity to see what’s hanging out at my place. I don’t have any stock but I do have some water troughs hanging around from when this place was grazed so I dragged this one to a good location, filled it up and popped a trail camera up in a spot where it wouldn’t go off every five minutes for no reason!

This is the spec of my camera and the features I chose it for:

* Solar charging so you don’t need to change any batteries

* Wifi in the camera so you don’t need to take the SIM card out or take the camera down every time you want to look at the pictures.  This basically means the camera syncs to your phone via an app and you can view the photos and then choose which to download.

* Buying from a site with a listed address and phone number so you can call them and make sure they are real before sending your money!  I’ve not actually had any issues from buying online before but there are a lot of ‘ghost’ stores popping up that ship directly from China – that’s not always a bad thing but if you’re parcel doesn’t arrive, you have nobody to call for a refund or to chase up with.

Here are some of the pictures I got during the heat wave week

I noted that when it’s not super hot, we tend to get one or maybe two species of bird in the trough at the same time. During this very high heat event I counted up to five species hanging around at the same time. I don’t know exactly why this is but would like to think the birds had all came to an agreement that cooperation and collegiality was required to win the day – save those petty squabbles for when it’s a bit less sweaty!

I did get quite a lot of footage during this week as the trough was very popular so my top tip would be to check the camera every day or so rather than leave it for five days (as I did) and then having to wade through around 4000 images of birds skinny dipping…

As you can see from the trough cam, temperatures at ours got up to 47C which feels absolutely bonkers! I’m glad the birds, lizards, echidna, possum, kangaroos and wallaby’s dropped by during this time as I’m sure they would have all been feeling quite parched.

Do you have any good trail cam footage to share? If so, email it to us here at Mid lachlan landcare @ gmail dot com as we’d love to see what visits your place. Oh and make sure you let us know if we can share it on with our fellow landcarers.