Trail Camera Photos: Bear Edition

Hey everyone! Over the past few weeks I've been working hard at sifting through our collection of trail camera photos and tagging them all-- adding digital labels to identify what was recorded in the image. Most weeks we download anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand photographs off our cameras, so sometimes it takes a while to get through them. We have nearly 15,000 photographs already from this field season, with about five weeks remaining to collect data.

Each photo must be properly tagged with information about the date and location the photo was taken, along with whatever critter(s) may have shown up, in order for us to be able to analyze the data later on. It can be a tedious and time-consuming process, but it's nice to have a searchable database of images. Once tagged, I can easily go back and locate every single photo we have of a marten, a canid, a crow, etc.

So instead of sharing photos from a specific location, this week I decided to share photos of a specific subgroup of subjects: brown bears! We have so many images of bears that it was hard to decide which to share. This is just a sampling of some of the bear pictures we've taken the past couple months:

This was a nice closeup we got at one of our first trapping locations, at the end of August. This is the same place we saw the bear cub and the wolf I posted earlier. This camera had great placement-- just about every photo we got off it was crisp, clear, and in focus.

 

Here's another earlier image. This is one of two female brown bears that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game monitors-- see her radio collar?

 

This image is more recent, from a set of cameras we have on a run of Chum salmon up Herman Creek.

  

Another more recent image taken at the same location. This is one of the better nighttime images we have of a brown bear.

Although this one isn't bad, either. But I just realized the clock somehow got reset on this camera, and the time stamp isn't right. Dangit! :\

 

This bear doesn't look particularly happy to have its photo taken.

Neither does this one. And it has backup!

This bear, however, is pretty fluffy. Not nearly as intimidating.

So many bears!