We had heard about some partners in South Carolina that were using camera traps and I think other researchers have used it in Florida. This design is not something new, but it’s new to us.
You take a five-gallon bucket and you cut holes, or tunnels, in the sides so that when you flip it upside down, something can walk through it. And then you mount the camera inside to the bottom of the bucket, so when it’s tipped upside-down, the camera is looking at the ground.
Bog turtles use these rivulets on the ground where they move around. They’re like little roads—a good environment to deploy these kinds of buckets.
We’re trying to find new bog turtle sites, where we think the conditions are good, but we haven’t seen them. Setting traps is really time intensive: You have to install the traps, and you have to check them daily. But if you could leave cameras out for an entire summer, you can monitor a new potential site. All you need to know is if there’s one turtle there. Then people can go out and do a heavy investigation.
We wanted to use these both as a way to explore new potential sites, as well as to get better data about our existing sites. We started with 10 cameras in 2022. And then this past year we deployed 20 camera traps throughout the summer, including 10 we moved around between four wetland sites where we thought there could be turtles. We actually still had animals on radio [for the telemetry project] as well this entire time. So we had some data that overlapped where some known animals were on the site as well as the cameras.