During our visits to a school we set up a camera trap overnight to see what nocturnal visitors the school gets. Here are some of the videos.

 

A camera trap is activated by a motion sensor, so whatever moves in front of it is caught on film. We often get videos of cats because they like to come and investigate the bait we’ve left. I don’t normally share the videos of cats, but seeing as Coton in the Elms Primary have the Coton Cat on their logo, I thought I’d share the video of the cat I caught on camera at Coton.

Luckily the Coton cat did not eat all the bait that we left out and later that night we caught a hedgehog on camera. Although we did not get to see the hedgehog eating for the camera had been repositioned (we suspect a curious cat!).

Our next school visit was to Lawn Primary School in Derby. Our first visitor to the camera trap was a young fox. In the video you can see that the fox is quite cautious at first, but did get more confident and eventually enjoyed a good meal, making several visits through the night.

Later in the night we had another visitor at Lawn, a hedgehog came and checked out the area and then ate some of our bait. We’re always happy and excited to find hedgehogs on our camera traps for hedgehog numbers have been on the decline in the UK for some time now; one reason for this is slug pellets. Once slugs have eaten the pellet, the poison remains in their body and when they are eaten the poison concentrates in the body of the predator, and hedgehogs love eating slugs!