Do you see what I see?

Look carefully at these camera trap photos. Notice anything in the photos? They looked like camera misfires to me at first glance. These photos are from our long-term woodrat supplemental nest monitoring project in collaboration with Jeremy Dixon from Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. It's a good thing that refuge interns, Josh Sands and Katie King, have great eyes and attention to detail! If you look at the bottom right corner of the photos, you can see the subtle movement of one of the most deadly threats to woodrats and all mammals in South Florida: the invasive Burmese python. While we have know Burmese pythons are a threat in Key Largo for several years now, ongoing research continues to reveal that these large snakes are quite difficult to find in the environment so various methods including the use of traps, transect searches, and even excitable python detection dogs are commonplace for finding pythons. We can now add remote camera traps to our python detection methods. Although they are cold-blooded and slow, it seems that when pythons cross the infrared sensor of a camera trap they will still trigger the photo to be taken. This could be encouraging and add another method to our arsenal to survey for these deadly predators in South Florida. Hopefully, we can track down this snake and remove it from the environment before it gets too far beyond nest 287!