On my trip to western South Dakota this week, I kept encountering single photo subjects: A bighorn camped out for days along a road in the Badlands, a bison grazing along the rim above the Badlands, a migrating butterfly stopping off in Custer State Park, a golden eagle soaring above the Conata Basin, a badger lumbering through a prairie dog town in the basin, and a lone cottonwood on the otherwise treeless expanse of the basin. Click on any of the images below to start the slide show. ![](https://www.thomasoneil.com/images/2017/m/0080.jpg) Badger
![](https://www.thomasoneil.com/images/2017/m/7307.jpg) Lone tree
![](https://www.thomasoneil.com/images/2017/m/7148.jpg) Bighorn at sunset
![](https://www.thomasoneil.com/images/2017/m/7277.jpg) Solitary bison
![](https://www.thomasoneil.com/images/2017/m/3173.jpg) On the road home
The purpose of the trip was to redeploy my trail camera in some manner. Part of that involved temporarily putting two of them in a prairie dog town in the Conata Basin south of the Badlands to see if I could find a black-footed ferret. At first I thought I had succeeded, but I now believe I got images and a short video of a badger. It's still a first for me. Anyway, this is the current trailcam situation: - #1 Bushnell is permanently retired.
- #2 Reconyx remains in Wind Cave National Park for a seventh year.
- #3 Moultrie has been repositioned from Wind Cave to Custer State Park. I had a spot picked out on the map but it turned out that mountain-climbing skills would have been needed. Instead I returned to an area where I had previously placed #4 facing a spot that looks like a natural funnel due to fallen trees, but I don't know if the wildlife in that area is very exotic. In other words, there may very few elk and no mountain lions, in which case I'll figure out something else.
- #4 Primos continues to drive me mad with its false triggers and washed-out daytime images. But when I waded through the 368 videos it took in two days sitting in a prairie dog town in the Conata Basin, I found one great 10-second nighttime clip of a badger. If I could somehow restrict the Primos to triggering only at night, I would, but this particular camera does not have this feature. For now it is sitting at home awaiting another temporary assignment.
- #5 Browning is at my brother's cabin in Montana.
- After serving an overnight stint in the Conata Basin and getting still images of the badger, #6 Browning replaced #3 Moultrie in Wind Cave National Park.
Next spring I will probably pull #2 and #6 out of Wind Cave. After seven years, I think I will have thoroughly documented the elk that pass through that area. Unless #3 reveals something new in Custer State Park, I will probably place most of my cameras in the Conata Basin in search of burrowing owls, ferrets, and (yes) badgers. |