[music playing] Hi, I'm Alex.

Welcome to another episode of A Season at Shaver's Creek.

Summer tends to be a pretty busy time of year for both people and wildlife, and this summer was no exception.

We saw some really amazing things on our trail cameras.

So let's take a look.

[music playing] Now, bats are a super common sight to see in the evening in the summer.

And this is a view looking up into our bat boxes that are on site at Shaver's Creek.

Members of our big brown bat colony are roosting inside this box.

At dusk, they start to leave, and they will drop out of the box and fly out to go hunt insects.

Pennsylvania's bats are insectivores, meaning they only eat insects.

And they do a huge amount of pest control for us.

One bat can eat over a thousand insects in a single night, and pregnant females have been observed eating about their body weight in insects in just one night.

[music playing] We saw three black bears this season, all crossing our beaver dam, which was pretty neat.

The first bear was a pretty young one-- looks to be about maybe two years old, smaller and more slender-- and then two adult bears, both of which were probably males.

You might notice the collar around its neck.

It's used by the Pennsylvania Game Commission to track their movements.

It sends GPS data to a satellite, and they can see where the bear goes.

And that way, it gives them an idea of bear populations and their movements, where they're denning for the winter, and also their survival rate for the next season.

We've been tracking our raccoons throughout the seasons in many of our previous clips, and it was pretty neat to see these raccoons show up.

This is a new family.

These kits were born in the spring this year, so a brand-new family from our previous videos.

And as you can see, this young raccoon is learning to climb trees and explore its environment.

Raccoons use trees quite a bit.

They like to climb trees and sleep in the trees during the daytime.

So it's pretty important for them to learn this skill.

[music playing] Now, in the exact same space, we see this great blue heron that just caught a fish.

And in a neat, very rare daytime interaction, we also see one of our young raccoons swooping in, hoping to swipe a free fish meal from that heron.

[birds chirping] Now, we had a very interesting sighting here, a bird species that's extremely rare to see in Pennsylvania.

These two juvenile white ibis appeared in our beaver pond this summer, which is a pretty common bird in the southeastern United States, one of the more common birds in Florida.

But to see them this far north is pretty surprising.

I couldn't find any record of them being in Huntingdon County in the past, so this was a pretty special sighting for us.

Now, they're a wading bird that used their long, curved bill to sweep along the bottom of ponds, and they're feeling around for food.

They're mostly feeling for small crustaceans and other invertebrates.

Songbirds tend to be pretty protective of their nesting grounds.

Now, this great blue heron that showed up poses a very real threat to the nearby red-winged blackbird nest.

And the male red-winged blackbird is pretty happy to let the Heron know that it's not welcome here.

[chirping] And here, we see that same red-winged blackbird taking a pass at this eastern rat snake, which is a pretty common nest pillager.

[music playing] Even American crows pose a danger to the nest.

And we see our red-winged blackbird showing up and harassing this crow, keen to protect their young.

Again, we can see that songbirds are pretty serious about keeping their eggs safe.

Now here, we got a glimpse of a common snapping turtle moving from a nearby pond going toward Lake Perez.

And it gives us a pretty good view of our largest turtle species.

These turtles are pretty commonly found weighing over 35 pounds in the wild, but some individuals have been found weighing over about 70 pounds.

They can get pretty big.

Now, we've been seeing porcupines pretty regularly on our cameras, but this is the first baby porcupine we've caught.

Baby porcupines, also known as porcupettes, are born with a full set of quills that are soft at first, but they fully harden within an hour of their birth.

The porcupettes will stay with their mother for about five months or so, and then they'll set off on their own.

[chittering] Now, we saw our local red foxes a few times this summer.

These relatives of dogs and coyotes are opportunistic when it comes to finding food, which means they're going to go for whatever food is most easily obtained in that moment.

Now, foxes are a really agile animal.

You can see how easily it navigates this log across Shaver's Creek at night.

And as it's peering into the water, you can also see it startle a trout that quickly swims away from this potential predator.

It seems like this log is a pretty common crossing point, as we see our local bobcat showing off its own balance and agility in the early morning.

We had some pretty exciting sounds captured on our trail camera this summer as well, which seemed to confirm our suspicions that the bobcat we have in the area is a female.

Take a listen to this clip, and you'll be able to hear her kitten just off screen calling to its mom.

[meowing] Thanks for joining us for another episode of A Season at Shaver's Creek.

I hope you enjoyed everything that we saw throughout the summer.

Come on out to the center this fall.

We've got a lot of great programming planned for the weekends.

And until next time, never stop discovering.

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