A few months ago, I purchased two trail cameras for our property in Woodside. We've always wondered what roams the trails after we leave and we've been moving the cameras around to various junction points as we figured out where the animals roam. For the first few weeks we saw nothing but finally happened upon two good places for spotting deer. Nice, but I can drive along 280 and see those.
The cameras have SD cards and Renee and I hike the property every weekend so we switch the cards out once a week. Today's haul included our first shot of one of the local mountain lions. So exciting! The cameras (which have come such a long way since I played with them 5 or 6 years ago) now have an infra-red mode and these pictures were taken right at dusk: a bit bright for infra-red but too dark for the regular camera hence the washed out shot. The clock on the camera isn't set exactly right and I'm not sure of the offset, but the pictures were taken at about 7:30pm. It's an eerie effect but now that we know there's at least one lion on the trails, we'll keep searching for a better shot.
Renee estimates that it's a probably a juvenile female, based on its size. We were able to compare the animal's scale with shots of our dog in the same position and while it's bigger than our 65 pound Staffordshire Terrier, it's not that much bigger.
For comparison purposes, here's the same location during the day, taken by the non-infra-red camera.