Gabrielle McMahon-Csaki, Preserve Technician
The end of summer at Shaker Village brings blooming goldenrod and white wing stem at West Lot, monarchs flitting over the milkweed on their migration southward, and flushes of bright white mushrooms in the woods along Shawnee Run. The seasonal change also marks the beginning of a new period: the Snapshot USA field season.
Snapshot USA is a collaborative nationwide mammal survey affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute. For the past seven years, organizations across all fifty states have deployed trail cameras with standardized protocols to collect wildlife data that can be used for conservation management and research studies. Last fall was Shaker Village’s first year as a participant.
A Perfect Match
Shaker Village’s “3,000 acres of discovery” are incredibly well-suited to participate in the survey – there is a gradient of mixed grass prairie, deciduous hardwood forest, and xeric cliffs of the Palisades, a diversity of habitats that suggests that the nature preserve would be host to a healthy northeastern mammal community. Coyotes howl in the evenings, white-tailed deer scamper out from beneath the sycamores each twilight, and the occasional possum shows its toothy smile in the Historic Village.
There is also a possibility that some of Kentucky’s rarest mammals could call the preserve their home. Cane-breaks on the property could provide habitat for golden mice and least weasels, and the limestone crevices on the cliffs above the Kentucky River could hide Alleghany woodrats and their middens of nuts and seeds. Golden mice, least weasels, and woodrats are all highly secretive in their habits. Trail camera surveys allow members of the preserve team to look out for these sensitive mammals with minimal disturbance to their habitats.
Location Matters
Trail camera locations across the Village were selected to encompass a variety of forested habitats, from the heavily invaded bush honeysuckle thickets along forest edges where we host Stewardship Saturdays, to the pawpaw understories along the Kentucky River. Locations away from the trail system were selected to ensure hiker privacy.
After trail cameras are retrieved, the images are uploaded to an artificial intelligence software that sorts them based on when the camera was triggered. The AI generates a suggestion for the species and number of animals that are in each image sequence. The researchers for each site must painstakingly confirm each of these suggestions to ensure that each observation is accurate. Many rainy or snowy winter days were spent checking over our camera images and confirming identifications of raccoons, possums, and hundreds of eastern gray squirrels dashing up trees and over the leaf litter.
Over the course of the two-month survey period last fall, Shaker Village was able to capture more than 3,000 trail camera image sequences – that’s roughly 33,000 images of wildlife on the preserve. We detected at least fifteen species of mammals, including bobcats, coyotes, and southern flying squirrels. While Snapshot USA is focused on mammal activity, the preserve’s trail cameras also captured twelve species of birds, including the preserve’s honorary mascot, the bobwhite quail.
This fall, Shaker Village is participating again in Snapshot USA, with four additional camera locations in the hopes of continuing to collect data on the animals that reside in this historic corner of the Bluegrass.
The first set of trail cameras for the 2026 rendition of Snapshot USA have already been deployed on the preserve. We hope that we can collect and share even more information about Shaker Village’s wildlife!
To learn more about the preserve at Shaker Village click here.
