NC’s ‘Candid Critters’ cameras are catching strange things in the woods

North Carolina’s Project Candid Critters has yet to photograph a Big Foot with its dozens of cameras, but some strange things have started showing up in recent months.

Some of the images are just weird hairy blurs...with eyeballs. In one instance, a coyote faced his rump to a camera to relieve himself in black and white.

Others are like the thing that showed up in Swain County. It was too ugly to be a deer, and too much like a deer to be a camel.

Operators of the program have labeled it “not on the list” and posted the photo on Facebook with the message: “Can you identify this mammal found in Swain county?”

Elk seemed to be the consensus, except for Wesley Johnson, who called it a “super rare Southeastern Micro-moose.”

Other shots have featured animals that are just plain creepy due to their defiant, glowing eyes.

The program was created by the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and N.C. State University. Since the project’s launch in December, volunteers have sent in tens of thousands of images that will be used by scientists to learn more about the distribution of mammal species in the state.

Here’s a slide show of some of the more unusual images captured this year:

This story was originally published August 4, 2017 at 12:52 PM with the headline "NC’s ‘Candid Critters’ cameras are catching strange things in the woods."