Two holes in the ice caught Sue Dickerson’s attention when she checked a black plastic water dish in her yard one morning in February 2018. The temperature had dropped to 18 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, so it didn’t surprise her that the top layer of water in the dish had frozen. But what had made those holes? She studied them for a moment. “Flickers,” she thought to herself. The woodpeckers often hung out in her Colorado Springs, Colorado, front yard and had likely pecked through the ice to get a drink. Dickerson, who had stepped outside to grab the photo card from the motion-activated camera she’d set up near the dish, crouched, hooked her index finger into one of the holes and tossed the ice.
Back inside, she settled in front of her computer monitor and started clicking through the photos. It had been her routine for more than a decade to retrieve the card around 7:30 each morning, then check for shots of wildlife that had wandered onto her property in the middle of the night. She’d captured close-ups of badgers, bears, pocket gophers — even bobcats. So she wasn’t surprised that the first photograph, taken at 4:01 a.m., was a skunk with its nose poking over the edge of the dish.
