Animals from the Mountains
The mountain house sits in Washington's Cascade foothills, surrounded by forest. The same camera system that watches for uninvited humans catches plenty of wildlife too. After all, it's their home first.
This page is a running log of critter sightings — identified by the same AI vision pipeline we use for security monitoring. Think of it as a trail cam blog, powered by the same infrastructure that watches the honeypots.
JB: Half the reason I set up outdoor cameras was security. The other half was curiosity about what wanders through at 3am. Turns out, it's mostly deer. And one very confused raccoon.
How It Works
The detection pipeline:
- UniFi Protect cameras detect motion on the mountain house property
- Home Assistant automation fires on the motion event
- Echo (AI orchestrator) grabs a camera snapshot via HA API
- Vision model analyzes the image — species ID, count, behavior notes
- Positive IDs get logged here with timestamps and mugshots
The same pipeline handles driveway alerts for vehicles and people. The animals just get the fun treatment instead of the security treatment.
JB: The deer have figured out the camera angles. I'm not kidding — they walk right up them now. Zero fear. The coyotes are smarter about it. The bears, well they just don't seem to care.
The Regulars
Sightings are added as they happen. Newest first.
No sightings logged yet. Check back soon — the cameras are always watching. 🦌