Japanese Macaques Walking across Snow-covered WIndbreak Forest in Mid Winter

I found a pile of plucked feathers of a bird (unidentified) in the windbreaker forest of Japanese red-cedar (Cryptomeria japonica, family Cupressaceae) surrounding the snow-covered farmland. The poor bird had been hunted and butchered by a predator. Now I installed my trail camera there to see if the mysterious predator would appear again. It turned out that a small troop of Japanese monkeys (aka snow monkey; Macaca fuscata fuscata, family Cercopithecidae) used the evergreen forest of Japanese cedar as a safe corridor between the roost and feeding sites. They paid no attention to the plucked bird feathers buried under the snow on the way. But some monkeys picked up something (maybe overwintering bugs) to eat on the snowy forest floor. The first one had been collared with a GPS device. An adventurous juvenile climbed a shrub nearby and shook it violently while moving around. Captured with my new trailcam in the daytime of mid-January 2025 in Japan. For a full story (text in Japanese); https://sigma-nature-vlog.blogspot.com/2026/04/blog-post.html