This was it… the last night of our trip to this house, this absolutely wonderful house with it’s plethora of amazing wildlife I couldn’t even dream of seeing at home… and I was set to do my project again, one last time… But the thing about this night - I was, to say the least… tired. More like exausted. The entire week I haven’t been sleeping well, because I’ve either been seeing people I haven’t seen in years, or I’ve been completely immersed in this project… and when I did sleep, it was in very short amounts of time. Between Saturday night, when I finally gave up on monitoring my project and just let it run (I didn’t get anything then, either, by the way) and when I woke up on Sunday morning was about 3 hours. And the entire day of Sunday was packed with things to do - people to visit, things to do… So that makes 8am or so when I woke up, probably about 5:30 or so when I went to bed, and I need to be up all day. ALL DAY. I can’t rest at all, not one minute - there’s too much to do. So, what do I do in that situation? Attempt to plan. “You see, I have the perfect plan — I’m going to set everything up again…”, I go on, “…and go to sleep. That way, I can still get a shot, and I’ll be rested for tomorrow!” The amount of sleep I had was probably the reasoning for that decision, because tomorrow was the ride back home, the perfect time for sleep - why would I want to be rested for that?
So, the day went by, we saw who were supposed to see, do the things we were supposed to do, hobnob here and there (and I played a somewhat invigorating game of table tennis in the middle), and it was now 9pm. 9pm, after being up for 13 hours, after sleeping for 3, which was after being up for another 13 or more hours… I was going to bed! So I set up the project again, after explaning again to my grandfather why I needed to do it with “the bag” again, at 9:30… and I did it in the new location in the yard. “See! This way if something comes, I can catch it! There’s no way I can miss a shot with the project being here…!” Of course, you know where this is going, probably, but let’s keep going… (→ continue on with June 11, 2006 - “All or nothing”)
BFP 6-11-06 Demo Clip [0:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 6-11-06 (High Quality 800Kbps Version) [25:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 6-11-06 (Low Quality 300Kbps Version) [25:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
Missing *Video* Raw Audio Segment 1 [5:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup Missing *Video* Raw Audio Segment 2 [9:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
Yes! The first night I tried my project at the other house, I actually got what I was looking for - a raccoon! During the next day, I planned how I could hopefully attract more raccoons, but still figured - “Even if I don’t get anything, that one shot was worth it! I got a raccoon! What I’ve been wanting to see for years!” Still I hoped that I could get more raccoons to come to my setup - so I tried a few new things setup-wise… I tried setting up another camera I brought for a ground shot and set up a tripod for the main camera but that was all for naught, as it rained that night… all night, despite the weather forecasts to the contrary. So, perhaps to my advantage, I needed to set everything up the same way as the night before — only this time, I had an ace up my sleeve - the shotgun mic! “Even if I can’t stick a camera outside to get a shot, at least this way I can hear what the raccoons sound like!” I set everything up again, getting food ready and sticking it in the bag - I felt more like a zookeeper doing this than I would at home, because it was almost guaranteed at this point that more animals were coming! I made the holes in my project a little larger, “raccoon friendly” as I called it, in the hope that an interested raccoon would like to investigate what’s in the bag, and I hammered my project, “the bag” as my grandfather called it, into the ground with spikes. Once again, I was thinking of what could happen if a raccoon was interested enough and checked in “the bag” itself for food. “I don’t want it to carry the whole thing off, so I’ll hammer it down this time!” Once again I left everything running… once again, I got a light here or there during the night, a possum walked by, a raccoon peered out from the woods, but nothing came up for food… That is, until 3am or so — a raccoon came up and started to eat the bread around the bag. “Yes!, it’s another raccoon!” Not only did this one stick around, but it even found the food inside the bag! It reached into it to pull some bread out of it and even made the hole bigger for better access to the bread I stuck into the bag! One of the sights I’ve been wanting to see for as long as I’ve been doing my project - a raccoon actually getting food from my project! Besides the raccoons that chanced by, I also got an interesting closeup of a rabbit that stumbled into the yard and chewed on a piece of bread (which, until that point, I didn’t think they did, but, it was eating it…)
Ah, June 8, 2006 - this is the day I’ve been waiting for… for years! I’ve been trying for years at home to see if raccoons (and other larger animals) would be interested in my project, but with no success. I don’t think that they’re not interested, just that we don’t have any around where I normally do the project. This day was the clincher for that test - I took some time off in June so that the family and I could visit relatives, relatives that know that raccoons have been in their area. Seeing the opportunity in the slight chance of seeing something other than I’ve been seeing at home, I asked if I could do my “tapings” there and they gladly agreed - “Oh yeah, you’ll see all kinds of things here. I doubt that you’ll see raccoons though - I haven’t seen any of them in a few months.” Well, even with that, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity! During the week that I took off, I took every one of my cables inside from their usual place (which in itself is a feat), designed a larger “raccoon-friendly” version of my project platform, wrote up pages and pages of logistics on how I would get this to work and then, finally, on June 8th, left for the other house. All along the way, my father told me over and over again not to “expect anything!” Which I understood, but this just seemed like it could work - I don’t know why, but it just seemed right. I agreed with everyone that I wouldn’t do the “project” as it was, and I’d just do a simple “scouting” kind of taping for the first night I was there, where I just let the camera run and see what happens - the house I was visiting has a motion-sensor light, so it just kicks on (or should - read the June 12th entry for a “funny” story about that). Strangely enough, I showed the project platform to everyone and they said “Well, you could try it, but I doubt you’ll get anything. And you still probably won’t get raccoons, maybe a possum or skunk.” Well, I wanted to see a raccoon, but any of those would be a welcome sight!