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…

I get back inside, this time setting up the camera in the true and tried place from Thursday and Friday and open up iMovie, the program I’ve been using to capture my raccoon project feeds. I check my FireWire drive, make sure it’s fine, and then make a project on the drive that reflects how I felt about Saturday night’s session… My name for this recording session?
“All or nothing”

I have my plan in place. It’s 10pm. And everyone’s going to bed… I wait for everyone to finish up going to bed, because I’m one of those people that can’t sleep when everyone’s still doing things, and that finally comes at 10:20… But wait! Right at that moment, at 10:20, when the last person finally laid down, the light kicked on! Already! So I stumble into the kitchen again, only after beginning to sleep, and see an uninterested opossum walk by, and then what I was hoping it was — another raccoon! “It’s a raccoon! And it’s only 10:20!!” Another one of the best recordings of the trip, it lasted 10 minutes - I got some incredible closeups of the raccoon, it’s face, and it working to get food out of the bag. “A raccoon’s interested, even after last night! And it’s only 10:30!” Now comes the time to make this shot and this last night, interesting!

Once the raccoon left, I grabbed some more bread and threw it in the project. “Hey! I can even put the left over meat from last night in here!” So I went back in and grabbed the bag of leftovers. “I’ll put some here… and here, and here…”, I said, as I stuffed pieces of the meat in hidden places in the project not tried before with the larger animals “…and I’ll even put some around the bag! That way, I’m assured to kick the light on! This is going to be interesting!”

I was up for about 20 minutes after that… and then I went to sleep. This is where things started to really get, er, “interesting“…

About 2 hours after I went to bed, the activity started up again. This time, though, I had a new visitor to the project - a skunk. I’ve seen skunks walk by before during the past few days, but this one actually looked somewhat interested! It did the common things that any animal would do around my project, eat all of the food around it, sniff here and there, walk cautiously, the normal routine. But in the middle of this normal routine, something very disturbing happened when the skunk would stand in one place for any given amount of time — the light would shut off. No motion sensed, no motion sensor, and no light - basic translation, nothing to record with… This went on for about a few minutes here and there, a skunk would walk on to the shot, eat a little and walk around, sniff here and there again, and the light would go off… My project, in it’s new location, was now out of range.

As I slept on…

3 minutes later, the light kicked on again, the skunk would get a little closer to the project itself, sniff around, walk away, and the light would go off…

Another few minutes, a small scuffle between 2 skunks (which I didn’t notice I recorded for months after June) and the skunks got closer to the project again. This time, a skunk notices a little bit of food in one of the holes (made larger by the raccoon earlier) and sniffs around, eventually grabbing the food, walking to the side of it, and once again, darkness.

One more time, the light kicked on, and a skunk walked towards the project, intently. It sniffed at one of the raccoon’s dug holes, and then started to rip at the side of the bag — something I’ve wanted to catch on tape since I’ve started my project, and there it is — a new kind of animal, a night animal even, slighly interested in my project, searching “the bag”, as it were, as a source of food! It half-walks on the top of it, investigates the hole in the center (that has the most stuff in it), grabs something, and walks off again to the side. It eats, for what seems like 2 minutes, then it looks up at the camera… a moth flies on to the mat (which provides a very interesting good natural sound)… and once again…

Darkness.

For seven, long, literally 7 minutes after this point, darkness. Nothing. But what’s actually happening now is not nothing — it’s the reason I set the shot I had, the reason why I re-stocked all of the food in the project — the reason I fixed the position of the project last night! The skunk is absolutely destroying the project to find the food I hid - ripping pieces out of the side, tearing into the top of it, it’s all there, it’s actually working for the food I put into it! — but there’s no video, no visual proof of any of it! This goes on, and on, and on… and then finally, the light kicks on again, with the triumphantly fed skunk walking out of the frame of the shot, stage right… And the project itself is drasticially different.

The mat, which at it’s last view looked a little beaten up (from the raccoon earlier) was now torn to shreads, the side was completely ripped out of it, there were holes in the bag that I knew weren’t there before, and a little piece of foam that fit neatly in the bag was now bent over in one of the holes that was newly torn in it (probably where one of the pieces of meat was that I put there hours earlier.) One of the reasons I wanted to try this project with larger animals, period, was to see if they would be as interested in the same level as the squirrels (of course, in a larger way) if they tried to get the food out. Well, I had my answer! … but not really… I have 5 and a half minutes of audio, and no proof of what the skunk actually did, so it’s as if the shot never happened!

…But wait! It’s not over yet, ladies and gentlemen!! In the 5 minutes the light did stay on after that, another raccoon came in to check out what was left. After investigating the bag, sniffing here and there and looking around the project and the immediate area, ran off after not finding anything of interest.

And then it happened again… Darkness. Darkness… but once again, not “nothing”…

The skunk returned (or at least it sounded like the skunk)! And once again, it proceeded to tear at the bag to find out what little tidbits it left behind the last time! Ripping and sniffing and digging and clawing, it was 100% intent at getting the small remaining pieces of meat from Saturday. And this went on, as well… for a total of 9 and a half minutes! Once again, the light didn’t kick on for any of it! 9 more minutes of audio, 9 more minutes of aboslute (and I mean absolute) interest in pulling apart the little puzzle I put before it with my project, and 9 more minutes of… nothing!

And then the light kicked on, some time later, surprisingly (of course, nothing on this night is surprising enough, apparently) with no one in the shot…

   
The “Before” and “After” Pictures

The project was… destroyed. There’s no other way to describe it. The skunk came and did what I was waiting years to see, a night animal, larger than a squirrel, can be interested enough in this little thing I put together to completely tear it apart, with great gusto, and I have nothing — there’s audio, but that doesn’t do me any good with a visual project! (It is an interesting listen, however!… There are sound files of both of the missed sections below this post.) This was the shot I’ve been trying for since the beginning…

And then, 20 minutes or so after all of this… I woke up. I felt nice and refreshed after my little amount of sleep, it couldn’t have been more than 4 hours, and ready to start the day. If you want to imagine this scene in your mind, imagine a “Chariots of Fire” or similar song playing as I woke up… walked to the window and checked out what I had. “Oh!! Something actually came!! I actually got something!!!” But the “Chariots of Fire” song soon changed, quickly, when I found out what I actually recorded! Now, if you will, imagine a Pagliacci-ish song playing… I don’t think I’ve ever been as livid with my project as I was at the realisation of what I was (or really wasn’t) witnessing here… “I didn’t… record… ANY OF IT?! HOW DIDN’T THE LIGHT TURN ON!? I FIXED IT!!! AHHH!!!!” (Of course, that was somewhat cleaned up from what I actually said, but I think it proves my point…)

And the thing that made this worse was that it was, in fact, the last day of the trip. It’s not like I could have tried it again — this was it, the absolute end, and now that I finally have a very interested clientele, I have to shut everything down! Not one more test, not one more shot, this was it! People still comment when I tell them about the whole thing “…well, you got the raccoon!” While that is still the most important thing I’ve ever shot, period, project-wise or otherwise, this was why I was trying the project itself and not just putting out scraps and getting video of animals that walked by. Would they be interested enough to find the food I hid, and if so, how would they get to it? This time, apparently, I wasn’t meant to find out the whole story…

And the worst part of all of this? When I told my grandfather about the whole situation, his reply was…
“Well… then why didn’t you just leave the light on?”

Needless to say - next time… I’m staying up.

NOTE: The videos from this day’s feeds are slightly edited, lightlessness-wise… Because I also included files of the RAW audio from both of the missed “destruction sessions”, I deleted that part of the video to cut back on filesize (believe me, you’re not missing anything)!… I also cut off the final shot (the shot shown in the “after” picture), because nothing happened after that animal-wise… I eventually deleted that shot and just kept the audio, which is the second file, “Missing *Video* Raw Audio Segment 2″

 

 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