I’m not sure if you (Chris) captured this also, but I checked into the pillow feeder cam feed just about the time of the 1st clip below (”If at first you don’t succeed…”) and saw something interesting happen a little while after the “ambitious squirrel” - a first sight for me anyway, a Black Squirrel (or at least it looks like a Black Squirrel) taking it’s chance with the feeder!

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Although written by me (Zach), the picture and video in this post are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

Now here’s an ambitious squirrel. Not content with just taking a nut, he decides he’s going to take the entire feeder. Luckily I had the foresight to tie it down, so he doesn’t succeed, but he sure tries. Eventually an entirely different squirrel gets the nut.

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This post, as well as the pictures and video from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

Here’s a squirrel who just can’t figure out how to get into the pillow feeder at all (I decided to christen this the “pillow” feeder, as that’s what it is, really - heavily derivative of Zach Glenwright’s Backyard Bag Feeder Project but more basic and really just a pillow with a plastic cover). Anyway he sticks with it, with admirable determination and a bit of thought, and does eventually get his reward. I love movies with happy endings

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This post, as well as the picture and video from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

Chris writes:

Five squirrels in the shot and I missed it … typical

Ah-ha! But I didn’t! Here are 2 short (the first one is a little longer, but not too much) videos from the end of the day yesterday that I had the opportunity to catch…

A group of squirrels, about 4 or 5 on Camera 8 (there’s another behind the pumpkin, and one in the swing), about 6:30pm or so EST (3:30pm PST), taken from Video 1

A squirrel trying to move the “pillow feeder”, taken from Video 2

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Although written by me (Zach), the pictures and video in this post are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

The clip below features the bag feeder again, being relieved of the very last few of today’s nuts. The feeder no longer presents any kind of challenge to the squirrels, who emptied the bag by lunchtime.

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This post, as well as the pictures and video from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

I spent quite a lot of time this afternoon monitoring the live feed from the bag feeder, as I’d tried setting it up vertically just for a change. After quite a while I had a few clips of squirrels inspecting the new arrangement but not really taking much interest, and a few clips of a squirrel digging some of the remains of the woodpecker feed out of the bottom corners of the bag. But nothing had gone for the main attraction, the handful of unshelled peanuts just sitting there asking to be eaten.

Eventually one squirrel did figure out that the top of the bag was now open, and got in there and got one peanut. Then another squirrel chewed through and again, took just the one peanut (see Clip One below). But after that, nothing. I watched for ages and finally got fed up and decided to take a quick shower.

When I came back a few minutes later, the front of the bag had been chewed open and almost every nut had gone! Boy, was I frustrated. How do they know when you stop looking? I obviously missed all the action in that few minutes in the shower. Oh well, when I calmed down and stopped throwing things I decided that I’ll try again, maybe tomorrow, with a fresh bag. Anyway it goes to show that vertical or horizontal makes no great difference to the squirrels, which is what I wanted to find out.

But it wasn’t a good day for the cams anyway. My next clip was captured at the pumpkin feeder and I forgot that I’d set the capture for one frame per second so I ended up with an unintentional timelapse clip instead of proper live motion (see Clip Two below).

Eventually I did get a fairly good clip from the pumpkin feeder; in Clip Three you’ll see one squirrel being ousted by another, who, as it turns out, isn’t interested in the pumpkin anyway. I wonder if this is just a senior squirrel pulling rank for the sake of it, and if so, how seniority is decided?

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This post and the videos from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

OK, undeterred, I triple-bagged this one and filled it with premixed woodpecker feed rather than unshelled peanuts. Astonishingly, I walked from the yard back to my laptop in the house to see that a squirrel had already arrived and started tucking in. It looks like this bag isn’t going to last any longer than the last one; do they think I’m made of plastic bags, for goodness sake?

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This post, as well as the pictures and video from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

This is all that’s left of the bag feeder (otherwise known as the Glenwright Backyard Feeder Project^TM - style feeder) …

And here’s the outer bag, or what remains of it. The squirrels had also got through the inner bag and pulled out some of the stuffing, possibly out of curiosity more than anything else.

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This post and the pictures from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

… or perhaps I should say, not in the bag any more. The bag feeder can be said to be thoroughly compromised now.

A triumphant squirrel stands on top of a totally wrecked and emptied feeder

Activity really took off yesterday, probably as a result of me tempting them with a whole bag of unshelled peanuts between the top and bottom layers of bagging. No way was even the dumbest squirrel going to miss that, and they didn’t …

Getting stuck in there

The following clip features about four and a half minutes of thievery. Where this guy is stacking away all his nuts is a mystery, I assume he had to dig a pretty big hole!

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This post, as well as the pictures and video from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

For the last few days, Chris, the Backyard Voyeur, has been trying his own version of my Backyard Bag Feeder Project. My main project consists of a platform made with a piece of foam (in this case a piece of Nu-Foam in a seperate bag) put into a bag that has a little bit of food inside of it, to see if animals that would normally check a standard feeder out would be interested enough in the food to dig into the bag and get the food out of that feeder. He has had some interested squirrels, and has seen them digging at the bag, but hasn’t been able to get any shots of them actually “in the act” of getting the food… I was watching this morning (October 25th) and at about 8:47am or so PST, a squirrel got some of the food out of the bag - and I caught it on “tape” through the magic of screen capture…

There’s some unavoidable problems with this shot that’s one of the usual risks with this kind of shot, and problems that I’ve seen many, many many times with my shots… The sun’s coming right into the lens (which seems to happen to me a lot right about the time when I can finally get the shot I’ve been waiting for all morning…) And the squirrel’s facing away from the camera for most of the beginning — I’ve done shoots in the past where a squirrel can take 15 minutes digging for food and it’s constantly facing away from the camera… I call those shots “back-shots”, but it wasn’t facing that way the entire time, so it’s not that big of an issue… I think (more like I know) I’m just more of a control freak when I look back at shots…
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Although written by me (Zach), the picture and video in this post are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

I picked up on Zach’s backyard feeder idea and put together something similar last week. Mine was, of course, not so carefully thought out nor finely tuned; I got a block of something called Nu-Foam as I couldn’t find any of the normal stuff, and put that in a two and a half gallon zip up bag with a lump of concrete to weigh it down and a couple of piles of peanuts in the top where they could be seen but not accessed without opening the bag or chewing through. Initially I also put some extras on top to encourage the animals to come take a look. Over the first couple of days, the extras vanished but nobody attempted the bag itself.

However, this morning a black squirrel took the initiative and got all of one pile of peanuts out, and got the bag open as well for good measure. So the official result is that it took one week for one squirrel to figure this one out. I didn’t have the project on camera because I didn’t expect there would be anything worth seeing, or at least not often enough to devote a camera to it, and this morning I didn’t have a still camera handy when the squirrel did crack the puzzle but I did see it doing so. As far as I can tell, no birds were interested in tackling this one, even though we’ve picked up a couple of bluejays who are big enough to take it on. There are probably too many other and easier sources of food in this yard for them anyway.

Anyway I will replace the bag and move it somewhere else in the yard, away from the tree, and see if the birds take it on. Unfortunately it’s not a project that suits the live cams so it will be off camera, but I’ll keep a watchful eye on it and report developments.

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This post and the pictures from it are © 2006 Chris Osborne, originally published on The Backyard Voyeur. The “Pillow Feeder” is his feeder project based on my (Zach Glenwright’s) Backyard Bag Feeder Project…

I was going to post this up in the morning, but sleeping in later than I was going to and working all day after that didn’t help…

I was going to toss something out on Wednesday and saw this leaf… looking at it closer, I notced that it wasn’t an ordinary leaf…

Video follows below…

Pictures and video in this post © Zach Glenwright

I’ve been wanting to post this video for a few weeks, but I’ve just now gotten around to capturing and editing it… It’s nothing amazing, but I like the effect of the sun’s rays shining down on the chipmunk and the sparrow and thought it would be nice to post it…

Chipmunk in tall grass - video is below…