Wed 25 Oct 2006
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…
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…
Pillow Feeder Feed, 10-25-06 [1:59m]:
October 26th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Thanks a lot for capturing that! I’m sure that if I had made the effort to get up early and monitor the cam, nothing would have happened at all.
The rest of the nuts disappeared over the day so I need to set that up again. I can see this is going to cost me a fortune in plastic bags! Ideally I would like to move this feeder to a more exposed part of the garden where the birds are more likely to come take an interest too, but although I could run the cables across the garden, I don’t think the rest of the family would appreciate that. But anyway the important thing is that we’ve caught some activity and we know that at least one black and one grey squirrel have figured this little problem out.
Don’t worry about the lighting issues, it’s still a classic little clip
oh… by the way, The Backyard Voyeur is the site concept, not the person who operates it. You have greater claim to that title than I do!
October 27th, 2006 at 2:52 am
True… it looks really good for a webcam feed though! Especially running at 15fps!
That’s the way it usually is with my shots too (when monitoring the feed) - you step out of the room for a second to get something, and there’s the squirrel, sitting there, eating… and oh, look, “I forgot to hit record…!” It’s cool to have someone else who can watch when you can’t particularly get away for that time to see what’s going on…
Hehe…
Well, the bags you’re using right now are similar (I think they’re actually the same ones) as the bags I used for my raccoon-sized project… I could send you a smaller piece of foam if you’d like, then you could try the smaller project with the smaller bags, and you wouldn’t need to use the Nu-Foam stuff…
It’d be cool to see if moving it would bring about any changes to who finds it interesting (I saw some birds out near the project before the squirrel came, but they weren’t really interested in the setup.) I wonder what kind of birds would find that interesting this time of year — maybe Bluejays could still find it useful? It’s a little bit of a problem of course if no one wants wires everywhere! It is cool to see some activity though! — I watched yesterday also, but I didn’t see anything between 7am and 10, so I’m not sure if the squirrel came yesterday or not (you’d know better than me, anyway!) I did see the line of nuts in the bag later in the day though - interesting pattern! Did anything come last night, or has most of the activity happened in the morning?
Thanks again! I was only going off of the About page’s description… “Chris, THE backyard voyeur, June 2006″ I think it’s safe to say there’s more than one “THE” now that can claim that title!