The Backyard Bag Feeder Project is the trials and tribulations of a special feeder platform I made and how animals react to it… Confused?? It’s 1-4 cameras, motorized pan heads, LANC controllers, microphones, etc., looking at food stuffed into holes in a piece of foam that’s stuffed into a bag, which is then stapled to a wooden “platform” that gets nailed in the ground — kind of like… well, “bear-proofing” a sofa… but “squirrel-sized”! (click here for details on how I construct the platform…) ~ The remoteness of the setup lets me get video of animals running, fighting, sitting and eating at close (and far) range and shots of them clawing, pecking, digging and tearing at the project “mat” to get the food inside… No, the animals don’t eat the foam! And yes — it’s strange.

If you would like to know about the history of the Backyard Bag Feeder Project, here is a recount of the first significant day - the 2nd actual day of trying the project-

Day 2: Wednesday, August 13th, 1998:

      The second day of my project, can easily be considered the most prolific day of my project, even the “birth” of it as it is today. If it wasn’t for that day, August 13, 1998, then the project as it is today wouldn’t even exist… The entire purpose of the day was to see “if anything else was even slightly interested.” I got up that morning at 10:15am, put the “food project” (as I called it at the time) out, this time with food on top of the project and this time, putting it near the water dish… I then set up and looked at the trajectory of the shot from the night before. As I was checking out the shot, I thought it would be much better to go with a tighter shot and also decided that it made no sense to use the 8mm tape to record the day’s attempts - it’s only 30 minutes, 2 hours tops, and if I needed to go out and change it, it would disturb everything I worked that 30 minutes/2 hours to get - I had absolutely no expectations that I would get any animals interested in the project, due to the lackluster attention paid to it the night before - so I figured that I needed a much longer tape than I used the night before. Then genius (or obviousness) hit me - a VHS tape would work! So I quickly ran inside and grabbed a 24ft. RCA cable that I had in storage and decided to move the project closer to a window that was near a VCR. This simple event was the single most important innovation of the project, period, as this is still how I do my recordings today (well, I have slightly better ways of recording and many more wires feeding in, but the idea is the same…)

      As I was moving the camera from the back porch to the window, walking exactly in the opposite direction to me, a squirrel came towards the project and started to investigate! I had only had the project itself out for 10 minutes or so, and there was already something interested in it! Seeing that motivated me that the project could be successful after all, but also made me nervous, because I had no idea how the squirrel would react to me being outside. I very quickly threw the camera setup together near the window, hurriedly threw the cable in the window, and hooked it up to a VCR. The room looked like it had been ransacked, but at least I had a video source! Or… I thought I did — the input was black, as the camera had gone off to Standby mode as I was running everything together in my hurried state. I bitched at the camera, quickly ran back outside, turned the camera back on and decided to take the tape out, thinking that it “maybe somehow… it’ll defeat the Standby function.” Of course I now know that when you use a camcorder without a tape with 90% of camcorders today, it defeats Standby mode, but I had no idea of that then - I never needed to use the camera without a tape! It was a trial-and-error thing, and I already lost the manual for the camcorder long before that day to find out if it would work… I ran back inside, threw the tape that was in the VCR (which currently had the premiere episode of Stressed Eric on it) in reverse to find a spot to start recording. I couldn’t go back very far, because I didn’t want to tape over that, so I just went as far back as I could, and threw that baby in record ASAP… OK. Now all I had to do was wait…

      Within 15 minutes of the setup being outside, another squirrel came to check out the project. It was hesitant at actually approaching the mat (as you can see in the video if you watch it), but another one (probably the one I saw while setting the camera up) came up behind it and took a nut off of the top! I seriously couldn’t believe it — something was actually interested in the project! I was actually getting something interesting!! I sat more or less fixated near the TV for the rest of the hour — watching squirrel after squirrel come up to the project, take a nut, and stand. Some would take a nut and run off with it, some sat in frame and ate the nuts and some squirrels even stood up on the mat! Now, not only do I have things that are brazen enough to take food off of the project itself, but they’re comfortable enough with it to stand on top of it and eat there! (Remember, I had no (and I mean, literally, absolutely no) expectations that anything would come. And now, they not only came, they were comfortable enough with it to interact with it!)

      An hour passed from when I first put the project out… and the last squirrel of the first session (the first time I put peanuts out) took the last nut off of the top. It moved the mat around a little to look under it, then there was nothing — I waited for another 15 minutes, nothing came. I figured it was due to the lack of visible food on the project, “The last nut is gone, so maybe they’re done for the day…?” I figured — so I decided to put more nuts on top of the project. “Beginners luck”, I believed, that the first set of nuts was some kind of early morning feeding frenzy done by the squirrels - “they wouldn’t want anymore, would they?” Well, they answered back (no, they didn’t actually answer back, I’m not that crazy–!) a resounding “Yes!” They came time after time, just like the last time. They also seemed to be a little less hesitant to get the food itself off of the top - not entirely without suspicion, but they were becoming used to it… And I was absolutely loving the fact that they were interested in it. I’ve never been as enthusiastic about anything as that day when the squirrels kept coming to the project — I actually designed a nature project that worked!

      Throughout the day, I restocked the nuts on top of the project — throughout the day, squirrels kept coming! I even had a grackle visit the project every once and awhile (and a bluejay -try- to get a nut, but not succeed.) In all, I had restocked the nuts a total of 8 times! 8 times!!! I had 95 specific seperate visits by the animals trying to get food off of the top of the project! I had absolutely no confidence when I put the project out in the morning - it usually takes time for animals to become confident with new things — and I got 95 visits on my $@#% second day!!!!! And how do I know those statistics? I sat down, the night of the 13th, starting at 10pm, tape in the VCR and a cheesy capture card connected to a PC (capture port, really - a ZipShot) and captured every single attempt made at my project. I sat there for 6 hours straight and captured frame after frame. Every single stock of nuts, every single attempt made by every single animal, even catagorized into shots of them going to and from and sometimes even sitting on the project. As I wrote the next day in my project journal, a slower but still productive day, “A slow day, but man, I think I’m beginning to become obsessed with this project.. :P” I was obsessed then — and I still have as much enthusiasm for the project today! Maybe not to sit and capture frame after frame for 5 hours straight, but I still edit every single day to a final edit (and some of those edits can take more than 6 hours in total to complete… especially the multi-angle, multi sound source projects of today!)

      This “food project” had become, in one day, much more than a boring little exercise on a boring day, it was now a full-fledged nature project - The Backyard Bag Feeder Project — I gave it that name because it’s generic enough that it sounds basic, but it refers specifically to my project alone - a feeder, but really much different than any other feeders out there. I’ve never seen anything quite like what I’ve tried with this project. And although I’ve had many, many technological and logistical changes and advantages since 1998 (for one, I didn’t have either the camera or the project secured to anything in 1998!), the basic project itself remains the same…

Click here to watch the the second day of the Backyard Bag Feeder Project in action!