Thu 7 Dec 2006
December 7, 2006 - Squirrels with Something to Say!
Posted by Zach Glenwright under Backyard Bag Feeder Project, Edited Feeds (SD), Squirrels, Vertical Feeder2 Comments
Apparently my Backyard Bag “Pillow-Feeder”-esque Feeder Project is becoming so popular with the squirrels in the area, that they’re beginning to quabble over it… I caught at least 4 pairs of squirrels doing a dominance challenge, complete with (very good) natural sounds of them whining at each other! Very interesting stuff in my opinion!
It’s mine!!
Video follows below…
I took everything in last night because it was supposed to snow today… the sun streaming in through the window seemingly mocks me…
Picture and video in this post © Zach Glenwright
Squirrels with Something to Say! [1:11m]: 
Well, it’s come to the point in the week where the squirrels are interested… what does that mean? It’s scheduled to rain again! Tomorrow, Thursday and Friday — don’t you just love it when it works out like that…?? I’m going to try a much larger version of this large version of the vertical feeder that’s going to be my “Mark 3″ as it were for Backyard Bag Feeders… More on that as it develops… and it stops raining… and I can finally put my cords and equipment out… and the squirrels re-re-re-re-acclimate to it… and… and… and…… eh, it’ll be a little while…
Due to the bag falling over on the 20th towards the end, I wanted to make a more sturdy design, so I tied the chain I was using to hang the bag up to the pole down with a wiretie and put a large rock in front of the bag to keep them from pulling it down (which did cut the challenge back a little but not too much!) One more day, I left everything sit outside, and true to the 20th’s project, nothing happened during the day… no interested squirrels, no squirrels even in the area… nothing. But fortunately for me, and also similarly to the 20th’s project, the cavalcade of squirrels came around at about 4pm — they’re still interested, and they’ll stop at nothing to get the nuts out of the bag, even if it means climbing down from the top of it! A few squirrels (it may have been the same one more than once) climbed up to the top of the mat to get the nuts out of the top of it! As you can see, they’re getting more acrobatic, they’re more interested in it (one of them even scent marks it, at about 1:50 in, making it theirs) and they’re more into the challenge of the hanging feeder idea! Next time… the entire setup will be about an inch higher off of the ground… but rain’s coming, and that severely limits the length that I can keep cameras outside, $10 camera or not!
I left the Feeder mat and the camera out overnight on the 19th to see if anything else would chance the project during the day… and nothing did… but that all changed in the middle of the day! At around 3:30pm, the squirrels started to come — and this time, they were determined to get the nuts out of the bag! One of the more interesting shots of the day (there were many good shots!!) was the squirrel literally digging into the bag with it’s back claws to prop itself up to get a nut out of the top of the bag - one of the things I wanted to see if they would do on my vertical design (they’ve done it on 
Thanks to Chris Osborne of 
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?
Missing *Video* Raw Audio Segment 1 [5:49m]: 
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…)
Not to sound like a complete moron here, but, “Hmm… 2 days, huh? I doubt it’ll come back a 3rd time!” So here I am again, one more time I decided to test my project with the ‘possums - but this time, I tried something a little different… or should I say a “big” different — as a test, I made a larger-form project with a larger piece of foam and a larger bag, to see if they would try to get to 3 different holes inside of the bag with bread in them. This time, I also put another camera outside, aimed at the project from the front. I exercised the “watched pot” theory again, and ignored the project for a few hours. 
“OK - an opossum came! But that was just a fluke, right?” I set up the project again, turned on the little light, put a small bit of bread out again, turned on the camera that actually provides the video source, wired another camera to the inside (Don’t you just love cheap $20 broken camcorders from eBay? That $20 camera is actually one of my main cameras! Check out the crow videos, especially 6/10/05, for an example… but anyway…) with the mic hooked to it, and waited. But this time was even rarer than the last! I set the project up at 8pm… the possum came at 9:10pm! Not only was it there, it was there much earlier than I estimated. Very, very interesting! And this one does have sound!
For years, I’ve tried to get larger night animals, like raccoons and possums to at least check out the project (or some kind of food) at night, but with no success… So with the advice of my grandfather (who has had some success with night-time animals in the past) I put a small piece of bread out with a very little bit of butter on it, I set up the project with a little night-light bulb to illuminate the area around it, and I watched. I tried it for 2 days, and nothing happened. On the 3rd day, I set everything up just like normal and just left it alone. 
Getting once again tired of my standard method of setting up shots, I tried my “aerial shot” technique that I tried once before in June… again. And about as moronicly set up as it was in June (remember how I had it taped to the window?), with this setup, I had the $10 camera taped (yes, taped) to the end of a kind of sturdy tripod, which was then suspended by a clothesline. Instant aerial shot. The things I do to get different shots… and of course, when you have a shot like that, it’s an absolute pain to set up! If you just move it a little, it screws the centering of the shot up, so you have to move the back of the tripod, which moves the camera off center, then move the camera, which then moves the tripod back to where it was, then move the tripod again, which… lets just say it took about 20 minutes to finally center the shot when it was set up… and even then, if it just moved a -little- bit, the shot wouldn’t work - so this was an absolute joy to work with, but the shots themselves were somewhat interesting… and when I finally got enough brains to put a panhead on the setup (yes, with even more tape on that), I could center the shot up much easier and get closeups of the tops of squirrels - another interesting perspective… Of course, this whole “aerial” idea followed me into the 2006 season, but as you will see when I put shots from that year up, I have a much smarter way to do it then…
Sometime in mid-June, I got another camera from eBay for the purpose of using for far, far-away shots, a Canon L2 - originally made in 1994 or so. One advantage to using that camera is that you can get a special extender that lets you use long lenses, so you can get shots from extremely far away, but of course, there’s a catch… and that’s one part caviat emptor on my part, as I found that it does have the ability to use LANC… but it’s limited to zooming ONLY - no focusing control! … That’s one of the major advantages to using LANC in the first place, so that you can keep changing the shot to different parts of the yard if you need to — well, that’s a moot point with this camera, but as a camera itself, it’s not that bad! It does do very well with long-range shots with the lens that came with it (I haven’t gotten the extender, so I’m relying on the lens that came with it) and that means I can sit the camera half-way across the yard from where I’m shooting and still get a somewhat decent shot… as I did with this day. One other strange quirk with the L2 is that it does have the ability to use plug-in mics, and it does have the ability to manually adjust the level of the mics you plug in to it, but it doesn’t even pass the sound through to the outputs unless you’re recording in the camera! If you’re not rolling in the camera, it just shuts the entire sound section off entirely! Not very useful when you’re using it as a analogue input feed… So, yes, the sound isn’t that good with this edit, as I didn’t have a good camera to plug the shotgun mic into, but the day itself was pretty active!