Fri 10 Nov 2006
Nov. 10, 2006 - More blatant product placement…
Posted by Zach Glenwright under Backyard Bag Feeder Project, Birds, Bluejays, Crows, Grackles, Pillow Feeder, RaccoonsNo Comments
In a reply to Chris’s original “Hefty bags are best” post…
“Yes, four out of five squirrels say they prefer Hefty bags to other, smaller makes!“
Based on additional independant usage surveys among bag-conscious woodland creatures, two out of three raccoons agree!…
…but given the same product test in similar usability surveys among birds, the avian consumers, such as grackles, bluejays and crows depend on and defend their Ziploc™ brand bags with ferocity…
All pictures in this post © Zach Glenwright.
Ziploc™ is copyright SC Johnson Corporation and Hefty™ is copyright Pactiv Corporation… just to be safe!… 
It's about time! - Squirrels and Grackles, 8-15-06 [1:15m]: 
On the night of July 19th, 2004 I decided I would wake up early and set the project for out the next day. Simple. Wake up at 6, set the cameras up and wire everything outside, start the computers capturing and go inside to watch over the project - I recently set up a second computer to capture both cameras directly to DV-NTSC so I wouldn’t have to capture anything later on, just throw the files on the timeline, sync the 2 raw DV files to each other in Final Cut and save me half the work - one day of the project can take up to 3 weeks or so to completely finalize, most taking at least 4 hours to edit completely. The last day’s edit of the project this year, September 2nd, wasn’t finalized until mid-November. Anyway, I woke up at 5:30, not at all in the mood to do anything. I set the cameras up, half-asleep, put the platform out with some nuts, falling over about 4 or so times on the wires and almost knocking over the cameras twice, went inside and started the computers (after screwing with the connection to one of them for 10 minutes - the cable didn’t work), fixed the audio (it had a real annoying buzz in the signal), etc., etc., etc. and went back to bed. Nothing really amazing happened during the time I tried to get back to sleep (nope, I didn’t get back to sleep…) so I went back to check on the project… 
OK! June 8, 2004. This is the big one - the one for the books in 2004. The final edit of this day is over an hour long! And the project itself was well attended by both grackle and squirrel alike! This is the last day for the grackles of 2004, probably because right after that there were 2 weeks of constant rain that completely hindered me putting any cameras or projects outside. 
Yet another grackle day. I never get tired of them… Only this one isn’t as much grackle-attended as it was squirrel-attended - the squirrel got pretty much most of the food… Of course, the squirrels need (well, OK, not need, but…) food too…! Maybe the grackles are getting lazier? NOTE: This is a COMPLETE DAY FEED - it’s a long-ish file, 5 minutes long.
Similar (almost exactly) to the 31st’s project. To the letter. Same cameras basically, same kinds of food, basically, and same kind of project, basically. What’s different? Not much… But there are still grackles around and it’s still freaking cool… and Whitetail returns to the scene!
After the success of the bread-and-butter taping of the 30th, I decided to put another project together. This time, with all of the fanciness and frills and, well, effort, that gets put into a normal project. And this time with a much better camera (2 actually) - and a microphone placed near the mat - I don’t get grackles that often, so when they come, I want to record it as well as I can. Well, they did come, and here you have the second grackle day of 2004! One specific one kept making an appearance with a small bit of guano on it’s tail - thusly it was dubbed “Whitetail the Grackle”… NOTE: This is a COMPLETE DAY FEED - it’s a long file, 17 minutes long.
I did a test run during the morning of May 30, 2004 just to see if anything would come. I had an old project sitting around, so I stuck it (kind of) in the ground and put some food on top of it. See, the plan was to put out a completely made project and do everything to set it up, all cameras and etc., but I was tired as hell. So I decided if I was going to do anything I might as well do well, something… So I put out the sample project, and that was good enough for me at the time. On my ’sample’ project, grackles (which are a rarity around here) kept coming to the mat and pecking at the holes that were already in the old project - enough so I got tired of them looking for things that didn’t exist (there wasn’t that much food on the platform, just enough to test what’s around), so I put a very quick project together and stuck some peanuts on top of it… 
The second day of my project!! Actually, this day can easily be considered as the birth of the project. Without this day, the project as it is today might not even exist. It was this day, with the (simple yet expansive) technological advantages I’d discovered and actual attention paid to the project by the animals that came that made the project more than just a one lazy-day video experiment… 
The very first clip from the very first time I tried this project! All that day, I tried to get something to come to the project so I could tape it. At the time, I was using a old 8mm camcorder sitting on a half-working tripod shooting across the yard - complete with a lengthy 30 min. tape (not really l o n g enough for nature videography.) I tried putting the platform in the middle of the yard earlier in the day, but nothing was interested. My mother suggested putting food on top of it, so I tried it and rewound the tape again, but there still weren’t any takers. On a last ditch effort, I reracked the tape one last time and moved the entire thing closer to a waterdish and started rolling again. I went inside for 10 minutes and watched the bird in this video actually sit on the platform and take a nut off of the top of it. I grabbed everything and watched what I taped, amazed that something came to the project in the first place, let alone sit on top of it! This is the clip that made me want to try it just one more day… The squirrels came out about 10 minutes after I taped this for their final-night foraging (the clip was taped around 5pm), but I couldn’t set everything back up in time to tape that, so I figured I’d try it again the next day… something might come…