Sun 11 Jun 2006
June 11, 2006 - “All or nothing”
Posted by Zach Glenwright under Backyard Bag Feeder Project, Edited Feeds (SD), Possums, Raccoons, Skunks2 Comments
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?
So, the day went by, we saw who were supposed to see, do the things we were supposed to do, hobnob here and there (and I played a somewhat invigorating game of table tennis in the middle), and it was now 9pm. 9pm, after being up for 13 hours, after sleeping for 3, which was after being up for another 13 or more hours… I was going to bed! So I set up the project again, after explaning again to my grandfather why I needed to do it with “the bag” again, at 9:30… and I did it in the new location in the yard. “See! This way if something comes, I can catch it! There’s no way I can miss a shot with the project being here…!” Of course, you know where this is going, probably, but let’s keep going… (→ continue on with June 11, 2006 - “All or nothing”)
BFP 6-11-06 Demo Clip [0:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 6-11-06 (High Quality 800Kbps Version) [25:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 6-11-06 (Low Quality 300Kbps Version) [25:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
Missing *Video* Raw Audio Segment 1 [5:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup Missing *Video* Raw Audio Segment 2 [9:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
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.