Fri 9 Jun 2006
June 9, 2006 - More Interested Raccoons!!!
Posted by Zach Glenwright under Backyard Bag Feeder Project, Edited Feeds (SD), Raccoons, Raw FeedsNo Comments
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…)
NOTE: There are 2 normal sized (360×240 for the High Quality file and 320×240 for the Lower Quality file) as well as one larger XL (480×320) format file with this posting. The normal sized files are feeds of the entire day’s session, all of the animals that walked by, tried to check things out or shots of anything else I found interesting about the day’s feed… The larger file (the XL format file) is a shot of one scene specificially ~
• A shot of the raccoon digging at the project to get bread out of the bag, which I originally compressed in June to show off the raccoon! (this XL feed also has the text on the bottom, as mentioned on the 6-8 XL video)
One thing, though about the XL format files in this post - they were originally coded at 1.5Mbps — they may not stream correctly with such a large bandwith, so if you choose to watch the XL file, it would probably be better to let it load some of the file before playing it!
BFP 6-9-06 Raccoon Project Feed (Demo) [0:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 6-9-06 Raccoon Project Feed (High Quality 800Kbps Version) [17:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup BFP 6-9-06 Raccoon Project Feed (Low Quality 300Kbps Version) [17:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup 6-9-06 Raccoon, tearing at the mat! (XL Quality Version) [5:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup
Ah, June 8, 2006 - this is the day I’ve been waiting for… for years! I’ve been trying for years at home to see if raccoons (and other larger animals) would be interested in my project, but with no success. I don’t think that they’re not interested, just that we don’t have any around where I normally do the project. This day was the clincher for that test - I took some time off in June so that the family and I could visit relatives, relatives that know that raccoons have been in their area. Seeing the opportunity in the slight chance of seeing something other than I’ve been seeing at home, I asked if I could do my “tapings” there and they gladly agreed - “Oh yeah, you’ll see all kinds of things here. I doubt that you’ll see raccoons though - I haven’t seen any of them in a few months.” Well, even with that, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity! During the week that I took off, I took every one of my cables inside from their usual place (which in itself is a feat), designed a larger “raccoon-friendly” version of my project platform, wrote up pages and pages of logistics on how I would get this to work and then, finally, on June 8th, left for the other house. All along the way, my father told me over and over again not to “expect anything!” Which I understood, but this just seemed like it could work - I don’t know why, but it just seemed right. I agreed with everyone that I wouldn’t do the “project” as it was, and I’d just do a simple “scouting” kind of taping for the first night I was there, where I just let the camera run and see what happens - the house I was visiting has a motion-sensor light, so it just kicks on (or should - read the June 12th entry for a “funny” story about that). Strangely enough, I showed the project platform to everyone and they said “Well, you could try it, but I doubt you’ll get anything. And you still probably won’t get raccoons, maybe a possum or skunk.” Well, I wanted to see a raccoon, but any of those would be a welcome sight! 
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…