Remember in yesterdays post when I mentioned making a timelapse video of the camera photos? Well I did something clever:
That’s about half of the photos compiled into a timelapse video! About 6 days separates the first and last shot.
Toward the end you can see two frames of a furry rogue being very close to the camera! Very shortly after those photos the camera was knocked over, which is why the viewing angle changes afterwards 🙂
Ok fellows, time again for some candid camera backyard snaps! This entry is a good one…
Firstly, I set the camera up leaning against our house looking directly in the backyard onto the grass. I left it there for a few days and… almost no animal photos! However, by sheer coincidence our backyard neighbour was having a tree removed during this period and the entire process was captured in about 300 photos 🙂
Interesting… but not furry! However this next one – one of the very few animal shots captured during that period, is most definitely interesting:
Now I’m no zoologist, but that to me looks like either:
a) A bear
b) A cougar
c) A thylacine
Sadly, with no further photos of the mysterious beast, accurate identification may remain elusive.
I then moved the camera, placing it on the patio angled toward the tree you see in the right side of the above pictures. Here was the new vista when moved:
This was a good spot! It seems this little tree sits atop a backyard highway, since over the next few days many types of beast wandered into shot. I’ll not show the usual suspects (squirrels, birds) and focus on two visitors.
Here’s a rabbit hopping into view:
And here, my friends, is an up-until-now elusive opossum:
Look at that ratty tail and pointed snout. Could this be the same guy I saw with my own eyes years ago?
Now we cut to about a week later (ignore the date stamp on the photos; I never bother to set it when). For Christmas we received a brand new squirrel feeder. It is a wheel on an axel that rotates freely and has place to put three corn cobs. In addition, I purchased a different feeder myself, which hangs a food block off a spring. About two weeks ago we installed these and set a camera on them. Here’s an establishing shot:
300 photos would be captured in this spot, about 90% of them containing squirrels making use of their feeders. Here’s two examples:
The photos not containing squirrels fall into two categories:
1) Night photos, that almost always contain only deer, and
2) Photos of birds
Here is a night example:
And here is a bird example:
That’s a bluejay. We have yet to see any squirrels attempt to feed from the new hanging feeder (as opposed to the corncob feeder hanging behind it). I think it may be too far from the branch.
By the way, compare the lushness of the greenery in the above shot to the establishing shot above. Only six days separate the two. Next year I should do a timelapse in early spring to show the growth of the trees and ferns.
Now we get to the good stuff, as in the really good stuff. I also moved the camera to look directly at the rotating feeder, and switched it over to video mode. It was set to record 30 second clips, and during the very first night hit the jackpot. Here are four such clips edited together:
Yes, that’s a raccoon! Possibly the same guy we captured in a photo a few weeks back. According to the timestamps, he was there for about 14 minutes in total. Cute little bugger, isn’t he? 🙂
So the list is squirrels, chipmunks, deer, birds, cats, rabbits, opossum and raccoons that we have caught on our cameras over the years. We know of three other mammals we know to visit our backyard that have still not been captured on film. Will I ever see them? Can you guess what they are?
On this day, exactly twenty years ago, I moved to America from Australia.
On this day, exactly twenty years ago, this photo was taken:
Those are even the clothes I wore on the flight!
Twenty years…
This time I put the camera in the back of our yard, in the only ‘wooded’ part of our property. I scattered corn amidst the fallen leaves as well. In a few days, over 150 photos had collected on the device. Even better, the vast majority actually had animals in them!
There were about eighty like these:
There are (at least) two squirrels in the second photo. Can you see them both?
And then there were fifty or so photos like these:
That second guy looks like he knows what’s going on doesn’t he? Two of the photos contained four deer in them!
And then we get to the unusual shots. Of the ~140 animal photos, all but two contained deer or squirrels. Here are the other two:
THERE HE IS AGAIN! A raccoon! Although his tail looks shorter…
And there we have it my friends, the first wildlife shot of a rabbit 🙂
(I won’t comment here that it’s not uncommon to see rabbits hopping around our backyard in the summer…)
Now this is a disappointment. As everyone knows and agrees, Jon Pertwee’s version of the doctor was the best ever in all fifty years of Doctor Who. One may suppose therefore that the literary output of such a great man would be without reproach. Sadly, that’s not the case.
This, my dear readers, is a book for babies. Containing piffle such as stories about dragons hatching from eggs and befriending children, or man-eating fungus houses, or amorphous blob-creatures that rampage out of lakes and devour dozens of people, there’s nothing very… well now I think about it most of the stories in this book actually are quite monstrous!
But the way they are told leaves a lot to be desired. Many of them I suspect were written in minutes, and even as I read them I supposed I may have been able to do better myself. Let me try:
At last the fated hour had arrived. Kron-pirr viewed the battlefield from atop his Daedalus platform, watching the Void Gigas units assemble their time cannons. At his signal they would fire at the city, breaching the etheric defenses and opening the way for the final invasion. Victory was by no means certain, and the losses would be great. But if the Machine Brain was ever to be defeated, it must be here, and it must be now. Once more Kron-Pirr remembered the events that had led him here: the discovery of the artifact (back when he wasn’t even elevated), the human invasion in which Glork’fth was killed, the accidental reactivation and ultimately apotheosis of the dreaded alien technology. Kron-pirr had indirectly caused the machine revolution, and if his planet had any chance to survive, he must now end it. He noted the Gigases had completed their task, and the troops were ready for his signal. He raised his tentacle…
Hey, that’s not really anything to do with Monsters is it? It’s almost as if the saga of Kron-pirr has taken over these reviews!
At any rate, this book is hardly worth the Pertwee name. My advice: save your gold sovereigns.