“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
Remember back in January when I visited the reptile park and hugged a wombat? The photo I posted that day was taken with my cellphone. At the time I also had a professional photo taken (ie. a teenage girl with an Canon digital SLR snapped a few quick shots and charged me $25). And here it is:
God that thing was cute!
So it’s been a while since I last posted pictures taken in our yard by our stealth camera. The reason is… well the camera died 🙂
Fear not, dear readers, for a replacement has been received. I present: The Primos Truth Cam 35!
This beauty is all digital, noiseless, and features infra red LED’s for pitch-dark photography! Furthermore, the battery life is astounding. Last week I set it up outside. Let’s see what we got…
Here’s the first shot:
As you can see, I aimed it at our squirrel buffet. Now given that the old camera used to die in a day or so, I assumed as much from this one and did not set either the time or date. So everything will be relative to the timestamp on the above. Notice also it records the temperature!
Two days later, this began. Why two days? Well the day I put it out a blizzard blew into town, and the camera was covered in snow for about 36 hours! There are a few photos before the one shown above, but they are blurry from the dregs of snow on the lens.
I hope you like squirrel photos, because there were (ahem) over 850 photos of squirrels on the device when I retrieved it yesterday, after only about 6 days in the yard. The vast majority were more or less the same as the two above, with only the occasional curiosity like this one:
Look at the bulge of his eyeball! What a shot 🙂
Happily, it’s not all squirrels… check out this:
Deer! Give the distance from the camera, I’m extremely pleased with the quality of these night shots. Remember there is no flash, this is infra red only. We were amused to see the deer checking out the squirrel feeder.
It only took two days for the squirrels to completely empty their feedbox (and eat the corn), but the camera revealed that they kept returning to check even long after it was empty:
This makes me want to more regularly feed them!
This last shot was our big surprise. Over the years we have seen (and occasionally photographed) many animal denizens in our yard, but when we looked at the photos yesterday we got quite a surprise (click the photos to make them bigger):
A raccoon! Look at that stripey tail! I’ve never seen a raccoon in our yard, but I’m happy they are there. As you can see, it seems they like the squirrel feeder as well 🙂
Some years ago, KLS suggested, based on something she’d read, that I was a supertaster. This is a term used to describe someone that has particular, possibly abnormal (although the actual percentage of supertasters is unknown) sensitivity to certain types of food. It’s neither a good nor a bad thing: supertasters simply taste certain foods differently.
The cause of ‘supertasting’ is twofold. First, supertasters have a greater density of tastebuds, and therefore can taste with greater ‘resolution’. This allows them to distinguish smaller concentrations of taste. Secondly, supertasters have a sensitivity to a chemical called 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP). About half of people can’t taste this at all, about a quarter of people can taste it and find it bitter, and the other 25% of people are sensitive to it and have a strong negative reaction.
PROP is present in many foods, but particularly common in a few, including vegetables (particularly brussel sprouts and cabbage), coffee, grapefruits, chili peppers (the burn is much more pronounced for supertasters) and olives.
At this point, you may want to re-read the list at the start of this old post…
I have often, in my life, had a strong negative reaction when eating certain foods. And I don’t mean psychological. I remember many times as a child (and occasionally as an adult), gagging uncontrollably when eating something I found particularly unpleasant. This is apparently a not-uncommon reaction for a supertaster when they eat food containing a large concentration of PROP.
Am I actually a supertaster? Who knows. But do I believe – objectively – that the evidence supports the possibility that I am?
I’d have to say “Yes”.